September 1st. Escondido, California.
I spent most of the morning in Felicita Park. Mr. Gossage was there, as usual, and he told me a compressed version of his life story. He grew up in Illinois, moved to Missouri, moved again, setting up a shoe repair shop in Pensacola, Florida, moved to Bellingham, Washington, where he set up another shoe repair shop, and got married. He and his wife moved to Phoenix, where she got cancer and died. He moved back to Bellingham and married his late wife’s mother, who was now living with him in Escondido. I assumed his first wife had to have been considerably younger than Mr. Gossage. Otherwise, his current wife would have had to be well over 100 years old.
It was Sunday, and Mr. Gossage invited me to go to church with him, which he said was within walking distance. Ordinarily, I would have declined but I did it as a favor to him and because I didn’t have much else to do. Also, it was a Pentecostal church and I was curious to see what went on in one. We walked by his house and I sat on the porch while he put his banjo away. He let me stow my pack inside, so I didn’t have to tote it to church with me. His wife, he said, wasn’t up to going to church and didn’t come out, so I didn’t meet her. Perhaps she actually was 115 years old.
He said his congregation shared the building with another congregation and they had their services in the afternoons instead of the morning, which he preferred anyway. The minister was lively and several people in the congregation were speaking in tongues.[30] Mr. Gossage said that meant they were baptized by the Holy Spirit. None of them sounded like they were speaking an identifiable language. Mr. Gossage later told me that didn’t matter. He also told me that healing miracles occasionally happened at his church, although none occurred during my visit.
I walked Mr. Gossage back to his house, where he said he was due for a nap. I retrieved my pack and spent the rest of the afternoon hiking around in the park and then went back to the rock for the night.
September 2nd. Escondido, California.
Dang. I had lost track of it being Labor Day so when I went to the post office to check for mail, I found it was closed. I was getting tired of being in Escondido and decided I was leaving the next day, whether any mail arrived or not.
Since it was a holiday, the park was more crowded than usual. I talked with Mr. Gossage for a while and told him I’d be leaving the next day but that I had enjoyed talking with him. He told me he would pray for me. I spent my last night at the rock.
September 3rd. Lee Vining, California.
I was at the post office when it opened. There was no mail for me, so I filled out a change of address form to have any mail that came forwarded to Salt Lake City. Then I went to Von’s and bought some groceries, filled my water container, and hit the road.
Just outside of Escondido, I got a ride with a guy going to Las Vegas. He got me over the San Gabriel Mountains and down into the Mojave Desert. I was planning to head up US 395 along the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, so I had him drop me off where I-15 and 395 split. An Air Force lifer, recently reassigned back to the states from Korea, took me as far as Kramers Corners, where I had waited for the sun to rise the previous summer.
From there, the amount of traffic was noticeably sparser. In the past, I might have been reluctant to try to hitchhike on a road with so little traffic, thinking that I would have to wait forever to get rides. However, I had observed that in areas with little traffic, the likelihood that someone would stop and offer a ride increased somewhat. The length of time it took to get a ride was not directly proportional to the amount of traffic passing by.
At the Corners, four Hispanic guys stopped and offered me a ride. Only one of them spoke English. He said they lived in LA but were on their way to Reno to work. All four of them were crammed into the cab of the flatbed truck and he told me I was welcome to ride with them if I didn’t mind riding on the bed.
Some of my favorite rides were riding in the back of a pickup since I had a wide-open view of the scenery. There was a big toolbox in the middle of the bed behind the cab though and only a couple feet on either side to sit, which put me at the edge of the bed. Whenever the truck rounded a right-hand curve, the momentum pushed me closer to the edge of the bed. Since I was facing backwards, I couldn’t anticipate the curves very well and compensate. There was a wooden railing along the side of the bed but it looked suspiciously weathered and rickety. The toolbox only had a recessed space for handles, which might help someone who was standing up but didn’t provide much for me to grip while sitting down. I enjoyed the desert and mountain scenery but, looking back, it was probably not the safest of rides.
I rode with them most of the day. They took me through the quasi-ghost town of Red Mountain, where I had spent the night with Lee and his beautiful and generous wife Pat the year before. We went right by the Silver Dollar Saloon and the house next door where Pat and Lee and the kids lived. I recognized one of the dirt roads snaking off into the desert, where I had ridden with Lee when he set off to confront Pat’s ex-husband about some crude remark he had made about Pat at the Silver Dollar. And then a moment later the road curved and Red Mountain was again out of sight.
It was a crystal-clear day and around Lone Pine I got a nice view of Mt. Whitney in the distance. The eastern side of the Sierras had a whole different appearance than the western side. They were much steeper, rockier, and drier.
Photo Source: Unknown/Reddit SierraNevada
A view of the eastern edge of the Sierras in the vicinity of the town of Lone Pine in the Owens Valley. Mt. Whitney, the tallest peak in the lower 48 states (14,505 feet), is in the center of the photo. The peak to the left of center is Lone Pine Peak. It appears taller because it is closer but is more than 1500 feet shorter than Mt. Whitney.
If you made an east-west cross-section of the Sierras, it would look like a wedge. The western slope is long and gradual. The eastern slope is short, steep, and jagged. I liked that I got to see both sides on this trip.
At a gas stop, I looked at my map and saw there was a road leading up into the mountains to the eastern entrance of Yosemite. I asked the driver to let me off in the town of Lee Vining so I could head that way. It was early evening when we got to Lee Vining. It was a relief to get off the bed of the truck where I was sliding around more than I wanted. I felt like I was starting to develop prehensile butt cheeks.
Some stars were just starting to appear. I slept in the sagebrush on a hillside overlooking Mono Lake in the distance, with its odd tufa columns. I enjoyed a dazzling moonrise as I ate dinner. The coyotes howling in the distance reminded me of my pond-side camp at Guy and Sandy’s in San Marcos.
September 4th. Dog Lake, Yosemite.
In the morning, I headed west on state route 120 up into the Sierras. There were two guys hitching from the intersection of 120 and US 395 when I got there. A guy in a Datsun pickup gave all three of us a ride. I rode in the back with one of them.
The back of a pickup was a wonderful vantage point for the steep, twisting ride up the east side of the Sierras. I got out at Tuolumne Meadows and hiked around most of the day. It was practically empty. The eastern end of the park got a lot fewer visitors than Yosemite Valley and even fewer on a weekday after Labor Day.
The area was a mixture of pines and subalpine meadows with the Tuolumne River and some smaller streams meandering through. It felt good in the sunshine but cool in the shade. The altitude in the meadows was about 8600 feet, more than 4000 feet higher than Yosemite Valley. A ranger told me that the road into the meadows is usually closed by the middle of September.
Within and around the meadows were several low granite peaks that had been smoothed into wedge-shaped domes by glaciers. I climbed up the least steep slope of one of them called Lembert Dome, which was not difficult. It helped that I was now wearing sneakers instead of hiking shoes. I later hiked on to Dog Lake, where I camped for the evening.
Photo Source: National Park Service
A view of the sub-alpine Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite. On the left in the background is Lembert Dome, which is a roche moutonee—a mountain that has been abraded into an asymmetrical wedge shape by the action of glaciers. I wrote about roches moutonees in a previous essay. Poking Around in Maine - Bangor Area - Les Roches Moutonees: by Craig Mains. In 1974, although I hiked in both, I don’t think I made the connection that Acadia and Yosemite have some similarities.
Photo Source: National Park Service
A view of the top of Lembert Dome, which has an elevation of about 9400 feet but is only about 800 feet higher than the floor of the meadows. This view is looking roughly southwest toward the Cathedral Range. The jagged peak just left of center is Cathedral Peak with an elevation of 10,908 feet.
September 5th. Reno, Nevada.
I hiked back out to highway 120 in the morning and caught a ride back down to Lee Vining. From there I had a fairly long wait but eventually got a ride into Reno. After walking across most of Reno, it was approaching dusk so I wandered down by the Truckee River looking for a place to stay. The river was pretty but the area along it appeared to be a recent wino encampment—there were discarded clothes, empties, and other garbage strewn about. It was so depressing I decided to find a place near the University of Nevada campus instead.
It wasn’t easy finding a place to hide—Reno is so arid that there wasn’t much in the way of vegetative cover. I ran into another hitchhiker who said his name was Winters. We had coincidentally scoped out the same place to spend the night. He seemed like an OK guy. We shared some food and the camping spot.
September 6th. Reno, Nevada.
By 8:00, Winters and I were out on I-80 to trying to catch a ride. He had clued me in that Nevada was the opposite of California when it came to hitchhiking. California allowed people to hitchhike from the top of a freeway entrance ramp but was strict about not allowing hitchhikers on the freeways. According to Winters, many Nevada towns had strict ordinances about hitchhiking within city limits. But, the interstates were not part of their jurisdictions, and the Nevada State Police didn’t seem to care about hitchhikers on the interstate. You were more likely to be hassled if you were hitchhiking from the top of a ramp than you were from the shoulder of the interstate. Every state seemed to have a slightly different approach to hitchhikers.
Winters and I thumbed together for a while but then decided we would have better luck if we separated. He wandered down the road and out of sight. I was there for hours trying to get a ride. Sometime in late morning, I was joined by another hitchhiker named Ron. He was from Athens, Georgia and was heading back that way. By 2:30 I was getting tired and discouraged and told Ron I needed a break. He agreed, and we walked to the university campus. I told him that I was going to try to sneak into one of the dorms for a shower. He said it had never occurred to him to try that, so we both scored free showers. I felt a lot better afterwards—the last time I had bathed was after a dip in the pond at Guy and Sandy’s in San Marcos, which contains a good bit of algae.
After the shower, we went to one of the dorm cafeterias where $2.00 got you all you could eat. Nobody seemed to be paying attention so I paid for a meal and then ferried food to our table where Ron and I shared it, so we each got a meal for $1.00. I got a burrito, cottage cheese, a vegetable salad, a fruit salad, some ice cream, and multiple milks.
After it cooled off outside, Ron and I went back to the highway to continue thumbing, but still with no luck. Around 11:00 pm we called it quits and crashed in the lounge of one of the dormitories.
September 7th. Wendover, Utah.
Ron and I shared a breakfast and then headed out to the highway to catch a ride. When most of the morning went by without a ride, we decided we needed to split up. I headed down the road in the direction Winters had walked the day before.
Around 1:00 pm I finally got a ride. It was by far the longest I had ever had to wait for a ride and I have no idea why it took so long. It didn’t look like a location where I would have expected such a long wait. The guy who picked me up was an older fellow, who had some kind of breathing problem. He wore a mask over his nose and mouth that was connected by a tube to a large device in the backseat.
He would occasionally fiddle with it while driving, which made me a nervous. He would adjust the rearview mirror so he could see the gauges on the device and reach back with one hand and adjust it to where he wanted it. That usually involved some weaving between lanes, so I suggested that I could drive if he wanted (he didn’t) or I could adjust the machine for him, which he agreed to. [31]
Since he was wearing a face mask, there wasn’t a whole lot of conversation. About all I knew was that his name was Carl and he was headed to Omaha. We rode across the width of Nevada, through the Lahontan Valley, the Humboldt Sink, Winnemucca, and over Golconda Summit. I-80 was mostly complete through Nevada at the time but there were some incomplete sections that were still two-lane.
Photo Source: Google Earth Streetview
A view of the Humboldt Sink looking roughly southeast from I-80 west of Lovelock, Nevada. The Humboldt Sink is the terminus of the Humboldt River, which flows about 350 miles from the Ruby Mountains in eastern Nevada to the Humboldt Sink, which is an intermittent dry lake. The river and sink are part of an endorheic basin—one which has no outlet to another body of water. The Humboldt Sink is a remnant of the much larger prehistoric Lake Lahontan that existed at the end of the last ice age. The river and the sink were named for German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who is considered the father of biogeography.
We stopped for gas at Battle Mountain and he let me take over driving. We continued east over Emigrant Pass and around the northern tip of the Ruby Mountains, which were by then lit by the setting sun. We stopped at the town of Wells, where Carl bought us dinner at a local diner. We then drove over Pequop Summit and rolled into Wendover, Utah around 8:00 pm. Wendover was just barely over the state line.
Carl directed me to a motel where he got each of us a room. I carried his luggage and some oxygen tanks into his room—the device in the back seat was too heavy for one person to carry, so it stayed in the car. I went out for a walk around Wendover on my own later. Even in the dark, I could tell it was desolate.
September 8th. Salt Lake City, Utah.
Carl woke me early and he bought us a breakfast at the motel diner. We were on the road just as the sun was coming up. I realized that Wendover was sited right on the edge of the Bonneville Salt Flats, so no wonder it seemed so desolate.
Photo Source: Google Earth Streetview
A view of the Bonneville Salt Flats looking north from I-80. The flats are a vast salt deposit left over from the evaporation of a large prehistoric lake of which the Great Salt Lake is a remnant. The salt flats are about 12 miles long and five miles wide and contain an estimated 150 million tons of salt.
Over dinner the previous day, I had let Carl know that I would be getting out in Salt Lake City to (hopefully) pick up some mail. He let me drive into Salt Lake City since he would be on his own again afterwards. I drove across the salt flats as the sun was coming up, across the width of the Great Salt Lake Desert into the city. I told Carl the last time I drove into Salt Lake City, I ran a red light and ended up in jail. He pulled down his mask and said, “Let’s try to avoid that.” I chose not to mention that I was charged with driving a stolen vehicle.
Once in the city, I grabbed my bag and thanked Carl for the ride. Since it was a Sunday and the post office was closed, I had to wait another day. I spent most of the day lounging in the park by the courthouse. In the evening I walked to the Salvation Army for dinner and to spend the night. The dinner was not too bad—chicken, rice, and barley soup, rolls, and lime koolaid.
They had upgraded the facility since I was there last year. They had expanded the dormitories and even had a new TV room. I got a good night’s sleep.
September 9th. Vernal, Utah.
After breakfast at the Sal A, I headed to the post office, where there was no mail whatsoever waiting for me. I was beginning to feel unloved, but in reality I was mostly just outrunning my mail. I regularly overestimated how long it would take me to get somewhere. I didn’t feel like sticking around waiting for mail though, so I filled out yet another change of address form and moved on.
I got a ride to US 40 with some off-duty Forest Service workers, a ride with some Indians to Heber City, and then a ride to Roosevelt in the back of a pickup truck. In Roosevelt, I ran into another hitchhiker named Steve and we thumbed together for a while. He was headed to Fort Collins where he went to school at Colorado State. We were stuck in Vernal for some time. It was a cowboy area and we got the occasional finger of scorn from the locals, including some small kids who went by on a school bus and opened the bus windows just so they could gleefully stick their middle fingers out at us. [32]
Later in the evening a car stopped. They told us that, unfortunately, they couldn’t give us a ride because they already had a full car but they wanted to give us a joint, which I thought was a nice gesture. Steve and I ended up crashing for the night on the out-of-sight side of a hill, not too far from the highway. We smoked the joint as the sun was going down, not long before turning in.
September 10th. Boulder, Colorado.
In the morning, Steve and I decided we’d have better luck if we thumbed separately. We flipped a coin and I won, meaning he walked down the road and around the bend. Within a half hour I got a ride with a guy named Virgil who rode me to Hot Sulphur Springs in Colorado. We never passed Steve on the way so he must have gotten a ride before me. I got short rides into Granby and then Grand Lake. Some guys in a van rode me through Rocky Mountain National Park and into Boulder.
I was running out of money again. I was down to $2.25. I looked around for a Manpower office or some place where people hired day laborers but no one seemed to know of anything like that. One guy I talked to said that I could crash in the lounge of his dormitory so I spent the night there. He also showed me where to get a shower and a free cafeteria meal.
September 11th. Somewhere in Nebraska.
I was up early and outside before it was light. I located the employment office and waited to see if anyone came by looking for day laborers. There was one other guy there and he told me that people did sometimes come by looking to hire temporary help. Within a half hour there were about a dozen guys waiting.
Eventually a rancher came by looking for nine or 10 people to help him disassemble a center-pivot irrigator, load it on a truck, move it to another location, where they would unload it and reassemble it. He said he was hiring veterans first and had everyone who was a veteran raise their hand and then he started picking. Of the dozen guys waiting, there were two non-veterans, including me and he had enough workers already before he got to us.
Afterwards, it occurred to me that the rancher didn’t ask anyone for proof that they were veterans. Maybe the guys knew from experience to just say they were veterans. I waited around for another hour or so and then decided to keep moving. I walked around in Boulder for a while first and browsed some bookstores. I left town in the early afternoon.
I got a ride first to Greeley and then to Ft. Morgan in the late afternoon. I was thumbing from the entrance ramp to I-80 but it was a ramp with almost no east-bound traffic, so I went down to the bottom of the ramp onto the highway. A county sheriff came by and started hassling me. He told me I was going to end up in jail. I realized though that he had no actual jurisdiction on the interstate and he eventually left without doing anything. I told him I would go back to the top of the entrance ramp, however, which I did, but only until he was gone.
I knew if a Colorado State Trooper came by I would get a warning or maybe a ticket for being on the interstate, but I hoped to get a ride before then. It took a couple hours but eventually someone stopped who was driving straight through to Lincoln, Nebraska and wanted someone to help keep him awake. We got along OK (his name is illegible in my journal), but it was a cold ride. It had turned chilly and the heater didn’t work in his car. We switched off driving and I drove across a big chunk of the state of Nebraska in the dark, while he slept.
September 12th. Lincoln, Nebraska.
We rolled into Lincoln around 3:00 am. It was cold, dark, and raining when I got out. I found a Denny’s that was open all night and sat around drinking coffee. I didn’t have enough money to buy any food. I left when it started to get light out—I could tell the manager was getting ready to ask me to leave.
I found the employment office and waited around with a couple of other guys to see if there was any daywork. There wasn’t. One of the other guys, called Spike, saw my pack and asked me where I was headed. He said he had spent a lot of time hitchhiking around as well. When I told him I hadn’t slept for more than 24 hours he invited me to the house he shared with some other people.
I walked with him to the house on G Street where he introduced me to his housemates—Rich, Curt, Janet, Judy, and their house dog Zephyr. Spike showed me a room where he said I could sleep. Even though I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t drink coffee that often and I was wired on the free refills I got at Denny’s. I could overhear Curt talking to one of the girls complaining about Spike bringing strangers into the house. Apparently, one of the guys that Spike let crash at the house in the past stole some stuff.
Finally, I gave up trying to sleep and got up. I sat around talking with the others. Curt worked in the freight yard of Burlington Northern and seemed to be the only one of the five with a job. He worked odd hours and was sometimes home during the day. I guess he must have decided I was alright since he said I could spend the night if I wanted, although it didn’t seem to be an enthusiastic endorsement. It was still raining so I stayed. They fed me dinner in exchange for me telling them everywhere I’d been in the past six months. Curt suggested that riding freight trains was easier than hitchhiking. He said a lot of the guys working in the Lincoln freight yard were hippies and would tell guys which trains were going where. Spike said he had tried both and still preferred hitchhiking.
Photo Source: Google Earth Streetview
An April 2025 view of the houses on G Street in Lincoln. In 1974 there was a solid block of small houses that looked like they were built around the same time. Some of them have since been replaced with newer houses. 710, where Spike and his housemates lived is the one on the right. It was a small house for five people and a dog. The retaining walls appear to be relatively recent. The weather was considerably drearier during the time I was in Lincoln.
September 13th. Sawyer, Michigan.
I left early. Spike was the only one up and I thanked him. It was still cloudy but not raining. It was one of those days where rides came easily. I got a ride to Omaha, then a ride into Iowa, one to Des Moines, another ride with a cigar smoker, and then a ride with a guy who rode me into Illinois. He was talkative and shared some fruit and cheese with me, which was nice since I was hungry by then.
He dropped me off at a rest area off the interstate, which we agreed was often better than trying to get a ride from a ramp. It was getting dark by then so I was just planning to put my tent up in the woods by the edge of the rest area. However, a couple saw me and asked me where I was headed and when I told them Michigan, they offered me a ride, which I accepted.
They rode me the rest of the way across Illinois, through Chicago, and through the northwest corner of Indiana into Michigan. They left me out near Sawyer, where I slept in the woods behind a giant truck stop. I was so tired I fell asleep right away and even though, between the trucks and the sound of the interstate, it was a noisy place, I slept soundly.
September 14th. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I was up early and got a quick ride to Battle Creek, then a ride to Albion, then a bunch of college girls rode me into Ann Arbor. They couldn’t believe how far I’d traveled in six months. I hadn’t really thought much about it until someone (like them or the people at 710 G Street) asked me where all I’d been.
I was in Ann Arbor by noon. When I was there in July, Denis had showed me which door to the house his Korean landlord tended to leave unlocked, so I was able to go up to his room. Because Denis worked odd hours though, he wasn’t up yet, so I hung out in the hallway. He eventually came out from what had been Sarah’s room. He said she had moved out and, since her old room was larger, he moved into it. I was disappointed because I liked Sarah and was hoping to see her again. Denis didn’t know where she had moved to.
September 15th. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I was hoping to sell some papers so I would have some money to head back to Morgantown on. It was Sunday though and I knew the Sun office would be closed. Denis and I hiked around in Stinchfield Woods with a friend of his, Mike, who I had met before. Stinchfield Woods was one of the university forests—mostly oak and hickory with some pine plantings.
September 16th. Ann Arbor, Michigan.
I realized I still had a Canadian dollar bill folded in the back of my journal. I took it to a bank and got a US dollar and two cents for it. I went by the Sun office, picked up some papers, and sold them for most of the day. A new issue had just come out, which made them easier to sell. I sold enough to buy Denis and me a dinner at the Brown Derby, with a little bit left over to travel on.
September 17th. Athens, Ohio.
I hit the road about 9:30. Denis wasn’t up yet and I didn’t wake him. I got a series of rides to Columbus, including one with a guy with a big bag of home-grown weed, who got me thoroughly stoned.
South of Columbus, I took US 33 into Athens. I have no idea why I decided to go to Athens since it was not the most direct route to Morgantown. It was probably because I had an aversion to traveling over routes I had already traveled if there was an alternate route I hadn’t yet been on. I walked around in Athens for a while and then found a place to camp out. The mosquitoes forced me to put up my tent.
September 18th. Morgantown.
I had been planning to go to Morgantown by way of Parkersburg and Clarksburg but I got a ride with a guy going to Cleveland and rode with him to I-70. From there I got a ride to Washington, Pa and from there down I-79 to Morgantown. It was a kind of roundabout route but it didn’t take me very long and I was in Morgantown by the afternoon.
I went to the post office and my mail had finally caught up with me. I learned that Jamie and Peg were working as house parents at a small boarding school in Keswick near Charlottesville, Virginia. I got the travelers’ checks that Jamie had sent me that had gone to Escondido and Salt Lake City before catching up with me in Morgantown. I planned to hitchhike over and visit them in a few days and pick up the rest of my cache of traveler's checks. I considered this trip completed, however. [33]
I crashed on the couch at the house of my friend Bud. [34] He had been my downstairs neighbor on Willey Street and was now sharing a house on Jones Avenue with three other guys, one of whom I already knew. Later I would think about finding a job for the winter and a place to stay.