I was 17 years old in 1969 when my brother asked me if I'd like to join him on a three-day hike up in the back country of Yosemite National Park.

He had just come home from Vietnam, even though I had camped out many times with my family,

I had never been on a hike for that long before, so I said yes.

The first day we followed a steep path that dropped a thousand feet to the river.

It was about the end of April, which is early spring in the high country,

and Yosemite is a big place. We didn't see anyone else throughout the entire trip as we

traveled over hill and dale in the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the first night we

camped near a babbling stream.

After lunch the next day, we walked through a sunny alpine meadow covered in light green knee-high spring grasses and flowers.

The meadow was situated in a valley surrounded by tall wooded hills

and it was a spectacular site.

And then we entered an aspen forest dappled with sunlight.

There we noticed the faint smell of a skump. It was weak enough that we figured the skunk must

have left some time ago, so we kept on walking. Further into the grove, we came across a newly built windowless rangers shed

constructed of thick corrugated steel.

All the necessary tools and equipment to repair trails in the backcountry were kept there

so the forest rangers wouldn't have to haul them back and forth.

We knew this because the front and one side were torn off with the heavy metal corrugated panels scattered all over the

nearby woods. We stood there gawking at it for several minutes trying to figure out how this

could have happened. My brother said it must have been a big bear,

freshly awake from its winter hibernation that did it. But on closer inspection, there were neither

claw marks nor teeth marks on any of the eight-foot-long panels. Some of them were curled into themselves

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