I told him we were heading to Sunrise. He said it was great timing. It was prom that night. It's a once-a-year party where workers from all the High Sierra Camps hike in for the get-together. Since the camps never opened last year because of high snow levels, this was going to be the first prom in two years. He said I should try to get invited.

But I couldn't imagine going to a party that night.

I still was unclear on how I was going to hike the next four uphill miles.

Even when we do finally get to Sunrise, I can't imagine doing anything but crawling in my tent.

But then I meet Tom, the manager at the High Sierra camp. He hiked the JMT in September 2001. He didn't know that 9/11 had happened until he got back.

"The weird thing was that all these people were excited to tell me, couldn't wait," he says. Even a month in the Sierra didn't soften that blow. He says he felt the same things as everyone else. He just felt them a few weeks later.

It hits me that I don't know anything that's happened anywhere except in front of my feet for the past three days. My mind goes roaming for a second. Lebanon. Korea. Iraq. My friends. My town.

But Tom brings me back with an invitation to dinner as well as the party.

I'm so hungry. I brought the wrong food. None of my research paid off. I'm all around badly prepared.

There's no way I'll pass up dinner. I wrangle Darrell an invitation as well, but when I go back to get him he is humming over a freeze-dried bag of Lasagna and not about to get up from the bear cannister he is using as a stool.
Emily says she is too tired. I'll find out the next day she has huge blisters on both heels. Jim and I are unlikely to go to a party together. We're already hitting heads: him, Mr. gung-ho "we're in it to win it" and me Ms. let me just go on my own merry meandering way. He seems to think were in an episode of Survivor and he's the tribe leader. I'm thinking more of a PBS production and I am, well, the writer.

I return to a warm kitchen full of people cooking who really know what they're doing. In no time the serving table is filled with halibut, fresh steamed green beans and carrots, rice with raisins and pine nuts. The sauce on the halibut is delicious, and not just because I am half-starved. It's flavorful and balanced and unique.

Later at the bonfire, I ask the cook where he learned to make meals like that.

"I'm just a drunk stoner from Tennessee who loves good food," he tells me.

Guests keep arriving. They hiked 10, 12, 15 miles in the dark, carrying backpacks full of beer and liquor. They're dressed up. Katie, a Kate Hudson lookalike, wears a short red mini skirt and hiking socks pulled up like go-go boots. She tells me that last year, having no clothes for the prom, she wrapped herself in plastic wrap and put paper stars over her nipples.

There's a procession led by Tom, who is now wearing three ties over his T-shirt, and his date, who wears a sparkly crown. About 50 of us climb a half-mile up a granite dome.

I can't believe I'm doing this. I didn't think there was one more step in me. But how can I not? It's a full moon in the High Sierra.

I meet a girl from Turlock who says she just got back from a stint in West Africa with the Peace Corps. She was trying to teach the locals not to burn the bush to hunt rodents. She did this by having school kids write rap songs about it being a bad idea to burn harvests and villages while flushing out varmints.

It is a party full of people with degrees in arts and history and sciences, but no "real" jobs. There's a poet who is a mule packer. An art historian who runs a camp. Biologists by the bucketful.

These are the wanderers. People are talking about what they'll do at the end of the season: Ecuador? Visit friends in Thailand?

There's conga drums and guitars and people are dancing.

I'm dancing.

I hiked from 9:30 to 6:30 with only the briefest of breaks to gulp some water, and now I'm dancing? I don't see how this can be. But sometimes it's a crazy, bonfire world. Especially in the High Sierra on a granite dome under a full moon.

This was written while on the trail, but published after returning to Fresno.