“Please write”: a correspondence 40 years in the making

This has all the makings of a Hallmark channel movie-of-the-week.  From the Los Angeles Times:

It was the summer of ’72 when 13-year-old Tim Taylor reached the summit in the Sierra Nevada outback. Inspired, he wrote a note — “please write” — and tucked it into a metal film canister that he left on the 12,000-foot peak.

Four decades later, a 69-year-old grandfather on an 11-day trek with his son and grandson came across the canister, rusted and now nearly the color of the rocks themselves.

“I had my 14-year-old grandson with me. If he wrote a note like that, he’d be interested to have somebody respond decades later,” Larry Wright said. So the Oakland resident set out to answer the note’s author.

On Monday, Wright and Taylor, now a San Diego County Superior Court judge, spoke about their visits — separated by 40 years — to the rugged landscape known as the Great Western divide.

Taylor, who lived in La Cañada Flintridge as a youth, recalled he was hiking solo in Sequoia National Park in August 1972 when he put a pencil to a lined sheet of paper: “Tim Taylor climbed to this peak, Thursday, August 17, 1972. Age 13 yrs. Anyone finding this note please write.”

Taylor left the note on the peak before rejoining his troop for trout fishing in a nearby lake.

Taylor recalled he left the note on a solo hike during a rare rest day on Boy Scout Troop 502’s 50-mile backpacking trip through the Sierra.

“We had nowhere to go that day, so I woke up and I looked up and said, ‘I think I’ll climb that mountain,’ ” he said.

Taylor said he wanted to climb the peak precisely because it wasn’t named on his Boy Scouts-provided topographic map — a chance to make his mark.

“I could see it was unnamed, and that was part of the attraction,” he said. “There was no evidence that anybody had ever been there.”

Read the rest.