It seemed like a good idea at the time, a Santa Barbara backcountry outing with Dick Smith.
What I thought Dick promised was a woodsy overnighter enjoying the Great Outdoors. What he delivered was a rugged lost weekend, two near-freezing nights in the mountains, struggling hand-over-hand off the trails to find a way out, and ending with me starving by moonlight, desperate for a sight of our car.
This was in the early 1960s, before Dick became famed as the author of books like Condor Journal, a naturalist and local expert on all that flew, crawled, ran, or burrowed in our backcountry. His day job was as staff artist and promotion manager at the Santa Barbara News-Press, working in a tiny second-floor office just off the newsroom, his pen flying, perhaps sketching a map of the latest wildfire raging in the mountains or a book cover, one ear to the phone hearing about that latest government assault on Los Padres National Forest or to local political gossip.