I am in the passenger seat in Susan's van and we are driving up a dirt road to a vague destination (which I will for convenience call a lodge) in the mountains. The landscape is arid - yellowish soil and rocks, sparse pine forest around us. A tractor-trailer truck is stopped in the road ahead of us and we cannot get around it. I know another road so we turn around but as we approach the turn-off I realize that my alternate route will be too rough to drive with the van.
We are hiking in the mountains above the lodge, paused at a spot where cars have parked at the upper end of a dirt track. A previous visitor left behind a large chunk of reddish-brown cheese unopened in its shrink-wrap on the ground. Someone tells me it is "Debony" cheese. Reasoning that whoever left it will not return for it, and that the cool temperature means that the cheese is still good, I pick it up and bring it with me.
As we follow the trail higher onto the mountain it leads us to a blocky metal and concrete building. Bringing up the rear of our small group (which includes my sister Sarah and perhaps Daniel and others), I scramble up an aluminum ladder and through the building via a narrow concrete passageway. My cheese is crumbled in a Ziploc bag now. I climb another ladder and gain the top of a narrow ridge. I am trying to carry a double handful of the crumbled cheese but it keeps slipping through my fingers like sand. We descend the back side of the ridge via tight switchbacks which are under construction. When a blue wheelbarrow blocks the way, we jump down several feet to the next switchback, landing in soft dirt.
Below the steep part of the descent now, I am under some kind of open wooden structure, an old mine headframe perhaps, when Sarah calls back to me "Take a picture of the baby Rosy-finches!" Then I notice them, little birds like baby quail running around on the ground right in front of me, and I also realize that I am carrying the camera. There are adult birds as well, which I identify as the Rosy-finches although in reality they look more like little quail. A Ptarmigan flies up, then I see several more and I try to get a photo of them but they all vanish. I climb a ladder made of yellowish wood, perhaps to look for the birds, but as I approach the top the ladder twists and I fall off, dropping 10 feet or more but landing unhurt on my back on soft yellowish-brown foam.
I follow the others down and across a gentle open slope to a doorway. A bird is sitting on the ground right in front of the doorway. I recognize it as one of the Rosy-finches and am about to photograph it when I realize it has blood on its feathers, so I don't take the photo.
Continuing through the doorway and down the alley I arrive at the garden of the lodge. Ben drives by on the tractor, straddling a grocery bag containing a green bush bean plant but the beans on it are overripe and moldy. Having failed to get any good photos of the Rosy-finches, I want to walk into the garden to find some birds to photograph but I am barefoot and the garden path is covered with spiny thistles all trampled down. The garden is full of thistles and stinging nettles, one of which stings me in the calf.