GOLDEN TROUT WILDERNESS, Calif. — We clambered loudly up the miserable incline, horses stumbling as their shoes slid on the ladder of rocks that took us up and away from the Kern River.
“Devil’s Stairway,” Chelsea McGlyn, the wrangler on this expedition, said over her shoulder, twisting around in the saddle.
Was it such a brutal trail when I made my first trip here almost 60 years ago? Memory is too fragile to say definitively.
