Post from 2015: Look what I found taped to the back of my mildewed 1964 copy of Starr’s Guide to the John Muir Trail — purchased back then at Smilie’s outfitters in San Francisco — which I left for a year with a friend in Mill Valley while I went off to Turkey. Note second billing at the time for the Grateful Dead.
It’s taken me this long to figure out the show was for two nights, Dec. 30 and 31st, and that the numerals at the bottom right, before 1967, are 1966 backwards. I never was too hip. And I’ve never been too sure whether the folks who drew these things were on acid or you had to be on acid to read them, or both. I still don’t know what the second and third words at the top are. I found it clearer to navigate the High Sierra with “Pete” Starr’s help.
I think either I or a friend taped the Filmore card to the back of the guide to cover mildew damage. I must have received it in the mail just before beginning treatment for lung cancer in 2015. Two kind friends from Mill Valley mailed it.
This helped me remember that I made my first solo backpack trip in the Sierra in 1964 at age 15. It was a fast-paced jaunt in good weather from Tuolumne Meadows to Devils Postpile. I bused and hitchhiked from Sausalito to Yosemite. I passed Robert S. McNamara with a daypack and horse packer accompaniment heading north at Thousand Island Lake. We didn’t speak and you never know about packers pulling your leg, but they said when I asked that it was indeed McNamara. No suit, just slicked back hair, spectacles, khaki shorts, thick socks and hiking boots, men on horses as I remember fore and aft on the trail.
dream ranch 