After recommendations from friends, this week I finally began to read ” The High Sierra: A Love Story,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m only a few chapters in as I write this, but already the book stirs up a lot of memories and thoughts about decades in the Sierra. Both of the trips he describes in the first few chapters take me right back to important places I’ve been. In fact, his transforming first trip literally took him to where I went on my similar trip a few years earlier.
The liner notes state that Robinson was “transformed” after he “first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains (sic) during the summer of 1973.” That got me thinking about my introduction to these mountains — and also about other people who know this range deeply and in different ways after decades of experience in the range.
My first backpack trip was, of course, in the Sierra, way back in the summer of 1968. I was 16 and — to my retrospective amazement — our parents dropped me and two of my buddies of the same age off at a trailhead. We hiked over Rockbound Pass into what is now part of the Desolation Wilderness for a trip that was, to the best of my memory, five days long. I had dreamed of such a trip for what seemed to my young mind like forever, and I still recall the magical first view of someone’s backpacking campsite at a lake just beyond the pass. (We managed to get semi-lost on the last day, but that’s a story for another time.)
But wait, that was not my first visit to the Sierra. My father, a transplanted New Yorker by way of the Midwest, aspired to backpack in the Sierra, though I don’t think he was ever quite up to it. I recall that he picked up bits and pieces of gear for the trail, and I now think he was responding to the same fascinations that I developed in my youth, though he never quite managed to get “out there” in the backcountry.
A few years before that crossing of Rockbound Pass with my buddies, he tried to take me and one of my brothers on a pack trip. My memory is now incomplete, but I think that we rented a “mountain tent,” backpacks and sleeping bags, and who knows what else. We got as far as the Tuolumne Meadows campground, but then — if I’m not merging multiple memories — we had “weather” and retreated to the wood-stove-equipped tents at the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge. Truthfully, that was pretty magical, too.
But that wasn’t my first Sierra experience either. Though we weren’t really a camping family — I think my mother actually hated it, but went along — we car-camped at places ranging from Lassen NP to Sequoia NP.
But the first real Sierra trip I (vaguely) remember was to Yosemite Valley. I’d love to share a stirring tale of seeing the Valley for the first time, but if it happened I don’t remember. I do remember being awed by the raging Merced River behind our (now gone) motel in El Portal, and I recall the rituals of the Yosemite Firefall, the feeling of looking into the great valley from Glacier Point (the old lodge still stood!), and a fearful moment of being chased back into the family van by a black bear.
But the first memory of the Sierra? This comes from our family’s first experience in the state, and may actually have been a stop on the drive from Minnesota to California when my parents moved here in 1956. We stopped at Lake Tahoe, and I distinctly recall a view the lake from an area along its shoreline. Later I saw an area — perhaps it was El Dorado Beach? — that sure seems to fit my memory, though the memories of four-year-olds are not to be fully trusted. Today it is not a magical place, but in my memory it surely was.
On a trip into the backcountry with friends this past summer, we passed — OK, we were passed by! — groups of young backpackers. I recognized the younger me in them, and I thought about people like the current me that I had encountered on the trail when I was their age. (I guess that makes me an old man of the mountains now!) I thought about the experience being young and encountering the Sierra as a new place, a blank slate for making unimaginable memories, with no idea of where this might lead. And I thought about what it means to be at the far end of that adventure, now full of accumulated experiences, memories, and stories. And I wondered if I could possibly explain to them the potential of the journey that they might be starting and how deeply it might affect them. (I resisted the temptation to actually stop them on the trail and try to explain, you’ll be happy to hear, as will my own kids! ;-) )
So, these mountains have been part of my life for a long time. And I’m not the only one. If you look around, there’s a good chance that someone you encounter was also “transformed” by a long experience with this remarkable Range of Light.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
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