It’s impossible to offend me. I am entirely comfortable with who I am—bad habits and all—so nobody’s representation of me, correct or not, rocks my foundation. There is one exception to this.

Call me an insensitive jerk, or a narcissist, or a pompous ass—all that is water off a duck’s back. Just don’t call me a flatlander or a city boy. That cuts me to the quick. The fact that I was brought up and lived as both for the first 15 and most recent 20 years of my life is beside the point. When my mother moved my brother and me to the High Sierra in my 15th year—absolutely against my wishes—it was the single best thing that ever happened to me. The mountains entered my blood like a mosquito’s stinger full of malaria, and after ten years of high-altitude living the mountain fever has never left me.

Last week I took the first concrete step toward replanting mountain roots. Not back in the Lake Tahoe region where I passed ten years of glorious runs and rides, but when you’re on a singletrack trail in a pine forest at 6,000 feet, mountains are mountains.

Mark Montgomery and I have been roaming around the eastern side of the San Gabriel Mountains the past few months, and I came across an old mining claim for sale. I showed it to Monty, and he said, "I’m in." So we bought it.

It’s called Old Point Comfort, and it’s a square plot of 40 acres. We bought 20 of the 40.

It’s raw land that encompasses Big Rock Creek and the country road that goes along it. We do have the ability to back out of the deal, and in this 60-day due diligence period we’ll answer to our own satisfaction questions like, Can we sink a septic tank? Can we drill a well? Does the six-millimeter widget bird nest only on our 20 acres?

Big Rock Creek flows one canyon over from Devil’s Punchbowl County Park. This is a little-known but geologically significant area. It’s the closest thing to a mini-Grand Canyon that Los Angeles can claim as its own. While Old Point Comfort is probably ten or so miles from Devil’s Punchbowl by car, it’s only a mile away as the crow flies, hence the strategic setting of this piece of property. You run a mile or two in either direction and you’re on one of several trail systems that either lead you up through the Angeles National Forest or into and through Devil’s Punchbowl.

I want to put an endurance camp here: a place for runners and triathletes to go for serious high-country trail running and the fabulous road cycling we’ve found in these parts; a place where high school cross-country and tracksters can come for running camps.

First, though, there are some challenges that come with buying Old Point Comfort. We’re not, for example, entirely sure what we purchased. The property’s corners have no monuments or markers, and it’s going to cost several thousand dollars to have a surveyor set the corners. I’m assuming there are monuments at the grid corners—set back in the 1800s—and from there perhaps I can figure it out myself with a GPS on the cheap. If not, at least I’ll have spent a good couple of days orienteering over hill and dale.

We bought Old Point Comfort from a guy who himself bought it in a distress sale and didn’t know much what he’d bought. We had no idea what sort of history the place offered. "There’s another patch of private property a ways up the road," said Monty to me right after we’d bought Old Point Comfort. "Why don’t we drive up and see who lives there? Maybe we’ll get lucky and find an old geezer who remembers something about our property."

We found our geezer—and how. We struck gold in spades by running into Bob, a retired Southern Pacific railroad engineer who still dresses in striped overalls, and his wife, Midge. They live in a remarkable two-story house built entirely of river rock. They live two miles upstream from us, and have since the 1940s.

"Old Point Comfort—what you bought—was a mining claim, but it wasn’t a mine," said Bob. "Old Point Comfort was the waystation for the Big Horn mine, way up’t the top of the mountain. All the supplies were brought up by horse teams to the waystation, and there the drovers unhitched the horses and replaced them with the mule teams. The grades are over 20 percent up above, and that’s why the mules were needed. The mules were kept at Old Point Comfort.

"More recently, though, Ivan Johnson lived on that property. He was married to Katherine Lister—Lister was her maiden name. The property had a lodge, where they lived, and a separate cabin. He was a journalist, and he’d write in the cabin once he got the inspiration. But he needed lubrication to become inspired. Down’t the bottom of the hill was a store, and it had a bar. Katherine, she kept the key to the car. So Ivan would get in the car and coast down the hill. He knew that he had at least 25 minutes to himself, because that’s how long it took Katherine to walk down the hill with the key, once she discovered he was missing. After they left Old Point Comfort, the Forest Service tore down the lodge and the cabin."

Funny thing about the waystation story—I love mules. This dates from a time when JulieAnne and I were running on the Lolo Trail, the old Lewis and Clark route West, as it passed through Idaho’s Bitterroots. We passed a couple of rangers on horseback on their way to perform trail maintenance, each leading a mule. One of the mules had strapped on his back the hay bales for all the animals, and the other carried the biggest chainsaw I’ve ever seen in my life, with what must’ve been a 42-inch bar. Ever since I’ve wanted to live in the mountains and have a couple of mules. So there you go.

With some luck and a lot of sweat, Monty and I will have a waystation at Old Point Comfort for runners and triathletes coming up to hang with us for a day or three.