MY SIERRA LIFE (1)

Not to Touch the Earth

I woke in my sleeping bag and saw Terry sitting up in his. I had gotten some sleep and now it was time. It was still dark but the sky was blue in the east, beyond the great gulf of Owens Valley. I had slept poorly, a little high on Diamox and altitude and the knowledge I was back in the Sierra. Around us stood tents and picnic tables and grills: the car campground at Horseshoe Meadows. A girl in a nearby tent had put us to sleep the night before by reading aloud to her friends, her musical voice like a lullaby. Now tall pines soared over us, black in the dawn. All the people around us were still asleep. Where else do you find so many people sleeping outdoors together? It’s a thing from an earlier time. We packed as quietly as we could and took our stuff to the nearby parking lot. Sitting on the asphalt by my old station wagon, we brewed up some coffee and finished packing our packs. It was cold but not too cold. With a final check we were off. Destination Mount Langley, the tallest peak at the south end of the Sierra.

The sky was lighter now. Sunrise would catch us in a forest on the eastern slope. We had done it again: another Sierra trip. Well over 50 of them at this point, Terry and I, almost half of those just the two of us. Rambling the Sierra with my moody friend: at various times he would be gloomy, exuberant, calm, remote. It didn’t matter. Both of us were there for the Sierra. In that sense we were a good match. For sure we were used to each other.

Now we flowed up the trail, hiking fast through shadows. A long gentle uphill walk through narrow meadows, threading an open forest. Everything was cool and still, the shadows horizontal, the light yellow. I felt the energy of the trip’s first hour, and yet things were still a little dreamy too. Sometimes hiking involves a lot of looking down to be sure of your footing, but other times it’s like strolling up a sidewalk. Minute follows minute, they unspool with nothing in particular to mark their passing. You’re just walking, and you’re only going to be walking for the rest of that day. And so you begin to shift into hiking’s different time, its altered state of consciousness. Sierra time. In that morning light, at the start of a trip, I sometimes laugh out loud.

That feeling is one of the things I want to write about here. Crazy love. Some kind of joy. There are people who go up to California’s Sierra Nevada, fall in love with the place, and then live the rest of their lives in ways that will get them back up there as often as possible. I’m one of those, and in this book I want to explore various aspects of that feeling, thinking about how it happens, and why. Analyzing love: Is this wise? Possibly not, but I notice we do it all the time. So I’ll give it a try.

On that particular day in 2008, we came over a rise to a sudden huge view. Cottonwood Lake One stretched before us, a narrow blue expanse banked by reeds. Over the pine trees on the far shore loomed the Sierra crest, here a stretch of broken gray cliff blocking our way, 2,000 feet high and topped at its north end by the summit prow of Mount Langley, the southernmost of the Sierra’s 14,000-foot peaks.

We followed the trail along the grassy south shore of Cottonwood One, and stopped at the far end of Cottonwood Two for second breakfast. It was very satisfying to look up at the giant rocky wall facing us and see that the rest of our day was going to be above tree line, and here it was only 9:30. When I remarked on this, Terry told me that the Pacific Crest Trail’s thru-hikers always start early. “Ten by ten,” they call it, meaning ten miles by 10:00 a.m. To me that sounded awful, but in the actual performance it had been quite nice.

Two fishermen wandered by and stopped to chat. I asked them if they had visited Cottonwood Lake Four, which would have given them a view up to Old Army Pass. The evening before we had asked a horse packer about that long-abandoned route, and he had growled, “You’d need crampons to get over that one.”

CONTENTS
Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgments

MY SIERRA LIFE (1): Not to Touch the Earth

GEOLOGY (1): Batholith and Pluton

MY SIERRA LIFE (2): Break On Through

SIERRA PEOPLE (1): The First People

MY SIERRA LIFE (3): Artists in the Back Country

GEOLOGY (2): Basins

MY SIERRA LIFE (4): How We Met

SIERRA PEOPLE (2): John Muir

MY SIERRA LIFE (5): The Pinball Years

GEOLOGY (3): Crests and Divides; Also PSYCHOGEOLOGY (1): Outside and Inside

SNOW CAMPING (1) Freezing Our Butts

SIERRA PEOPLE (3) Clarence King

NAMES (1) The Good

SNOW CAMPING (2) Close to the Edge

MOMENTS OF BEING (1) A Sierra Day: Morning in Camp

MY SIERRA LIFE (6) Crossing Mather Pass

SIERRA PEOPLE (4) Mary Austin

PSYCHOGEOLOGY (2) Altitude and Foreshortening

SIERRA PEOPLE (5) Mapping the Territory

GEOLOGY (4) Fellfields

SIERRA PEOPLE (6) Common Neighbors

MOMENTS OF BEING (2) A Sierra Day: Rambling and Scrambling

MY SIERRA LIFE (7) Owls in the Blue

SIERRA PEOPLE (7) The Sierra Club’s Women

SIERRA PEOPLE (8) The Fresno Crowd

ROUTES (1) The Four Bad Passes

MOMENTS OF BEING (3) A Sierra Day: Sunset and Twilight

MY SIERRA LIFE (8) Robbie You’re Wasting Your Precious Youth

THE SWISS ALPS (1) Kistenpass

SNOW CAMPING (3) The Transantarctics

SIERRA PEOPLE (9) Norman Clyde

NAMES (2) The Bad

ROUTES (2) The Six Good Passes

GEOLOGY (5) Canyons and Massifs

MOMENTS OF BEING (4) A Sierra Day: Night in Camp

ROUTES (3) Some West-Side Entries

MY SIERRA LIFE (9) Gear Talk

THE SWISS ALPS (2) My Ascent of the Matterhorn

MY SIERRA LIFE (10) Return to the Sierra

MOMENTS OF BEING (5) Close Calls

ROUTES (4) Desolation

MOMENTS OF BEING (6) A Sierra Day: Under the Tarp

MY SIERRA LIFE (11) Heart Trouble

NAMES (3) The Ugly

SIERRA PEOPLE (10) Tree Line Artists

GEOLOGY (6) Roof Pendants

SIERRA PEOPLE (11) Fish and Frogs

MY SIERRA LIFE (12) This Is the End

SIERRA PEOPLE (12) Reclusive Neighbors

SIERRA PEOPLE (13) The Sierra Nevada Bighorn Sheep

SIERRA PEOPLE (14) What Didn’t Get Built; and Trail Phantoms

ROUTES (5) Basins Have Characters

SNOW CAMPING (4) Extreme Housekeeping

SIERRA PEOPLE (15) Gary Snyder

NAMES (4) Naming Mount Thoreau

SIERRA PEOPLE (16) Michael Blumlein

MOMENTS OF BEING (7) Late Desolation

THE SWISS ALPS (3) Seeing Meru

ROUTES (6) The High Route

An Annotated Sierra Bibliography

MOMENTS OF BEING (8) The Monsoon Gets Stronger

MOMENTS OF BEING (9) Hetch Hetchy Restored

SIERRA PEOPLE (17) Young People in Love

MY SIERRA LIFE (13) Still Getting Lost

NAMES (5) Corrections and Additions

SIERRA PEOPLE (18) We Had a Good Shaman

MOMENTS OF BEING (10): How Big the World Becomes in a Wind

MOMENTS OF BEING (11) Have I Mentioned How Much I Like the Fall Colors Up Here?

MY SIERRA LIFE (14) For Wilderness

MOMENTS OF BEING (12) The Thicket

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