I wrote here that the path to the job or career you really want is like a route up a mountain. There’s a clear goal, and while there may be a variety of ways to attain the summit, good planning, route-finding and setting interim milestones will all help speed the ascent while minimizing the risk of delays and mishaps.

The mountain in the photo is Mt. Williamson, 14,380 feet and second highest (next to Mt. Whitney) in the Sierra Nevada range. It’s not an easy ascent, but even so, the rewards are out of all proportion to the effort; the view from the top is spectacular in all directions.

The road in the photo shown leading to the mountain starts in Manzanar, now a National Historic Site, but during WWII it was one of 10 camps in the US where Japanese Americans were incarcerated. When the camp was closed, the internees were given $25 each and a one-way bus or train ticket out, to start all over again except now looked at with far more suspicion and bigotry than before the war.

One internee, Hank Umemoto, vowed when he was in Manzanar, to climb Mt. Whitney. It took him a long long time, but he finally did it at age 71 in 1998. He wrote a great book about his life, “Manzanar to Mount Whitney: The Life and Times of a Lost Hiker” published in 2013, which I strongly recommend as a tale of his long and interesting life. I do not know Mr. Umemoto, but he is an inspiration and I intend to meet him some time.

I did not take the photo of Williamson from Manzanar. I may do that at some point but until then I would like to thank TerryDarc very much for his beautiful Mount Williamson from Manzanar Road which he took in April of 2013, posted to Flickr, and which he very kindly allowed me to use.