There was one time in 2021 when I set out for a short walk but ended up climbing a mountain. I didn’t know that the path I went on was actually a hike. I didn’t exactly know what the difference was between a walk and a hike, even. All I can remember was that it was hot, I had no water on me, but I kept going because it looked so cool that I wanted to see more.
I don’t remember much about the decision to go there except that I borrowed Pauline’s car and drove up Lake Ave until I saw a trail head. Then I just walked until the sun went down. As I gained elevation, I saw more strange and beautiful plants. Then, a deer gnawing on dried grass that I startled. We stared at each other for a hot second before it leaped off what looked like a cliff. I didn’t see where it landed, but I assumed it knew what it was doing. I went from being able to see a few houses to the entirety of LA.
I was in a strange headspace then, in the midst of COVID and having abandoned my life in Vancouver for just enough time to forget someshit™ that weighed just a bit too heavy for me to bear.
Inadvertently ascending this mountain, seeing remnants of old forgotten buildings surrounded by sun scorched flowers, crumbled, graffitied walls and half eroded paths somehow felt like it needed to happen. It was all very lonely and quiet and everything that made me feel OK.
Back then, OK was hard a high bar to reach.
The entire time, I maybe passed 3 people in total. The entire place was eerily quiet, and it felt like I had the mountain completely to myself. I was tired and dehydrated, as I was completely unprepared for a ‘walk’ of this caliber, but, I did have my XT3.
I think at this point in my life, I had forgotten what it was like to take photos because I was inspired. Capitalism has sucked the love of photography out of my body as the only pictures I had taken for the previous few years had been of the Christmas and romance genres. Needless to say, those are two things so far down on my interest list that I was on autopilot every time I took my camera out to shoot. I would wake up, go to work, take 300 frames, get paid. It was quite simple, but the strangulation of creativity was insidious enough that I didn’t notice I barely take photos anymore in every day life.
But the pale dusty palette and golden sunlit path and the fact that I was very much alone woke me up to why I liked photography in the first place.
I don’t care for the newest body or the sharpest lens. I simply like beautiful things in the wild. When I can capture what I see and encapsulate it in a rectangle, I felt like I was doing some sort of magic. I was immortalizing how light falls on a specific place at a specific time that would never be repeated the exact same way again.
As the sun began to set, the only direction I could go was the way I came. I never reached the end of the trail, and hope that one day I can go back and retrace the steps I once took that felt like I was getting closer to heaven.
But for now, the Eaton fire of 2025 had claimed a lot of the area. When the trails will completely reopen, and when I will be back there is all up in the air.