Golden City Experiences of yesteryear

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 I remember that after I almost froze to death on Mt. Shasta in 1970 and saw the golden city as I went into the snow cave to survive the night, that after that even though my arm and leg joints all hurt pretty bad from almost freezing to death that night in the snow cave and afterwards(the next morning my jeans all of our jeans were wet from melting snow. Luckily, the temperature outside was about 20 degrees Fahrenheit or less. This froze our pants solid from ankle to knee and from knee to hip. This created a dead air space with frozen Levi Jeans so even though we were shaking and had been all night long in a convulsive manner in the snow cave, the temperature froze our jeans and because of that we stayed alive. Everyone further up on the mountain during that blizzard lost fingers and toes. But, none of us had frostbite. It just took us 4 days in a motel to warm up by alternating hot baths getting our fingers and arms and legs to work right again. Today people likely would go to the hospital. People were different in the 1970s than that.

The next year I took off to visit a girlfriend in Santa Fe in my VW Bug then in the fall after I almost froze to death on Mt. Shasta, some people wanted to go to a commune in Taos and so paid for my gas to Santa Fe and I dropped them off in Taos around Thanksgiving in the snow.

I visited my girlfriend in Santa Fe and then traveled to Salt Lake City Utah to visit a branch of a church I then attended in San Diego that was sort of New Age and Mystical Christian there. While I was traveling from Denver over the mountains through to Utah I experienced the Golden City again. It was kind of overwhelming to experience it again in the Colorado Mountains after first experiencing it in Mt. Shasta at the time for me. I felt very overwhelmed by the whole thing and started writing songs about this and my profound experience with the Colorado Rocky mountains. I also started singing, "Colorado Rocky Mountain High' and playing it on my guitar then.

My girlfriend in Santa Fe and I decided not to get married because I really wanted to live in California even though I had met her at the private school I attended in Santa Fe in 1965 and 1966 when I graduated High school in May.

So, I made it back to California for Christmas with my folks who were then living in the Desert for that winter near Palm Springs.

I was going through a very difficult time in my life then because I had had to leave my childhood church and my friends since babyhood because I was too 1960s for them to deal with.(I was too progressive for them as my childhood church was very conservative at the time). However, the Federal Government changed all this with some laws that affected all churches then to be more inclusive of all ethnic groups.

By September of 1971 I had re-entered college and studied for awhile Philosophy. I was very good at this and always got an A. Since I was about 23 then I would stand up in class and expound about philosophy because it was keeping me alive then. The teacher really enjoyed me pithy comments especially when younger students didn't seem to know which way was up.

So, I shared my realizations from all my personal suffering in the form of the usefulness of Philosophy and my professor was very grateful at how it helped all his students there. He invited me to a party to meet his wife. He had spent time in a Japanese Zen Buddhist Monastery in Japan and thought my point of view was very zen and present.

Without being as Zen as I was I would have already been dead long before.

My suffering changed to a more bearable kind when my son was born after I got married in 1974. Then it didn't matter what I was upset about because I had to take care of my son and raise him right to adulthood. What I felt actually didn't matter anymore he had to come first.


This was a very good discipline for me to become a Householder Yogi raising a son and eventually the rest of my children until now my youngest is 18 here in 2014 over 40 years later.