I caught up with Stan just after seeing an American black bear on the trail in Yosemite. I was by myself, and that was my first bear sighting in my many years of hiking. Black bears are generally uninterested in humans, so all you have to do is scare them, but I was still embarrassingly overly relieved to run into Stan, who had been camping just outside the park with his brother and a friend and was on his way to fish.

I asked if I could join him and take his portrait, and as we talked and hiked, I learned that he lives in San Francisco and comes to Yosemite whenever possible. He is a woodworker, so he can do weekday trips and avoid the crowds. Currently, Yosemite is reservation only for visitors, so this trip took a little more planning.

Stan was born in Saigon, Vietnam, to Chinese parents, and they fled Saigon before the fall of the city and the official end of the Vietnam War. He was seven then, so he remembers the chaos and fear, but is grateful he was still young enough to not be fully traumatized by what was happening around him.

When he began to fish, I asked if he keeps his catches. He said he lets many of them go, but keeps some toward the end of the day. He was catching mostly an eastern brook trout, which isn’t native to these lakes, so the park encourages people to take them. With that, the thought of freshly caught fish made my stomach growl, and I headed back to see if I’d have any more black bear sightings, which I did not.