I couldn't make this weekend's Granite Mt. conditioner so I hooked up with a friend of OSAT, Bill. He was hiking up to Granite Mt. to inspect the lookout for some repairs he is going to do. I got lucky. I've wanted to hike up to Granite Mountain for the past year and finally yesterday I had my chance. We started off with overcast and quickly hiked into the cloud layer. Cloud shrouded the trail and the landscape was hidden as we ascended. As we got near the summit we ascended above the clouds to blue sky, snow, and granite. The surrounding peaks poked through the cloud layer— Kaleetan Peak, Chair Peak, Snoqualmie Peak, The Tooth, and Mount Stewart. Even Mt. Rainier peaked through.

My fascination with this mountain is because I'm fascinated by stone. The past few years of hiking the Green River Gorge have reveiled a world of stone— sandstone, granite, coal, cinnabar, sendimentary layers with leaf prints embedded in them, petrified wood. From giant white sandstone cliffs to tumbling river boulders it became an adventure to see what lay around the next river bend. Also I've always loved Utah because it is the land of stone— Canyonlands, Arches, Bryce, Capital Reef, and Zion. Granite Mountain just seemd like a natural place for me to gravitate towards. I've started a journal of images of stone and wanted to discover new "Bones of the Earth".

The poem below is from one of my favorite poets "Pablo Neruda", a very passionate Chilean poet. It is from his book "Stones of the Sky". Enjoy.

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Silence is intensified into a stone: broken circles are closed: the trembling world, wars, birds, houses, cities, trains, woods, the wave that repeats the sea's questions, the unending passage of dawn, all arrive at stone, sky nut: a substantial witness.

The dusty stone on the road knows Pedro, and his father before, knows the water from which he was born: it is the mute word of earth: it says nothing because it's the heir of the silence before, of the motionless ocean, of the empty land.

The stone was there before the wind, before the man, before the dawn: its first movement was the first music of the river.— Pablo Neruda " Stones of the Sky"