MONO PASS TRAIL — Mary Breckenridge crosses the High Sierra every year, with only her horse and two mules for company.
She always leaves in September, when heat still tents the Central Valley but cool mountain breezes stir silvery-green aspen leaves.
Higher up, the nights could be so cold that the water in her coffee pot turned rock-hard. It's happened. She kept going. Packing and unpacking 300 pounds of gear daily, making and breaking camp, starting her fire from twigs.
Reporter's notebook: Follow the journey
It made her feel thrillingly self-reliant. A true Western woman.
Except, now she's 64, and she's not sure she can do it anymore. Not alone.
Bucko Davis had sworn he was done with packing. He'd had enough of being so tired that he would unload a pile of gear from a mule, plop down on top of it and have people walk by without realizing there was a limp body beneath the cowboy hat pulled over his face.
Then Mary tracked him down. They've been friends for 30 years, since he was a packer and she was a cook on commercial High Sierra trips. She needs him as backup.
Once long ago, Bucko said he would never tell her "no." He agrees to the trip.
He's spent his whole life in these mountains. He loves how the junipers line up for sentry duty along the ridges, the way edible mushrooms pop out amid the damp undergrowth.
Maybe now he can know if they will ever let him leave in peace.
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Climbing the ridge out of Lake Edison on the first morning of their trip, Bucko, a Mono Indian, points to a distant peak.
"My brother Henry's up there now," he says.
Mary was at Henry's all-night funeral powwow — the only non-Indian woman dancing and chanting beneath the stars and oaks. Henry had given her the eagle feather she wears on her black cowboy hat.
Bucko scattered his older brother's ashes on Volcanic Knob. The ashes of Henry's best friend were spread on the mountain across from his. "They were both ornery. You can still hear them hollering across at each other," Bucko says, referring to thunder.
The horses are as fidgety as children on the first day of school. Mary's favorite mule, Dixie, keeps trying to kick her pack-mate, Woody.
"Dixie, huh-nee, don't " Mary chides in her Bakersfield twang.
She's blond with broad shoulders and a broad smile. Bucko, gray showing in his dark ponytail, is small, lithe and tends to limit his expressions to his gray-blue eyes. Both have the rolling gait of people who've spent a lot of time on horseback.
The three-day ride will carry them over the 12,000-foot Mono Pass, one of the shorter routes Mary has traveled in the past. Bucko has ridden almost every Sierra trail but somehow never crossed over on this old Indian trading path. It runs through a vast wilderness area where, for hundreds of square miles, there are no paved roads.
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