Daniel grew up in Hemet, close enough to the mountain to look up at it on hot days and think: that's where we're going. He is a woodworker, an electrician, a sculptor, a barefoot hiker, a competitive swimmer who can still hold his breath for six minutes, a chess player who sees everything in moves, and a father who plays art games with his teenage son on weeknights. He works out of a shop behind an art gallery in town, surrounded by sawdust and router bits and a bronze cast of his own hand. He is not easy to summarize. He would tell you that is the point.

The shop is small and dense with things. A bronze hand sits on a shelf, heavier than you expect. Drawings are tacked up alongside tools. A 3D printer hums in the corner. The smell of fresh wood is everywhere, cedar and redwood mostly, because Daniel is particular about material. "Up here you are at the source," he says. "Someone is always cutting down something and offering up a gorgeous chunk. If you know what you are looking at, you get to work with gold instead of ordinary metal."

His grandmother was a painter, oils mostly, landscapes with houses, really good. She sat him down for lessons when he was young, taught him boats and a few other things, and the pencils and charcoals she had lying around became his first tools. He drew Garfield first. He remembers that clearly: Garfield on a piece of paper, the beginning of everything.

He has never stopped. Whatever you put in his hand he will use. He has done pencil, charcoal, paint, bronze casting, resin work, 3D printing, wood carving with a router, animatronic props for local filmmakers, crystal installations with embedded lights, signs for businesses all over town. The signs are everywhere if you know to look for them. Art Depot. The pottery place. Black Mountain Coffee. He does not advertise much. People see the work and call him.

The Navy, the World, and Coming Home

He joined the Navy right out of high school, recruited for his math scores, his memory, and the fact that he could outswim almost anyone. They pointed him toward the SEALs. He said no. He was not a killer. He worked on FA-18 jets, and the carriers they flew from took him around the world.

Australia was his favorite. He says it the way people say the name of someone they loved and lost. He also did the Persian Gulf circuit, walked the streets of Dubai and Bahrain and Abu Dhabi. Same people everywhere, he says — just wanting to go home, sit with the family, have some fun.

What the Navy also gave him was a habit of going into tattoo parlors in every country he visited. Not to get tattooed, just to look at the art. Black and white work especially, strong lines. He would talk to the artists, show them his own drawings, and sometimes someone would look at his sketchbook and offer him cash on the spot. He would take it. Beer money, he says, and grins.

He got out in March of 2001. Six months later, September 11 happened. He has thought about that timing more than once.

Twenty Years on the Same Mountain

He moved up to Idyllwild with his then-wife Amy, both of them done with Hemet and ready for somewhere that felt like a real place. They rented at the top of the road near the bakery, then two doors down from that, then around the corner on South Circle, then bought a place on Marion Ridge. Since then he has moved around more than he can count, a casualty of rents that climbed faster than the work could follow. The mountain keeps him regardless of which roof he is under.

For years he worked construction all over the mountain, doing electrical work, drywall, painting, carpentry. He worked for the Butterfield family at their compound for six years and will tell you he knows that property better than anyone. Between 2013 and 2015, he and Amy owned the Village Market, a liquor store included, not the most convenient situation for someone drinking a little more than he should. He quit a year in. He has been sober for eleven years.

The woodworking grew out of all that construction time. He had been using a router for years and found he was very good at freehand work with it. He started making things that were more than functional. Signs became sculpture. Scraps became objects. He got commissions. People started pointing at things around town and saying: that's Daniel's.

The Art Game

His son Jonathan is fourteen and already a better artist than Daniel was at that age — Daniel says this with unguarded pride. The boy has color, he says, and his line work is something. Every night they can, they play a game Daniel invented. You roll dice to determine which colors you are allowed to use, sometimes just yellow, sometimes orange and black, sometimes blue and green. You make a quick drawing with those constraints. When you have four or five, you pick one and spend as much time as you want redoing it with full freedom. It is partly a game and partly a lesson and partly just two people who love drawing sitting together at a table.

Daniel still draws mostly in black and white. Color has never been his natural language. His son lives in color.

Jonathan is tall, already taller than Daniel at fourteen, and headed to high school in Murrieta where his mother is moving, which means he will come up to the mountain less. As long as the boy keeps making art, Daniel says, that is enough.

The Frequency

Daniel is a scientist by temperament, which in Idyllwild puts him in an interesting position. The mountain draws a lot of people toward crystals and tarot and spiritual practice. He is not dismissive of it. What interests him is the frequency.

The mountain, he explains, is sitting on a massive formation of quartz granite. Quartz vibrates, holds and transmits frequency, and has been doing it longer than anyone has been keeping track. "A JPL engineer and a movie director and a mystic and a woodworker all end up in the same small town, feeling at home in the same coffee shop," he says. "Because the mountain pulled them to the same frequency. Whether you take the science view or the mystic view, it ends up in the same place."

He tells his son there is always a magic show going on. You are either the magician, the assistant keeping the trick alive, the audience, or the person in the front row who knows it is a trick and is watching for the method. He wants his son to be the last one.

Barefoot on the Mountain

He is a barefoot hiker. Has been his whole life, because he was a competitive swimmer from childhood, trained through high school, swam CIF and junior Olympics, and swimmers live in bare feet. He wears steel-toed boots at the router because the Navy taught him that lesson the hard way. But on the trail he takes his shoes off, holds one in each hand, and runs.

He goes up Black Mountain, up the deer trail to Suicide Rock, back and forth on the Ernie Maxwell trail. He is 48 and his knees are not what they were, so he has gone back to fasting and training, getting the muscle back. "You have to keep the gears going," he says. "The older you get, the faster they rust."

When he hikes he thinks. He has hundreds of documents on his phone, pages of notes talked or typed into it on trails and in the shop. He has paper notebooks too. He is always trying to get the contents of his mind down somewhere before he loses the thread.

He has watched Idyllwild change and has opinions about most of it. "All my buddies up here can show you sixty-five different forest cuts through the woods that are all now gone," he says. "People moved up and fenced everything. The deer can't cross. The coyotes are confused. That drives me crazy."

But the mountain itself has not changed. The quartz is still humming. The trails are still there. The salad bowl of people, as he calls it, is still unlike anything he has found anywhere else. There is no place like this. He knows it with the certainty of someone who has checked.

Outside the shop, the mountain sits in the afternoon light. Somewhere up there is a trail he knows by feel, barefoot, eyes open, thinking about everything and nothing, exactly where he is supposed to be.