As mentioned in the introduction, I didn't start my trip until early June although I had meant to leave as early as April.  Finally I had all my stuff together, the horses arranged for and my truck loaded with my Mt. bike, food and camping gear.  Despite the cost of fuel, I decided to take my long-bed, 3/4 ton, 4WD pickup with its huge wheels and high ground clearance.  With my pickup truck,  I'd be undaunted regardless of the condition of the back roads and I'd have room for every piece of gear I could possible think of bringing (some of which I didn't even use).  Here is a link to the list of all the junk I brought with a star by the items that prooved to be especially useful.  The Mt. bike wasn't as useful as it could have been, but it did provide me some nice exercise and it was fun to ride around the camps in the early eveining hours when I would otherwise have nothing to do.  One of the dumbest things I brought was a DVD player, but no DVDs to watch and there were times I really wanted a little entertainment.

     An essential part of 'Plan A' was to get up really early, load the pickup with pre-selected and packed items (all arranged in my living room so I wouldn't forget anything) and be on the road by 6 AM.  Well, it wasn't until after 8 AM that I was finally ready to go.  Then more wasted time as I tried to get my handheld GPS to talk to my laptop - until I finally realized that I knew the way to the Colorado Plateau better than the back of my hand and didn't need the GPS.  Finally I crossed the Santa Maria River and on to Highway 166 going east.  

     Outside of the town or Arvin, I met the granite boulders that marked the foothills of the Tehapachi Mountains.  I didn't stop to sit on the boulders and contemplate the Convergent Plate Boundary with its subduction zone and its Magmatic Arc that began forming during the Triassic (about 200 million years ago) and which had such profound effects on the formation of the granites of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the deep sediments of the Great San Joquine Valley below me and the many sedimentary formations of the Colorado Plateau that I would be seeing.  No, I didn't stop, but I did think of those things as I watched the scenery zip by.    

     I got to the town of Tehapachi and it was pleasantly cool up there.  I passed the outcrop of ancient paleozoic limestone that had formed in a warm, quiet sea long before the granites below them and are now a "roof pendant" on top of the mesozoic era granites.  Nearby is the huge cement plant that takes those carbonate rocks that have lain there all those hundreds of millions of years, all through the evolution of a line of amphibians into reptiles, a line of reptiles into mammals, a line of mammals into primates and a line of primates into me.  Those ancient carbonates from a tropic sea so long ago were there when the first fire was lit by our Australopithicus ancestor, when the first pyramid was built, when Julius Ceasar was stabbed and when the Battle of Gettyesburg was fought, but now they are being dug up and turned into cement for the buildings of Los Angeles.