Sierras Again, At Last
A week on the East Side
Finally, made it to the Sierras for a week this summer season. Too little, perhaps, but not too late.
Rain smoke hail
Rolling thunder
Tromping along in the god zone
Land titrated between desert and life
Over Paiute Pass
The smoke is stronger in the morning, from the growing Garnet fire. We bail, retracing our steps through a delirious combination of haze, dust, rain, and hail. Once we’re out we warm up in a hot spring in Owens Valley. It’s not a bad consolation, soak in a steaming river with USGS surveyors. Learn about frogs, toads, snakes, fish, land, springs. Enjoy the view. We get permits for another trailhead to the north and set up camp.
Hiking in up to Green lake, 9000 feet. This is my favorite elevation to camp - under the treeline, but high enough that the shrubby undergrowth and wet soil has given way to granite and pine needle duft. We set up the tent in a little protected grove of lodgepole and ponderosa pine, tucked away in a corner of the lake. As always, swimming and sunbathing are the first two priorities.
Entering the high sierra (10,000+ feet elevation) is often our goal when backpacking, but entering it can feel like trespassing on forbidden territory, a holy relic of a purer age. Often you enter by hiking over a pass from lower country, trees falling away, steep exertion and crumbling footing keeping your eyes trained on the ground. Then suddenly the slope levels off and spits you out into a high vista, a granite basin of the high sierra. The beauty sinks in, overwhelming, harrowing. You’re confronted with sweeping granite slopes, rock gardens, crystal lakes, wind heavy with the fragrance of wild herbs. The altitude and exertion and possibly hunger combines to create a heady, disorienting feeling. Perhaps you’ve been flipped upside down, because isn’t the bright gleaming rock below you the sky? Doesn’t the sky, split as it is into hundreds of miles of U-shaped canyons, look as solid and pure as a black sea when you look up?
Descending into the basin, the high sierra becomes personal. It is a garden of exquisite clumps of flowers and krummholz bonsai trees, rock gardens, and water so pure and cold it phases into a vacuum on closer examination. Dipping down to drink water the pebbles on the streambed resolve into perfect mosaic clarity. The aftertaste is pure air. It’s almost sacrilegious to sleep in such a place, to bring the messy routines of human existence - food, waste, shelter - into this exposed ceiling of the world.
Today, we’re walking in a bowl of mountains with no other people, in fact no signs of human existence besides a scattered trail that fades in and out of talus and clumps of spiky grass. Being alone in this landscape is childish joy and deep heartache, freedom and loneliness. I switch from playful to somber and back in an instant, and the landscape switches with me. It’s a playground, a church, a film, a prayer, a dream.
“On Climbing the Sierra Mountains again after 31 years
Range after range of mountains
Year after year after year.
I am still in love.”
― Gary Snyder
Later, we camp in a meadow next to tall western groundsel, dwarf lupine, spike trisetum, sulfur buckwheat, parry’s rush, rocky mountain pussytoes, bristly haircap moss, purple mountain-heath, spiny milkvetch, threadleaf sedge. By the stream mountain gooseberry, broadleaf lupine, and many other unknown plants clustering around the cold stream of life rushing down the valley floor. Possibly spotted endemic foxtail pine? Have to bring an ID book. Spy a coyote in the distance, hopping up the mountain. Two deer relax in the evening light. Yellow striped garter snakes hide by our tent poles. We cook dinner and sleep early.
Scramble up passes, carving lines across the rockface. Exertion. Reminder to stay calm. Feel the air thin, heart rippling in the neck. Keep a flow. Make it to the top, as the slope rounds out catch the view of the other side. Gulp it all in, over again. The high sierra is walking, up and down, Kim Stanley Robinson wrote in his high sierra love letter. It’s true. The repetition is also part of the prayer, and it’s easy with a new lake, new sight just around the bend. A week is never enough.
