From Little Si — Mamiya 6

Twelve frames from three rolls of 120, all Ilford Delta 400 in T-Max developer, all square 6×6 through the Mamiya 6 MF — this time from the summit of Little Si, looking across the saddle at the bigger sibling. Four miles round trip from the trailhead off Mt Si Road, with the last pitch earning every breath. The morning began without promise: occasional raindrops, a grey deck overhead, the kind of sky that suggests staying home. One roll lost to my own impatience: I’d been waiting for the sun to break through a stubborn ceiling of cloud, certain it would come, and when it finally did I had only two frames left on the roll. I burned them, reloaded fast, and clicked the lens cap back on out of habit — to protect the glass between film changes. Manually metering through the orange filter, I missed the meter’s quiet warning of underexposure, and shot six glorious frames into total darkness before realizing the cap had never come off. Fortunately the light held. The two surviving rolls gave back what the mountain offered: a grey morning giving way to blue, clouds combing the haystack, an orange filter pulling the heavens darker and the rock harder. Building off last week’s walk along the Iron Horse trestles, the same corridor — climbed into rather than walked along.