Climbing Mount Signal

When I was 18 years old, me and two of my buddies decided that we were going to climb Mt. Signal. Even though it's only 2,300 feet to the top of Mt. Signal it looked like Mt. Everest to us. Being the young bucks that we were, we thought it the thing to do to prove our manhood. Temperatures in the Imperial Valley hit 90 to 110 during the day so we started early in the morning, figuring to make the summit by noon and get back down before nightfall. We started up one foot in front of the other, boulder by boulder, it was a good climb and we gained a hundred feet of altitude every ten minutes. Half way up we looked around and thought, maybe we've bit off more than we can chew, but we kept on climbing. We made the summit right around noon and took in the view. 2,300 feet in the air it was if we were in an airplane flying over the perfectly flat fields of the Imperial Valley, we were in awe of what we had accomplished. Standing before the shrine with it's cross at the summit we knew we were somebody, we knew that we mattered. I picked up a couple of rocks and put them in my pocket, then we started the climb down. It was like floating on air, we bounded from boulder to boulder gravity assisted and flew down the mountain. Without seeming effort we glided as if on wings toward the base, in a trance like state time slowed down, as if in slow motion every stone was alive and a step back to reality. We arrived in the real world and realized that we were men and began our journey, we had arrived ! (read more)