Summer 2020, Sierra foothills, Calif.
“I don’t even own my hammock,” Matt Cornell tells me, pointing at the striped cotton cocoon that marks his bivy in the woods behind Priest Station Café in Groveland, where he works as a server. We’re a 10-minute walk from the nearest road in a patch of trees on a sloping hillside overlooking California’s Central Valley. The Café and nearby Groveland are the last stops for travellers heading to Yosemite from the Bay Area. After this town, 30 miles of steep, windy roads separate motorists from the park gates.
To get to Cornell’s bivy, we walked out behind his work at the Café, past a gutted wooden house where he keeps his belongings. This is where his ice tools, covered in cobwebs, sit hooked over…
