Originally posted on my old site Life In A Mikeycosm.

9/30/2005

I was wandering the trails through the woods by UC Santa Cruz, taking some pictures of trees and stuff and trying to shake off a cold, when fate brought me by sheer happenstance onto this intriguing tableau:

 

Click any image to enlarge

The two guys who went in ahead of us still hadn’t resurfaced yet when we left. Imagine how far down into the world they must have climbed.

As we were walking back, we tried to find a shortcut home through the woods, and took the next easy path we could find up the ravine bank. All of a sudden I recognized the woods where we were—I had been right there shooting pictures of the same trees earlier in the afternoon, before I met them.

I looked and the kids were standing in a circle. One of them picked something up off the ground. “Is this yours?” he asked, and handed over my wide-angle lens. I hadn’t realized I had dropped it there earlier. Nice.

“Now it’s a story,” he said.

I don’t know why it is, man, I always have to leave Vapid City for the magic to happen. Never here.

Later that night I had to deal with this…

0586283-R1-040-18A

…but that’s a story for another forum.

(Note to UCSC folks: I went to Tree 9 too, but by that age I was already too fat to climb it.)

Content originally from https://michaelkupietz.com/visual-art/adventure-photojournals/santa-cruz-porter-caves/. © copyright 2024 Michael E. Kupietz