Sierra Nevada Journal 2012

Sierra Nevada Crown Jewel Hike Journal

Carson Pass to Taboose Pass, Pacific Crest Trail

first draft

August 18 – September 26, 2012

By Fred Allebach 12/22/12

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.” – Lao Tzu

As I write a trip journal it becomes an increasing contrast of being transformed by the experience and regular run of the mill, automatic pilot life. I like to catalogue my transformation and see it unfold, try to maybe shake out something new. Something new is what I’m after.

One question is asked persistently on the trail: “where are you going?” I’m going to take a look at this question. My general feeling: the question doesn’t apply to me as I’m not going anywhere.

Destiny is not in front or behind you, it’s right where you are. Everybody asks, “where are you going?” Implied goal orientation is the defacto assumption; that it’s about a destination and not about a process. Destination, a destiny, does not necessarily imply any purpose or goal. To say that this was his destiny is to say nothing more than he ended up at point X; and everybody is always at point X anyway. In reality, where you are going is always right where you are in the moment.

“Where are you going?” is part ways a mindless greeting, a conversation starter.  One problem for me here: I am trying to open up mindfulness, not keep on autopilot, not get swamped by boring, idle chatter. All people are doing out here is going from point A to point B, but point B (where you are going) can’t be the goal because by the time you get there the trip is over. The goal of the trip can’t be merely to finish it. You are out there to get something during the time you are there, an ineffable something that makes you go out in the first place. This ineffable something is not measured quantitatively, only qualitatively. This distinction sets thru-hikers apart as they are transparently focused on point B only; their thing is something else. What they are doing is more like a quantifiable athletic event. To thru-hikers, “where are you going?” is what it’s all about. But shit, that is just like bringing the rat race to the woods, why hurry for months at a time just to get to point B? Just to say you did it?

Many hikers are high physical destination focused, on their point B. They only have 3 or 4 days, so they have to get to the lake, the peak or whatever. I guess I’m no different on the face of it; I do have a prospective point B. But for me that is just the framework within which my idiosyncratic transformational goals unfold. Physical space, geography and logistics demand a sense of enter and of exit but this is not then ipso facto, the prime reason for my hike

People ask where you are going because there is a sense that we are all members of a community, that we have some camaraderie in common, that all are equal members on the trail. There’s an opening here and asking where you’re going is an innocuous start to an engagement. You’d think a simple “hi” or “hello” would do. You go to the trail and all of a sudden you are in this face-to-face community of which you are a default member. An assumption gets made that what you’re doing is open to public discussion. All hikers are some kind of fictive kin. The whole endeavor does have a bit more authenticity than just walking down the street. “Where are you going?” is the intro question, you get to ask it. It’s the “how you doing?”, it opens, but also limits the context.  Other ones are: “Beautiful day! Excellent weather! Great day! To which you must respond in some way: “why yes, it is a great day!” And on you go, one more formalized greeting bites the dust.

You can tell different hikers by their gear. The thru-hikers have barely anything while other guys have tons. You can pretty much tell what people are doing just by looking at them. It’s not necessary to ask a thru-hiker where they are going because you already know. For back packers there are only so many basic looks you can have anyway. Each look telegraphs the type: rich, new at it, old pro, new high tekkie, really old guys, hunters, locals, hard charging yuppies etc. People come at this activity from all walks of life, from all different presumptions, and so really what you end up seeing is about the same as you would see anywhere. The gear is like one big fancy costume that hikers show up in; any comments about it seem to be fair game. I would imagine that all, in their own ways, are looking to drop the humdrum consciousness… Every now and again one hiker will transcend the gear and just be really cool no matter.

If this wilderness hiking is maybe a quest for solitude, a chance for cleansing of the soul, where you’re going has nothing to do with it, quantifying it is not the point.

“Where are you going?” The ubiquitous question. Transformational hiking goes well beyond this. In the anonymity of modern society, you just walk by, never say anything. Ask a stranger on the street where they are going and they will call the cops. Out of an ocean of pro forma trail greetings, I am hoping for the transformational conversation, somebody to show me something new; I’m bored with pro forma, rote small talk. I remember and respect the people who stand out from the crowd with something to say beyond the usual.  

This temporary, trail-based, authentic, face-to-face community creates expectations. I have the expectation of something more than the automatic pilot of the city yet you then get a new automatic with new stereotyped questions and context. The freedom to speak (as we are fictive kin) rather than anonymously pass by opens the door to a host of personal channels and entanglements. The initial challenge is then: who is going to set the channel? By what magic is it that conversation gets set here or there? Am I obligated to stay tuned or can I refuse to engage? Do I switch to my station? Frequently I find an artful way to change the subject from where I am going. Sometimes I get stuck with someone else’s automatic pilot and have to suffer them until we leave.

The hiking community is a construct, not a functioning membership with any responsibility, all are still autonomous, individually oriented, with many purposes yet also with the same fundamental idea, to find inspiration in the solitude of wilderness. If it’s about where you are going in physical space, a destination, then that is not focusing on the transformational aspects, the inspirational potential. Yes, the context is fundamentally point A to point B but the real point is not linear, it’s what you find along the way. Where I am going is to a state of mind, to a feeling, to cleanse and strip away the bullshit, and that happens every step of the way. I can’t get there at some predestined location, as the goal is not a point in space. The location is always interior. The physical environment is just a prop, a stage. The stage of wilderness is special because it is fundamentally uncivilized, offers a context to really hit the reset button.

I’m going wherever I happen to be at the time; it’s the immersion and opportunity for wonder and contemplation that I value. Contemplate. Con = with, temp/ tiempo/ temporal = time, it’s the reflection you can do with time on your hands; with time, the moments can float by in new ways; it’s kind of like a natural high, areas of the brain get opened up and it feels good. It’s refreshing. A long distance hike gives you precisely that, built in, plenty of time; yet somehow you get thrown in with lots of others who are seeing it as a goal activity, as an athletic event. But you don’t get the time as a transformational potential if time is only for as long as you can carry the food, if time is all about gaining point B.

We buy time when we are out, the time to be touched and immersed in nature, in an order where we are fundamentally not in control; closer to natural orders from which we spring, farther from society’s and civilization’s memes, crosscurrents that run over us roughshod, in an onslaught of media and social static. We buy time for contemplation by immersion in nature, that’s the ultimate destination, one step is as good as any other; any step holds the potential for transformation, you don’t know which it will be, let the game come to you, you can’t force it; no wrong notes; it’s an open-ended process, a cultivated style that leads to what two, non-material, non-mainstream scripted people value. Why do (we) value this way? (We) saw the folly of chasing superficial things, and we came of age at a time when general material prosperity allowed us to be comfortable without a lot of effort, when counter-culture narratives filled a void of 1950s meaninglessness and the world seemed wide open to do whatever we wanted to do.

Not having children or siblings, for me has opened up endless uninterrupted time to pursue my interests. It’s an uncluttered world, of my own making, on top of the bourgeois head start I got, and the unwitting steering by my parents into a counter-culture narrative; I’ve managed to avoid many traps. People with kids are occupied with them for 20 years straight and then thinking about them lots after that. Only the rich can pursue their own interests and have kids, otherwise your time is spoken for.

There’s no altruism or real interest in knowing where somebody is going; it’s just a play to be able to say where you are going. “Where are you going?” It’s an attempt to capture, frame and set the context. It’s a social transaction that asks for reciprocity. What channel will we be on? Setting the channel of a conversation is a primary unconscious action. As I said, I try to deftly switch the channel, to deflect the question.

“Going to…”, “Going.” The Canterbury Tales, the adventure of going to see the Grateful Dead; it’s something to focus on, a project that manifests as an adventure in physical space where the getting there is part of the fun; with Canterbury and the Dead, the journey along the way is at least as fun and important as the final destination; that’s the point of that style…it’s a magic bus, the Ken Kesey platform. Going is a verb, implying action. The proper question should be “how are you going?”

It seems to be too much to expect that people would just Be. The cultivated, professional hobos and long distance hikers don’t come off with a lot of dumb comments; they are comfortable in their skin and take in the rich thickness of the moment wherever they are; it is not novel for them to be out in the woods for months at a time. Newbies are struck by the novelty of it, need to talk about those aspects, 95% of the people we meet are “where are you going” types. Perhaps there is a level of mentoring with the newbies that has to be suffered through; you’ve got to say the same things to them over and over again, they come like waves, always more novices; and so they force me to have to go to the beginners level over and again; like with SCA students, teach the same skills every year, same learning curve and only a small percent really step up to it, the others need to be herded and hassled, managed. As Ken Kesey said, “there’s a lot more dumb people than smart people, we ain’t many.”

Well, the fact is, I have never been going anywhere; a startling insight. I’ve been content to just let the river flow, let the game come to me; I’m not going anywhere because I’m already there; I’ve got enough natural talent to keep myself amused. I always have a project; I have many interests; I didn’t buy the mainstream script of pursuit of material success or think of finding any success for that matter, I don’t look for public quantification; I’m really fine just as I am. I’m a genuine amateur; I love my private pursuits. I really boxed myself into a highly idealistic, impractical type of life! Impractical in the sense that I didn’t have consistent role modeling to steer me towards how to pursue excellence in my chosen style. I may not have gone for it anyway, my nature may be just what it is, independent, low key. Hard to say, things seem to be coming my way now.  

I’m a spiritual intellectual. I don’t find too many on my same channel. Kim is a mystical, sophisticated country bumpkin. We’re both outliers.

As a kid I got the Benjamin Spock upbringing. My friends the Boeckle boys had a traditional upbringing. Traditionally children were seen to be born with the character they had, there was no big effort to mold them. Traditionally raised kids are expected to behave in the house but are unsupervised otherwise. My upbringing labored under the premise that I was a blank slate to be filled with enriching experience, to be molded as if clay. One such enriching experience: Quaker Farm and Wilderness Camps where I always admired the authenticity of the people, and I couldn’t believe the shallowness of my middle class suburban life in comparison; I had to get away. I couldn’t grow up fast enough! As a kid I read tons of books on Indians, I saw white man’s history as shameful, I yearned for membership in a traditional culture, but there was nowhere to go, I was sheep herded, hamstrung and fogged by drugs and addictions; it’s taken me years to grow into my own skin and sort through my strong, formative impressions. Now, this hiking is just top quality! All the pieces seem to be coming together.

It’s worthwhile to say that this sort of lifestyle may not have been viable without the general prosperity of the US during the majority of my lifetime. So much affluence everywhere, and me growing up comfortably middle class, there was no pressure; everything was taken care of, no hunger, no pain or suffering from lack of stuff. I have been able to cultivate a lifestyle of a scavenger, taking scraps from the whale shark of our bloated economy. I dumpster dive, I make a little money go a long way, glean food from trees beside the road, shop at thrift stores, no new clothes, keep the overhead low, no dogs, no kids, no mortgage, and thus I open up clear sailing space to indulge my endless curiosity about life, culture, history, science, weather, hiking, anything really. It’s a specialized niche, sort of like a jackal or coyote, not dependent on making the big kill yourself. It’s what you can do when you decide to value inner stuff over outer stuff.

Unlike actual property ownership, a wilderness experience affords the opportunity to privately, interiorly own everything. You can own the qualities of it free, free out of a public context. It’s like getting sea shells off the beach, wow, this beauty is really just lying here for me to experience and own?! You may stake a claim to a campsite, take in the vast spaces, steward it in the ways your ethics lead; it’s wide open for ownership in every aspect of every day. Yet you must deal with all different types of users that are seeking the same public place, you don’t get full ownership, there is interference from strangers expecting a face-to-face interaction, all on their own peculiar automatic pilots, for their own peculiar reasons. So even though you are all the same, the small differences are sometimes harder to take than the big ones.

What is the thesis of your hike? That is going to set the tone. Not necessarily the goal, but the thesis. The reason we are here is: why are we doing this?  The particulars of someone’s hike depend on the paradigm and thesis. How to be conscious of different theses? Can we hold the apparent truth of our own thesis at the same time as being conscious of other theses?   

One thesis: the 1950s open road metaphor, the trail is the last frontier for hobos, for 2012 titanium hobos who can’t afford to be world travelers.

Our thesis: let the game come to you, be trail hobos, the journey is what it’s all about, not 25 miles a day, look for transformation, contemplation, observe, let the experience sink in, clear out the domestic techno bullshit/ turn off the inner dialogue/ tune in to the surroundings. I can’t exactly speak for Kim, but she concurs on a lot of this. She has her own take, her own journey that led her here.

If the “goal” is immersion and transformation, a meditative state, then we made it; it’s not about Point B itself in physical space. The quiet here seeps in; I become able to participate in the quiet, still my mind, my internal dialogue is cut way down, less interference waves from other people, we camp off the trail, just being, observing: ants, trees, roots, leaves, every little thing fresh, open, time, wide open.  This is the “clearing out”, the house cleaning of the mind and heart, the regaining of inner purity, the establishment of a fresh vantage with which you return to society, this is the boon with which and from which you see everything anew. This type of freshening up is also gained through aging; developmentally you arrive at new perspectives that make the same old lay of the land appear new and exciting/ different/ novel, intriguing, once again. You see the same old stuff in a surprising new way. The wilderness renews you; you still yourself by tuning into the immense quiet dynamism of nature. You carve away the valleys of your soul as a glacier would; leaving exposed a progressively larger and more impressive landscape of the mind and heart. This is precisely “where I am going”. Kim observes that some folks may go the opposite direction in life and chip away at progressively smaller things, until maybe there is nothing left, same result? I can only describe my own inner landscape when it comes to saying where I’m going. I’m heading to larger inner space. 

The whole dynamic of expectations, doubts, judgments, all the inner dialogue revolving around people gets stilled more and more. Everything you experience is foreign to that: trees, birds, bugs, sky, stars, dawn and dusk, mountains, snow, these are all fundamentally different/ non-psycho-social, and you come more into those spaces vs. human spaces.

On the trail everyone wants to know where you’re going. In town no one cares. If you ask a stranger where they are going they will think you’re crazy. Out in civilization people walk and drive by as if you do not exist, leave you on the side of the road, no contact, fear, no sense of belonging to the same community. I don’t like the anonymity of civilized life yet I also don’t like people asking where I’m going on the trail. But to the woods I am not going to find any sort of salvation for social anonymity and alienation. Maybe I am predisposed to advanced alone time in nature because modern society has already pre-alienated me and sent me looking inward for all my answers.

As a hike goes on for months, the initial hurdles are taken and more patience is mustered for the naïve questions of passers by. I just want the chance for a clear ocean ahead, time to sail where I may and when I’m ready to engage I will. And I hope someone with something to say will try me on for size.

Maps: you find what you’re looking for, that is to say, you get what you think you’re going to get, to a hammer the whole world looks like nails. The map itself is not equal to the territory and so it is easy enough to fool yourself that you have an objective take on the lay of the land; you may not.

What you find is delimited by what you think is there a priori; in the evolution of maps, Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado and the Spanish explorers, they found evidence on the ground to support their own myths; they found Quivira, Cibola, the Seven Cities of Gold, the Fountain of Youth, islands of Amazons. But these places were only there in their minds, not in fact. This was the case then and probably is now. You find what you’re looking for, as the map, the cognitive overlay that you have, is identified to be equivalent to the land. But the map is not the territory. The symbols used to conjure up the landscape are not the landscape itself. Stated another way this is the Uncertainty Principle, your equipment, your map, interferes with the phenomena, alters it, you can never get a clean, unbiased look. Better to look at your biases first, are you only finding preconceived arrangements? Another way of saying it is that if you look for stuff only under the street light, sure you will find stuff, but what about everything out in the shadows?

On Google maps, on satellite maps there is an island in the Coral Sea that doesn’t exist. Fool-proof modern accuracy is a myth.

From the Age of Exploration to the satellite era, you still find your own myths; the maps contain the myth, not the objective reality. It is only hubris and arrogance to think that our current state of knowledge is perfect. There is no good reason to think that just because we think we have cartography down, that there can be no misconceptions.

Kim and I use paper maps, no GPS, no smart phone, no downloaded this or that. Kim’s array of paper maps of all different scales means we have a wider net; the new PCT paper maps focus narrowly on the just the trail itself, don’t give a sense of surroundings, no context. The mass delivery of the same map makes for a current homogenous group of users, marketed, internet-based, Backpacker Magazine reading, garbage in/ garbage out.

Ipso facto it becomes about the gear for the new mass mapped approach. It’s part of a mass, market gestalt construction. Yet people aren’t wanting to come to wilderness because of technology, the impulse is deeper than that.  But you do see a lot of people who are fooled, who are in for superficial reasons. Regardless of tech level people have always come to the wilds. Bottom line for all of this, the map is not the territory; bear spray is not brains in a bottle, a cell phone does not equal instant rescue. Judgment still has to be exercised no matter what the map, gear or tech on board.

And now this: Google Trekker, a Google Street View for the trail; this calls more people, popularizes the wilderness, the experience progressively loses the sense of being a challenge, a place separate from technology, a wild place; all the tech reduces the sense of wilderness, domesticates it, popularizes it, brings hordes of bozos, ruins it actually; the point is to be inspired by that which is fundamentally not under your control, not to try and control it more and more. Tech dependence is creeping in and supplanting actual experience and skills. First Back Packer magazine, then National Geographic “The Last 50 Great Places”, now Google Trekker. This isn’t even a map, it’s a movie, a photograph, accurate yes, but the hiker is still left to conceive of wild as something under control, as entertainment. Cell phones have created more safety issues, too many calls to SAR for a sore back, the tech brings out a class of user who does not understand ethics, is not there for inner reasons, goes because of the tech; people go because they bought the gear, looks good on paper... It’s not only back in civilization that you see people glued to their little boxes. Kim and I feel that a wilderness experience demands that we take some risk, to actually go beyond contact, to put ourselves in a place where wits, experience and knowledge will carry us through.

Hike your own hike, that’s all OK when people abide the by same general rules. Hike your own hike can’t be OK when the use is concentrated to the 1% ers, when there is not a common behavior, some can’t take the most, or use the hardest and say “hike your own hike” as they abuse the resources for the rest. This might hold true for off-trail hiking that really tears up the soils and plants. It may not be OK for more and more people seeking solitude, to over-trample the last wild places. Austerity is probably the new cure, limit the use for the masses because the few have abused resources, we’ll need more permits, have use funneled into established camps, horse use especially… but this punishes the mass for the abuse of the few, this is the irony of rules in general.

This brings up the fallacy of individual freedom in a crowded world. There are precious few instances where someone’s action does not cause harm to something. Instead of looking for how far we can push our freedom envelope, what we need is to try and be more cognizant of the consequences of our actions, take a longer-term view than just our own pleasure and happiness.

If I don’t want to be judged by other hikers I can’t judge them. Look at Fred play his subconscious Christian meme! But it’s true, all I’m doing here is switching the tables; I make it a one-way street; I control what I can, make it easier on myself, I withhold judgment, and that causes me less static. But I have to judge at the same time, as by comparing, I arrive at what I think moral and ethical behavior is.

8/17

The day before we went on this hike: there was a big storm, lots of damage to the trail with debris flows, flooding; big needle cast, this was a heavy erosion event, a big alluvial deposition event; smooth inclines were fissured heavily, lots of soil was carried off, less material available for life in the short run. On high elevation rocky exposures life is barely hanging on anyway, such a big loss of soil represents a set back of resources that could take 1000s of years to recover from. In general however, high Sierra soil seems to be primarily mineral soil anyway. Trees make their own detritus; leaves and needles, bark, cones all fall and make a thin covering of duff; perhaps the soil serves mostly as an anchoring and water catchment medium, and it has enough nutrients just as mineral soil. The storm was centered around the Carson Pass area south to Ebbetts Pass.

8/18/12

First day. Michael and MaryAnn pick us up and drive us to Carson Pass. We stopped at a Central Valley fruit and vegetable stand with big gourds. Went to a McDonalds in Jackson. Up to 8,800’ and then four miles plus to a camp spot along a creek in the Mokelumne Wilderness. The snowfields from last year are gone; it is dry and dusty.

After four big long distance hikes we have our routine and fall right back in. Every time is a shorter adjustment. Living out of our packs is rote, everything finds its place, we each have our chores, we know there is inspirational gravy to get and we look forward to it. It’s just a matter of time.

It rained some; it may rain more. The clouds thickening at 4:PM. Tree identification is my new fun project. I’m ready with a small amount of printed material to help me.

The word wilderness sounds impressive. In reality sometimes it is hard to tell why some area is and another is not. Many times you see use that you just wouldn’t expect, particularly cattle grazing and road access.

8/19

Up at dawn, stars out, the sky was alternately overcast and clear during the night. My back had sharp pains in the night, not much room to move ergonomically in our small tent, no rolling out of bed, on the ground there is no where to roll to. Kim has a headache still, maybe a mild altitude symptom. With the soft hiss of creek I slept very well, nice to wake up amongst trees and natural objects. I’m focused on enjoying Mokelumne, enjoying the brief time we have to be outside and away.

8/20

I had a lot of work before this hike, painting one whole house interior, good for paying for the hike, bad for exercise regimen, as I don’t exercise if I am working. Work is hard enough but not aerobic. This hard break-in is tough! Starting at 8,800’ from sea level gives mild altitude issues and headache but we’ve been so tired the sleeplessness part has not been a problem. We got to a lake about one mile south of Blue Lake Rd., it’s a private space, not many people out. We met some horse users from the Great Basin side of the Sierra. I said I was a mule whisperer and one woman came right back with “I have a donkey, so that makes me an ass whisperer”.

She also commented on how big our packs looked. This is annoying. All of a sudden every stranger is free to speak and not just pass by anonymously.  Would anyone say “wow your nose is huge!”? As you pass by, your style, the purpose of your hike is worn by your gear and so I guess is fair game for superficial comments. I do this as well, although my comments are more like “nice green pack!”

Hiking or doing whatever, people are all the same yet are marked by slight differences. In general people have a lot more in common than not but the differences sure are made much of.

You have the ultra-light people, gear heads bristling with gadgets, the heavier people on shorter runs, mountaineers, off trail folks, base campers, week-enders, horse users, hunters, new to the trail, old hands, all of these differences are subtly signaled by gear and appearance, and by casual comments made. People try to divine other’s purposes, or they assume their own purpose generalizes to all, it’s a feeling out of who it might be you are be passing by in the middle of nowhere. Face to face on the same trail, it’s more difficult to just walk by and not interact but when you have some miles to knock off, you can’t chat with them all. By the luck of the draw you get a bozo or a quality interaction. Generally Kim is open to any humanity. Fred does not suffer fools gladly. Yet sometimes Kim rips their head off and Fred is more tolerant. Go figure, when trying to delineate the way things are, the water can get muddy for a clear, unambiguous generalization. We are both observers and analyzers of life, humanity and experience, with many ideas and opinions. Sometimes these ideas combine in a great creative fugue where we are in tune and making music, other times the ideas are like sandpaper grating each other with every word.  This is the combustible, volatile chemistry of the spiritual intellectual and the mystical, sophisticated country bumpkin.

It’s like Fall in the Sierra, while still summer in Sonoma. It’s a dry year. Less lingering snow pack in the up here in the Sierra, things dry out earlier, dustier, creeks empty. The Pleiades and Orion come up about 4:30AM. Up in the dark I see my breath, make coffee. I dreamt I saw my grandfather Alfy. He was leaving me off at the bus. I gave him a big hug and said “I love you Alfy”. He’s been dead 35 plus years now. I remember him putting me to bed with hunting and farm life stories when I was a lad. The generations pass by; by the time I’m an adult capable of probing Alfy’s person and life, he’s long gone; in my youth there was no time to focus on him. I had other fish to fry. What was so urgent I had to do then? It sure doesn’t seem important now compared to Alfy.

Kim has a Quaker moment: theology is not spirituality, theology gives us a way to talk about spirituality but it is not the experience/ capacity itself. Fred’s spin: we need language and reason to communicate about it, to say anything about spirit, it has to go to symbolic level otherwise we are simply animals and not human. A past Quaker moment of Kims: there is no good or evil in nature, God is for nature, Jesus is for the city.  We call for a Quaker moment, when we want to say something of personal import. Then the other person then has to listen and not comment until later.

Spirit is a fun word. It has the connotation of wind, of breath, of something that moves yet is unseen. Respiration, inspire, aspire, expire, spires of a church reaching towards the unknown. It’s like life itself, an animating quality that you can’t quite put your finger on. Yes it’s there moving us and when still, it is gone.

8/21

Up early yesterday, did a quick seven mile pull to Raymond Lake with good views down Pleasant Valley towards Markleeville and off into the Great Basin, Artesia Lake, Gardnerville, nice views back towards Carson Pass. The Great Basin is a huge sink where no water drains to the ocean. The Basin and Range geologic province is concurrent with but much larger than the Great Basin. Basin and Range refers to an area in the southwest US where the earth’s crust has been stretched on an east-west axis; this caused faulting where blocks of crust fell in, creating north-south trending valleys because of the stretching. The crust in the Basin and Range is thinner by about a mile.

The sun is unrelenting, intense, from dawn to dusk. The wind howled like a freight train all night, good that we didn’t stay on that ridge that had nice views but no flat spots, too windy even then, no wind breaks. Wind unsettles the spirit. Nice lichens on the rocks, bright orange and yellow, green. We break into a juniper wonderland, trees hanging on by a strip of bark, bonsai, juniper magic. Raymond Lake to Ebbetts Pass is the juniper zone in the Mokelumne. It’s an easy one day walk from Ebbetts Pass of around seven miles right, to the thick of it.

We staged our camp just above the fun juniper zone, to be able to go through in the morning, take our time and soak it in. Below our camp Pennsylvania Creek is still pushing a lot of sediment four days after the big storm, barely drinkable, lots of floaties and debris. Yet the water meets the basic qualification: it is wet.

We stopped for a number of hours to explore the volcanic/juniper area, I loved it, felt no pain on the rubbly steep mountainsides, had a surge of young, exploring energy. I poked into secret nooks and crannies, discovered hidden juniper places. This was top notch!

Got to Ebbetts Pass and found the same cooler left by Meadow Mary, the same note left by a ranger to not leave a cooler full of food in bear habitat; nevertheless we enjoy the sweets, fruit etc, we meet Fester who gives me some “lemon twister” pot, we meet a woman who comes a little onto the PCT from the parking area, because she read the latest book by hiker woman. The book has brought 500 or more new thru-hikers this year and lots of buzz. The parking lot woman seems thrilled to meet actual PCT hikers, maybe the magic will rub off… “Are you thru hikers?!?” We tell her to get a pack and go for it.

We cross the pass and go on a few miles to a ledge with a great view. Fester mentioned escaping wilderness cattle and we hear the bells below. Wilderness means different things depending on the agency managing the land; ranching allotments and permits are apparently grandfathered to families. This means that as long as the family wants to ranch, that wilderness will have cows. You can be in “wilderness” yet be surrounded by cattle. This is similar to how the “organic” label is manipulated by politicians and farmers.

8/22

Ledge Camp. Had to get up at 1:30 AM and put the rain fly on the tent, a good sprinkle interrupted our star gazing night. The cowbells were ringing all night, quaint but not wild. Noble Creek sounds down in the valley as the dawn comes on; we were horizontal for twelve hours; sore from my juniper explorations yesterday. Weather is unsettled. As the day progressed there looked to be substantial cloud build up and good storm potential. We played it safe by not going higher to the 10,000’ pass and then having to go down another seven miles at 3:PM The clouds broke up and it turns out we could have made it. Oh well; when you make a safety call the point is that you are safe. Now, by Eagle Creek, lots of cattle with bells, like La Mesa de Abajo, cattle as a way of life, cowboys, westerns, steak and burger; cattle, our 6000 year domesticate, yes, the land is trampled and thrashed but these ranchers are like my friend Tavo in Chihuahua, just at a bigger scale. There is an authentic basis behind the whole scene, not just the juxtaposition of wilderness seekers and cattle nearby.

In the Carson Iceberg Wilderness there have been at least 100 head of cattle around as we pass through, lots of them. Cattle grazing is a local skill with local culture; it is resource- producing, self-reliant. If all food is delivered by truck out of nowhere, people are left helpless of the skills to feed themselves. These skills and life ways are worth keeping alive; they represent survival, how to get by.

Agrarianism has two common meanings. The first meaning refers to a social philosophy or political philosophy which values rural society as superior to urban society, the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values.[1] It stresses the superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed to the complexity of city life, with its banks and factories. The American Thomas Jefferson was a representative agrarian who built Jeffersonian Democracy around the notion that farmers are “the most valuable citizens” and the truest republicans.[2]

The philosophical roots of agrarianism include European and Chinese philosophers. The Chinese School of Agrarianism was a philosophy that advocated peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism.[3] This influenced European intellectuals like François Quesnay, an avid Confucianist and advocate of China's agrarian policies, forming the French agrarian philosophy of Physiocracy.[4] The Physiocrats, along with the ideas of John Locke and the Romantic Era, formed the basis of modern European and American agrarianism.

Secondly, the term "agrarianism" means political proposals for land redistribution, specifically the distribution of land from the rich to the poor or landless. This terminology is common in many countries, and originated from the "Lex Sempronia Agraria" or "agrarian laws" of Rome in 133 BC, imposed by Tiberius Gracchus, that seized public land (ager publicus) used by the rich and distributed it to the poor.[5] This definition of agrarianism is commonly known as “agrarian reform.”

In societies influenced by Confucianism, the farmer was considered an esteemed productive member of society, whereas merchants who made money were looked down upon. In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, the word identified any land reform movement that sought to redistribute cultivated lands equally. Today, the word has largely shed this radical political meaning. Instead, agrarianism points to a collection of political, philosophical, and literary ideas that together tend to describe farm life in ideal terms^[citation needed^]. Wikipedia

The bells are at once great and annoying, ting tanging, ringing in many tones, setting a background feeling, a soundtrack, sort of like music. The cattle were upstream just out of sight; the bells sounded like some sort of Mickey Hart percussion ensemble getting down to it in an imaginary fiesta or big time ritual, some kind of Babatunde Olatunji wild drum shindig.

There are a few characters that trail aficionados are aware of in general, one is a guy named Billy Goat. He’s sort of famous on the PCT. I have fun play calling him, trying to conjure him up out of the mythical mists of trail lore: “Billy…. Billy Goooooooat”

8/23

We’re still breaking in and the miles are hard sometimes. By avoiding the potential storm yesterday we gained a much-needed break, repaired packs, washed socks, relaxed. Up early now, going to see if we can knock off some miles. We’ve both got snot and stuffy noses, not colds but the result of a dry year and lots of dust everywhere. The trail is pulverized by boots and hooves, established campsites are routinely dusty from over use; we walk along and stir up clouds of dust. You are supposed to camp in established campsites to confine use to particular areas, rather than thrash new areas. Yet to camp in an established spot is to confine our use to terrible dust pits. It’s unhealthy for one thing; many times components of the dust include pulverized horse shit, as the horse use is pretty prevalent.

Kim has another good one: a conversion experience is cross-wired as a catalytic experience. I love how she gets those going.

I see a metaphor in the trees for rich guys and poor guys. In society we have this thing that maybe equality is a good idea, that there should be equality. Do we see that in nature? The lodge pole pine by the lake is big, stout, healthy, has lots of resources. The lodge pole on the rocky slope is stunted, barely hanging on. It’s about access to resources. By the luck of the draw one is fat, the other lean and seer; not all can be by the water. What did they do so that Fate brought one fortune and the other not? Just luck, no intention here; nature is not equitable. What we see as equity and justice, in nature these things are meted out in terms of balance, not equality.

8/24

Dawn breaks from night, the canyon has this pale light, trees still, wild like I remember the Galiuros feeling as a young man; a feeling of clean purity here, with a deep gravitas. In the still quiet is a gem, for a moment, the Sierra, clean, pure, majestic, granite, trees hanging on, the light, the quality of the light… You notice something about the light; it’s an intangible at first, part of the overall impression; as time goes by the subtleties of it reveal themselves; as the mind quiets, you fit more and more into the natural scheme, the expansive Now.

A juniper log among thick lodge pole marks a past ecosystem, a lava flow marks a past volcanic event, the stars frame us in eternity; the signs are here to see. Part of being an amateur is not having everything known and understood, keeping things unnamed keeps it fresh, allows for veneration, mystery, awe.

We meet two to four people a day. Up close we take each other’s measure, some want to compare, others to share. Red Lake Ron and his professorial friend were great. We made a connection, not pro forma babble, a good talk about trees, local issues, nothing said about gear, plans etc. All of a sudden you are in a dynamic conversation with interesting people and it is great; you don’t care if you stand there for a half hour with your pack on; the effect will linger; we digest and talk about fun people for days after.

I start to notice the types of habitat trees are in, the orientation of the slope, the angle, I look for variables: on an east face, steep and rocky, are juniper, lodge pole and western white pine together. Noticing trees and their variables is a key, a way into experiencing nature at a deeper level, it could be birds, ants, whatever, it’s an entrée that opens the whole thing.

We play with trail names, fun names. People have trail names; it’s part of the scene. Some names are given in the moment unplanned, others are self-crafted, some you must ask about, others are so contrived you don’t care to know. For the creative mind there become multiple identities to play with, your regular name is so static, new names so much fun. Thinking of various unflattering names is entertaining as well, a way to pass the time as we walk the miles. The scenery lends itself to fantasies of western movies, motifs of wild, lawless times, of old Mexico, old California, the Gold Rush and so emerge Luger Bartel, Dustboogers Jackson, Captain Fuckburn, Dry Wash Willy, Lakewater Larry, Jefasaurus and other unmentionables.

I started the hike out with a line of jive that I was Marshall Stockburn with his seven deputies and that I was going to bring in Luger Bartel (Kim), that I was going to clean this country up, of people of low moral character. Kim started calling me Fuckburn, with no Marshall even, and so I dropped the whole thing; I just wasn’t limber enough to be called Fuckburn on a regular basis.

Our big, external frame packs are a direct, in your face challenge to the ultra-light scene, which is one of the dominant gear paradigms. If we were out here earlier in the summer we’d be in the thick of ultra-light thru-hikers trying to do the whole Pacific Crest Trail. This would be like, if it was car clubs, subcompacts meeting trucks, all are methods of transportation with a fundamental commonality yet the preference for one or the other results in judgments and stereotypes. Does any of it really suck? Is it necessary for subcompacts to think trucks are hogs? It seems so many times that people’s raison d’etre involves a negative comparison.

Who is on the trail with what gear is dependent on the time of season. The thru-hikers are mostly ultra-light but after they are gone, many of the people you see are much heavier, have lots more gear whether with an internal or external frame pack. What gear you have then, reflects the purpose of your hike. For any hiker there is a danger of making it all about stuff and gear; the irony of ultra-light is that by deciding to do with less stuff it becomes even more about stuff. In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold (1) bemoans an increasing focus on gadgetry at the expense of immersion in nature. Too high a focus on gear amounts to bringing home and domesticity along with you, missing the whole point of being out there.

The focus on gear coincided with the ramping up of American industrial production and its concomitant consumerism. People got sold stuff out of sheer hype, with pressure to buy goods just because they are there, not because they are actually needed. And so, 1850’s on, the excess wealth of all economic classes got channeled into an increasing culture and economy of conspicuous consumption, of which outdoors gear is just one small part. Generally, technology and industrial production resulted in more material well-being, better health, longer life, more money. As agriculture became industrialized the small family farm was displaced, people moved to the city. People got more and more separated from nature, and then to get back, they needed all the toys. Outdoor gear then, becomes a symbol of desire to reunite with an authentic natural world, a panacea for the alienation of modern humanity.

I can see that my own thoughts and trajectory with the outdoors owes a big part to Leopold and others who defined the territory, a territory of intellectual/ spiritual/ natural awareness. Part of this awareness can only be gained through a quest of trying to know nature on its own terms, by escaping the domestic world. The Romantic/ Transcendentalist thesis: the domestic sphere of life is dull and predictable whereas nature is wild and pure, the real deal. This scheme makes modern people out to be somehow fake, and I think this is true; they are fake, they are domestic, they have lost basic survival skills, how to procure food from the land, how to handle oneself outside. Take away the house, take away the car, phone, Safeway, and your average modern citizen is completely fucked. There are no skills left that don’t depend on industrialized society. Joe Suburbia has no idea of how to farm, herd, hunt, butcher or shit outside even.

OK, people have always lived outside; we are animals after all, so how do we get so separated from nature that we ended up with terms like civilization, domestication, agrarian, nature and wilderness? That we have these terms shows clearly that there is a conceptual divide between what we control and don’t control. As our level of technological control over nature increased over the millennia, we came to rely more and more on technology itself; with each advance we lost more primary resource producing skills and became more dependent on technology that took us farther and farther from our birthplace in wild nature. 

A long hike like ours does not utilize or bring these kinds of skills back, but it does situate us outside, in more or less wild nature for long periods of time where we mimic the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle. A lifetime of backpacking, of being outdoors for a week or for months at a time, does develop a certain outdoors skill set. We get a techno break; we enter a world fundamentally out of our control; we need to use primary survival skills to remain comfortable and safe. Flexibility and attitude are the best skills, surrender, be nimble, let the game come to us. Even so, gear like a Bic lighter or a water-proof tent makes life incredibly easier than if we were really taking it on nature’s terms.

What this little discussion does really is bring up the whole history of technology as relative to humanity’s separation from nature. Are we only natural if using stone tools and animals skins or is metal and plastic essentially the same type of thing? Are the Sears Tower and a tipi essentially the same? Maybe the real unnatural part of humanity is that here you have this animal with no teeth or claws worth a damn and then they control the whole world with their brains, reflective consciousness and smarts. As a species, we are way out of proportion somehow.

To put it on a nutshell, to give a big sweeping view, here’s a brief history of our separation from nature:

Pre-civilization we were in the thick of it and up to 35,000 years ago we were pretty much just another animal. At 35,000 years ago we make the great leap forward, gain a modern level of culture, technology takes some significant advances, still very simple yet enough to start our first forays into causing mass extinctions of other animals. 10,000 years ago begins civilization; agriculture, domestication, metallurgy, hierarchical society, increasing standards of living, a move to sedentary, urban landscapes, an increasing control of and alienation from nature. Culture becomes increasingly complex: Egypt, Greek, Chinese, Romans. The Renaissance opens secularity and human potential. The individual and humanism are unleashed from a mythical and religious stasis. Then comes the Enlightenment, rationalism, , the Age of Exploration, colonialism, people glory in their ability to figure out the world on their own. Critical rational mass is achieved and we have the Industrial Revolution, mass production, factories, electro chemical advances, fossil fuels. Romanticism was a reaction to too much logic, against rationalizing of nature. Romanticism sought the authentic, intuitive, esthetic, emotional side of life, glorified a heroic individual escape from industrialization. Romanticism elevated the creative individual to being the nexus of critical authority (not community). The transcendentalists; derived from Romantics, represent a reaction to technology, modernization and industrialization. Muir, Thoreau, Emerson, Leopold, Abbey, society as corrupt, defiled, the individual is pure, the individual (not a sheep) makes a mystical connection with nature. Environmentalism grows out of transcendentalism, man as member, not conqueror of nature, leads us up to today, a move back towards to nature. Edward O. Wilson, a science-based environmental ethic, taking into account evolutionary biology/ evolutionary psychology; we are inextricably of nature, not apart, we need to take a longer-term, less parochial view than the short-term thinking for which we are hard-wired.

Interesting that the nexus of individual command is arrived at through transcendentalism and libertarianism. It’s not surprising I guess that the individual thread is followed in various ways. In a world full of spurious culture, the last fallback position is that of the individual. In a world devoid of traditional culture, it is left to the individual to create the whole world from themself. This seems to me to be the logical extension of a long-coming individual trajectory, of individual volition breaking free of social constraint. Today we have a world where community action is critical to solving massive common problems but culturally we have arrived at a space where the individual is predominant; gaining the type of cooperation we need is socially impossible in 2012, like herding cats. The upshot of this little insight: group-based solutions are equally forestalled by both environmentalists and libertarians.  

It’s also interesting that civilization involves a coming in to an urban core, to produce society as we know it, yet rural guys today act as if the city is totally no good and unnecessary. The urban/ rural divide is culturally huge but technologically both these types of people are in the same boat, dependent on the same means of economic production. The fact is, take away civilization and rural guys would be busted back to square one, maybe not what they are after…

We cross a pass and find a nice shady, wind break nook amongst a white bark pine thicket. We settle in, get situated and I get to do a day hike up into the Stanislaus Peak area, where glaciers lived; they are gone now but their mark is everywhere.

On this day hike my tree project is realized. I deliberately meander up towards the alpine tundra and soak in the biome. All I’m here to do is look and soak it in. As I gain elevation the trees magically shrink and adopt weird, crazy shapes. This shrinking and crazy shaping is called krummholz or twisted wood. Mountain Hemlock goes up into this krummholz zone. The white bark pine forest starts to dwarf and is very thick, nearly impenetrable, virtually impassable, it gives way to white bark pine shrubs and mat and then to long expanses of nothing but rock, rubble, small plants and lichens hanging on. I coin a term: the krummholz spectrum, trees go from big and stout to matted low shrubs; the taller ones in clumps give great shade; these clumps are made by birds; the Clark’s nutcracker stashes seeds in a group and voilà, a clump of trees. Directional exposure affects the elevation of tree line, i.e. tree line is higher on the southern exposure than the northern.  The condition of the substrate makes it more or less likely for trees to grow; they don’t grow in steep, high elevation gullies, the seedlings get washed away, covered by snow. They grow on areas above and between the drains. Amazing how they can hang on growing out of pure rock, rubble and mineral soil. I have a great walk marveling at this place in the high Sierra. I see Kim way below, safe and tucked in, in our camp.

8/25

Expansive quiet. Vast quiet. Still, silent, rock, sky, time, life, eternity. The breeze of the wind rustles; that’s all you hear, wind against the silence. The watchers: trees bearing witness, hewn, rough, sculpted by the power of the subalpine seasons. It’s a privilege to be here and pass through; it’s rare; it’s profoundly inhuman. The tenacity of life in extreme conditions causes me to feel awe and veneration. This is crème de la barren I like to say, Pinacate, the great Altar desert, the high Sierra, a sparse elegance; it gets to me in ways that provoke wonder. I guess the plan is working, I’m opening up to and being inspired by nature!

Buddhism taps into unmasking, deconstructing.  By using reason to see the thought world, the object is to be conscious of context, to see how paradigms shape and define, how the mind goes along with it. The map is not the territory. The thought world is fundamentally illusory anyway, with no people it doesn’t exist, you won’t find culture anywhere as a material object. It only exists between minds.

As a religion Buddhism is cool because it does incorporate the capacity to reason. This is a leg up on pure faith, which is too stilted, insisting the fantastic rules all. A persistent barb thrown by those of the religious bent: scientific truths are equal to any other thought illusion; “it’s all a matter of faith anyway.” It could be. Yet to deny our reason, to deny some regularity to the workings of the world would be to take an Alice in Wonderland perspective. This regularity makes for the ability to predict outcomes, for generalities, truths as to how things work. I maintain that faith has nothing to do with physical laws, chemistry, biology, geology etc, these things exist independent of minds and culture as eternal processes that move, that exist, that I see in motion here in the mountains.

It’s at once fantastic, magic, mystical, rational and regular, shoot, this is the full palette I’m trying to wrap around, what a project! And as I seek to grasp the palette, the colors and textures, I wonder, am I the artist or do I merely intuit some greater artist? Is it both? Am I just on a spectrum of life, consciousness, matter and time, and somehow I get to be conscious of it for a brief moment. What a treat.

8/26

Made it off Sonora Pass down to Kennedy Meadows and up into the Emigrant Wilderness in decent enough time, up to the PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric (2), Relief Reservoir where some immigrants got stuck and some people from Sonora, CA went out and helped. At Kennedy Meadows we were down in the lower montane forest zone with Jeffrey pines, Incense cedar, sugar pine, big cottonwood, on the river bottom of the Middle Fork of the Stanislaus River. We now find ourselves in a fir transition zone back to the high country. A 5’ thick lodge pole pine stands right near our camp.

It’s nice to ascend through the different forest zones, until it all gives way to an open sparseness, up to tree line, alpine tundra and then a seemingly inorganic zone where rock reigns supreme. The higher up you get the more it is like church, worshipping nature in the high, barren strongholds closer to the mysteries, less interference from people, more possible for a direct connection. This would make me a mystic, to even think I could get to it myself vs. through a preordained pattern.

Kim is from a big family. She has lots of crosscurrents to deal with. She sometimes gets family tapes running, mother, sister, brother, this, that, brother’s and father’s early death, divorce, tragedy. As an only child I exist in a space of non-sibling conflict. My world was never complicated by any of the stuff Kim had to deal with. I was sent away from home at age 15, to boarding school, before that, sleep away camp for 4 years every summer. I’ve been given the space to be free, to focus on only my own stuff. What I may lack in social, family connectivity, has been made up for with near total individual freedom, to be the architect of my own private world.

At our camp spot by the reservoir we notice mountain mahogany dwarves, succulents, juniper mixed with cedar and some long needle pines, there’s a general deserty feel, plants hanging onto marginal niches, patches of scattered Manzanita chaparral on open slopes. I see a solidified, fossil volcanic ash flow that has picked up big round river cobbles although no river is present now. Here I am looking at stuff that transpired in the unimaginable past with dinosaurs or some shit. It’s real; it’s knowable, datable and fantastic all at the same time. The old ash flow speaks of vast time, of a deep context here on earth. This stage has seen many acts.

Out here when you go to piss there isn’t always a car coming or even anybody anywhere. How nice! Being interrupted peeing is a function of overpopulation, congestion, you can’t go anywhere in town without somebody always coming along. I use no toilet paper at all while on the trail. There are no toilets anyway so why even call it toilet paper? People say “I’m going to go to the bathroom”, an auto-euphemism to avoid any explicit reference to excrement or urine, too much information eh!?  Well shit, out here shit is a legitimate topic; it’s refreshing to bring to light cultural shadows about bodies and what they are like, how they work etc. If you have a good, bad, big, little, or pasty shit, why not say it? The divination of shit is an age-old topic. For wiping your ass, sage is a nice material, fragrant, not too rough; mildly abrasive; sage wipes are OK. Spanish moss is good for the same reasons. Smooth river and stream rocks are the best, slighty wetted for better cleaning; smooth sticks are fine, sticks with prickly bark are not; hot lava rock wipes will do in a pinch, whatever it takes. I choose not to have to deal with toilet paper trash or to risk burning it. I don’t feel OK about burying it as TP is unsightly and too much of it is already around left by careless hikers. I bring fiber capsules to help form good shits, otherwise the lack of fresh vegetables and fruit in my trail diet results in persistent monkey butt. Fiber plus what amounts to an all day workout carrying heavy enough weight, and drinking lots of water, adds up bowels that are conditioned to work well.

A fun bilingual euphemism. “Voy a mi arbolito.” Voy = I’m going, a mi = to my, arbolito = little tree. The double meaning is that it can also sound like Voy a miar bolito. Miar meaning to piss. Voy a mi arbolito. Very witty.

I’m starting to get the lungs for it here, getting in shape, long uphill pulls without stopping. Like a sled dog I enjoy the pull.

8/27

White granite peaks catch the early light, shine bright in the rarified air, the sight of it brings a feel of unity, of identification with nature; this must have given man the idea of church spires; if there is magic, it is there up on high, reaching closer to the source of the mysteries that surround us, God, nature, whatever, they are just words. Words are symbols, they represent, confuse, open, lead, astray? You are the captain. Command those words! The words coalesce into groups of bigger symbols: concepts, ideologies, assumptions, and we swim in this miasma as if it were identical to the truth. The mountains, peaks and spires themselves, are not just words. The ash flow full of frozen river rocks is not just words. I stand in front of this landscape and try on for size some direct, unfiltered identification with nature. Open the mind, quiet the mind, for a direct impression of mountain spires.

We camped on the Emigrant Trail, near the Trans Sierra Route, Gold Rush, Conestoga wagons, mining, get to California, settlers, lawless, Chinese labor, good bye Indians and Mexicans, bring on the sheep, denude, cut the trees, foul the rivers, mercury. And now nothing but quiet, wind and sky.

Richard Henry Dana on California in the 1830’s: “what an enterprising people could do with this land.” Dana was of good New England, Calvinistic, Protestant work ethic stock; he saw the long growing season, rich soils, mild climate and the Alta Californians not doing much but raising cattle.

It’s fun and challenging to notice different mixes and patches of forest at different elevations. It’s like developing a subtle ear for fusions in music, you tune in to the various combinations of timings, styles, instruments, effects.

Kim saw a big bear track yesterday; now she is aware. An average size black bear in CA is 300 lbs. There are no longer any grizzly bears inn CA. A persistent myth statewide is that grizzlies and black bears crossed so that the local bears are bigger and meaner, more special. Recent legislation has it that bears (and bobcats) are prohibited to be hunted with dogs, much to the chagrin of rural voters. There is some kind of cultural gulf here; as us city folk can’t understand the ethics of such an unfair hunt, for no obvious reason other than to kill it for fun; this just doesn’t stand up, yet the country folk see this dog restriction as deluded. For me to understand I have to go back to Aldo Leopold and the Think Like a Mountain essay; the inertia of taking out all big predators, the legitimate safety aspect of some of that…the conflict with agrarian stock raising, the control of and destruction of nature; there are issues here. One of them however is not that black bears are dangerous. If they were they would have been extirpated in CA, like the grizzly; no, they run; they are only a problem if you let them get human food. Since their main occupation eating, they just need to be kept in their own wild movie. No other good reason to hunt them in my opinion.

The general paradigm pushed by the gear industry and stores: stuff needs to be new, tricky, catchy, with an angle of some sort to separate it from the older stuff. It’s just like cars, the old are just fine; a new trim is supposed to make you want a new one but the difference is only in looks. We are seduced by progressively changing styles; the better part of it is usually more appearance than any actual technological advance. Better comes to equal newer. Yet there are no substantive differences in product. It’s new for the sake of new only. You get enough of this planned obsolescence and calculated pressure to conspicuously consume and it’s like the boy who cried wolf, after a while you can’t believe any of it. It’s hard to trust business people. When a real advance comes along how can you tell it from hype? Advertising traffics in such bullshit that the halfway intelligent learn to ignore it all, tune it out. Advertising is about equivalent to lying. The constant drumbeat of hype deadens the senses, leaves our consumer-based economy vulnerable to disillusioned realizations that they are crying wolf again. We are not getting anything better most of the time, just repackaged to appear different, more apparent then real. The whole house of cards held up by confidence fairies, they whisper, “it’s OK to keep buying useless crap and tossing out perfectly good stuff.” Wolf! Wolf! Yeah yeah.

The way this paradigm dynamic works is the same for politics, religion etc, everything is shoveled into one way of seeing, even if it doesn’t fit; facts don’t matter. What matters is to be loyal and pure, to follow along like sheep. I feel called to resist the hype and therefore called to enter a post partisan space as well, where automatic pilot is not standard operating procedure.

As a long time back packer, 44 years from 11 to 55 years old, I’ve seen the gear come and go. There’s not a lot of it that really matters. The main advances have been in fabrics and metals, which have made gear somewhat lighter and faster drying. The rest: boots, socks, tents, ropes, compasses, maps, down fill, stoves, utensils, hasn’t changed much but this stuff sure gets repackaged on an endless pipeline if hype. Boots have become lighter but also less substantial and more expensive; a light-weight boot can barely get 250 miles before falling apart.

The quality of the light in the high Sierra is special. It is easy to notice. It imparts a particular feeling, you know it; you are in a special zone. One glance here or there: the hues, the angles, the rock, the gnarled trees, adds up to a “wow, check out where I am!” There is no Central Valley haze or Highway 101 auto exhaust. Here there is clean air, and less atmosphere at 10,000’, less interference with your vision.

At Snow Lake I gave the old Montezuma tungsten mine a good casing out, a detailed look over. I found the garbage dump, the machinery, the cabin, the truck, the diesel donkey and lots of cool rocks that previous visitors had set up here and there for perusal. The mine was located in 1942, developed in the early 1950s and closed in the 1960s. The Montezuma mine road was last drivable in 1967. I love this kind of stuff; somehow I’m fascinated by the departed, be it dinosaurs, ice age mega fauna, the dead, ruins, old lava  flows; I get into a space of wonder, to imagine what this past life was, this vitality now gone yet somehow known.

I sewed the tip of the sole back to Kim’s Keen boot and hopefully it will last until Tuolumne Meadows where we can take steps to procure a new pair. Lightweight boots today are just supremely cheap and poorly made yet they cost plenty. I wouldn’t reasonably expect this type of boot to last more than 200 or 250 miles, meaning that a person hiking the whole PCT, 3000 miles, would need 15 pairs of boots, more than $1500.00; this seems entirely unreasonable and is why we return them for lack of performance. Otherwise you pay $200 plus for more solid boots, but all the brands except Keen shape the toe as if the human foot cane to a point in the middle; how stupid is that?! The whole boot scene is pretty much a lose-lose situation; the best solution is to buy at REI and then return them for full price when they start to prematurely fail.

The wind has been ferocious at Snow Lake. It beats across the lake, coming from down below in the super heated valleys. Then, in the early evening, the wind usually just stops and later on it picks up going downhill as the cold air flows down the drainages. This is why if you camp near a stream it will be very cold in the morning while, say, just 30’ up in elevation it will be much warmer. Cold air flows right down creeks and streams. If it’s cold out you don’t want to be even colder by camping right next to a drainage.

8/28

First frost, Summit Meadow, above Snow Lake; the air is so clear you can see individual rocks and plants from a long distance away, the light has a quality to it that calls your attention. It’s like amazing grace, I once was blind but now I see.

We cross from the Emigrant Wilderness to Yosemite, back to the Pacific Crest Trail. We were off the PCT from the Sonora Pass hitch down to Kennedy Meadows and back up through the Emigrant Wilderness. Kim likes to explore new stuff; it is usually fun to let her have the reins, she finds ways to open adventures. The frost went down 1000’ lower than Summit Meadow, down through the drainages, like I was saying. Very nice along the river in Yosemite, Grace Meadows, peaceful, light wind, warm sun, grass waving, water shimmering, reeds of deep green against backdrop of white granite; another u-shaped glacial valley. We’re walking in areas that were covered with ice, big ice.

On our way up to Tilden Lake, we met a trail crew, nobody has been up here for three weeks; we will own the whole place. We do the campsite dance, looking around, deciding, chatting, working over what would be the best; we have this down pretty good; one person goes and looks, comes back, we go to the place, it’s OK or not, if not the other person goes and scouts around more, all until we say “this is it!” We get a nice swim, start our zero.

8/29

Tilden Lake zero!  (A zero is a day with no miles, you go nowhere, it’s a rest day, a vacation from vacation, Fred’s specialty.) Got a nice big fire, slept until it was light, very pleasant.

Central Valley and dry side valleys are heating up, this drives daytime winds, warm winds, upslope, they blow ferociously up the valleys and find us; the winds stop at night. These are orthographic effects, what happens when mountains, wind and sun get together. The wind has to be tolerated, there is nowhere you can go; it’s not something you would seek out.

I fixed and sewed my pack where needed, moved the packbag down on the frame, sewed the tent stuff sack and repaired my shorts, tightened the pack’s suspension onto the frame, washed sox etc. After all these fun little chores I can sit and live in my own Ken Nordine soundtrack, the miner, sparkles; “what does your sparkle truly portend, shimmering brilliance, light without end.” The Moorestown Quaker kids just did not understand that, what does that mean Fred?! I guess it takes a special mind, a special kind, to value something like shimmering sparkles on water.

Further zero day repairs: I put sap on Kim’s boots to cover the dental floss threads, it seems to protect for a while anyway. Put the boots in the sun and the sap melts in to the threads. Fresh sap is better. We’re trying to get her Propet boots to last long enough to get to a town or to have old ones sent from home. God, good boots are hard to find. The laminated soles always come off, even for the expensive ones like Danner. REI is selling more style than substance. This is a trend. You can also blame consumers for demanding low price and light weight; this drives the quality down. Vicious cycle, REI can’t sell what everybody knows is cheaply made stuff for a high price; they just have to suffer a higher return rate, given their returns policy of any time, for any reason.

I file my fingernails with small rocks. You use what you have out here. This is just a small taste of the ingenuity and skill set people would have had when they lived outside all the time.  

Chapped lips: it seems as if chapstick products make you need more, that they actually cause chapping. There’s a quote from Pa in Grapes of Wrath about how using soap everyday  makes you smell worse than bathing one time a week. It just goes to show you really can’t trust advertising hardly at all. It’s hard to know how much stuff we have that is really the result of being scammed over any necessity, and then it becomes normal, becomes an inertia.

Saw a bald eagle at Snow Lake and now one at Tilden Lake this morning, and afternoon, heard the screech right over camp. They are fish eagles; that’s their thing, fish.

8/30

Mtn. Hemlocks can get real big. Our trail dialogue stumbles on the idea of cunniferous trees, cunnifers; this would be tree ID for Kim’s new book Knife, Compass and Pussy: All you need to survive in the woods. We start to notice Jeffrey pine outliers and interlopers, isolated individual Jeffrey pine trees in higher elevation juniper areas.  Interloper Jeffreys are usually associated with junipers, sometimes with western white pine. In the saddle above Stubblefield canyon there are nice junipers. Junipers are mostly in rocky areas, near exposed chaparral. The lone Jeffreys are with juniper, in the chaparral or alone period on pure rock. I am saying chaparral here as whenever I see Manzanita I call it chaparral.

Wildernessdining.com, for some reason I noted this, but now, who knows why? Kim and I tend to blaze our own path and not follow a lot of websites; we like to discover stuff on our own; Kim is a great, inventive cook and trip planner so we hardly need to take a lot of outside advice. This makes us more authentic, without even trying. We’d rather be stupid and do it our own way than to slavishly follow random internet sites about camping skills, stories etc. If an obvious improvement comes along we take it, like cooking food by pouring boiling water in Zip Loc bags, inside another insulating bag. This saves a lot of fuel, as you only bring the water to a boil, then shut off the stove.

A guy with a medical marijuana card gives me two joints of a large size; they last for more than two weeks at one puff at a time; I make a one hit pipe out of aspen, ream it out with wire from my pack. Anybody knows that human ingenuity is put to the test and succeeds when you need a pipe, you can make pipes out of apples, tin foil, anything, proof that all that extra grey matter we have is adaptive. Pipes are just one example of what people can do with the requisite desire and determination.

8/31

Smoke from Yosemite Valley fire, fines (fine particulates) from the dusty trail and the  overall dry substrate adds up to sinus issues and bloody noses. We are down in the dirt all night, the dust is right there, it blows in, there’s no escape. The dust is a bad collateral damage effect we have to suck up in order to be here.

The older stone work on the trail is more solid, it’s fit together better, built by people with more stone cutting experience, a skill that has fallen away with the advent of more power tools, more modern, easier to work building materials. Now people use drills and generators, try to fit the stone work from their rough cuts, the old guys would find a tighter, natural fit, they took more time, maybe had a different sense of time; their work sure has lasted. The new stone workers here on the trail are all young people without experience in a trade, probably mostly city people; it all adds up to less substantial work.   

A Seavey Pass there is an unnamed lake; we swam here last summer and loved this one spot; the lake sits hidden, you climb, climb, up and up, reach the top and just as you summit, there’s this precious little lake, magically revealed, hidden, with pure rock points jutting out into deep water. You’re hot from the climb, the sun is out, just the perfect spot for a dip. The rock points are good because you can swim and dry off without having to touch any soil with your feet, nice and clean for once. The lake is just in front of a hanging valley, high mountains and outrageous scenery all around. Marvelous big trees await going downhill. We took another swim here, a year later, off of the same favorite rock we found last year. The lake is deep; it’s scary to be out suspended over the deep water; what could rush up and get you? Some things are instinctual, fear of deep water, a deep memory of predators. I think all of life has the impulse to not be extinguished, from worms on up, we all try to get away, to keep our asses safe. Nothing is going to take death lightly. When you are exposed to danger, you know it; that’s the instinct to live.

There are just a few junipers by Seavey Lake. There are 5 or 6 Jeffrey dwarfs south of Seavey Pass, and big impressive western white pines in the ravine below the juniper zone, also big lodge pole and red fir. This is a special area of big trees. Tree bark has a developmental aspect; it appears differently throughout the life of a tree and also whether or not it’s exposed to sun. There is reddening and accentuated reticulation with more sun exposure; the sun must bake it, bleach it, burn it, affect it. The ones that have more shade don’t have the red and reticulation going as much on the bark.

Mixed juniper, lodge pole, western white pine, fir, Jeffrey dwarfs; the mixes are always changing. You walk in and out of forests with differing trees. These species’ niches depend on soil type, moisture, rainfall, elevation, temperature, slope exposure, gully or not, probably on a lot more. I like to play naturalist and try to figure stuff out fresh, then if I get sufficiently interested I’ll see what the books say.

My whole life I’ve been directly and subtly exposed to ideas about the outdoors, about nature and wilderness. I try and emulate the great naturalists with my own journals and writings.

From as early as I can remember, my own nature led me to not want to step on ants and bugs, to respect life. I was fascinated in the woods, captivated by creeks and water. I loved catching and having turtle and frogs. Once I figured out they were all dying under my care, I let them all go and never caught another.

When I was a kid I read every single book on American Indians I could get my hands on, and at an impressionable age I saw that the white man had done these guys really wrong. Nature itself had been done really wrong. A tremendous injustice was done. The world I was supposed to enter was built on the ruins of another and nobody cared. All that mattered was to follow the script, be successful, be molded into some product against my choosing. There I was in suburbia, the mainstream script going hard against my fledgling ideals. My actual life was totally alienated from this Indian world; the Indians being real, symbolic of the authenticity lacking in suburbia, symbolic of a simple, direct, traditional world. This book world I entered was the antithesis of the Benjamin Spock middle class upbringing.

It’s not surprising that I would have a mystical, anti-technology, anti-commercial view, and that I would idealize communal life. Yet as a youngster I was separated from it in a world of individuals; that’s how I came up, conflicted between my ideals and seemingly no way to get to them. I had no outlet, no clear possible future I wanted to grow into. As a youngster, I was trapped in suburbia. Then I went to Farm and Wilderness and everything changed.  I got role models, idols and later in high school, exposure to John Muir and the preservationists.

The Quaker Farm and Wilderness camps in Vermont fundamentally altered me. There my trajectory was established in many ways. I liked the counter culture line a lot. We had Meeting everyday and I got an earful of ideas from young counselors who were in the thick of the 60s.  I saw what life could be in a genuine community, got exposed to sex, drugs and rock and roll, environmentalism and first hand got to hike for days and days in what seemed to me at the time to be real wilderness. I made a personal connection with nature early on, connected to my own fascinations, American Indians, Quaker mysticism and counter-culture/ back-to-the-land idealism.

Idealizing a meaningful community was probably natural as I was born into a world valuing the individual. The individual and community were two poles, two condensation points between which I had to navigate my place in the world, to try and figure out where I fit. There was no traditional world to be safe in, to have all meaning given. The sense of belonging, of any stasis, was generations in the past. Pretty much what I’m saying here is that I was born in a modern context and wished I wasn’t. The lid had been blown off any genuine culture my ancestors had. All the emigrating and moving through the generations had led from an agricultural life in small communities to me being born in a big city with no kin, modern, all on our own, free of much social control. As an emerging individual, the whole world had to be constructed out of my own self. All meaning stemmed from me, not from any community of which I was a part. My identity was at cross-purposes, I yearned to belong somewhere, yet I began to exercise the tremendous freedom given as an individual with all of life on front of me.

How is a young kid going to figure that out? No wonder I am averse to joining any community, it takes away my freedom. Having near total control of my volition was like opening Pandora’s Box to me, once given those reins I was loath to surrender them to anybody or any group. The whole world was open to question and I was then one to decide the answers. In some hazy way this all just indicative of how a person’s times affects who they are and who they become. I’m describing the nurture part of my coming of age. Maybe in 20 more years I’ll have a clearer reflection on all of this.

The freight train of American modernity was hard to side step. For years I was in a fog of drugs, booze and cigarettes, a lingering affect of the once promising libertine 1960s. I was swept along, not much ambition, let the game come to me, plenty of resources to be able to live, the U.S. like a big whale shark sloughing off lots of scraps, I adopt the role of scavenger, live low off the hog, make do with less and in my 40s and early 50s I come out of the fog, start to clarify, be able to see my tracks, reconstruct the story. With this part of my Hero’s Journey mastered, I become worthy of being in the garden; I meet Kim; I come in from the cold.  

We see big time recent glacial features, from 12,000 years ago, from whenever they were last here. The scale of glaciers is measured geologically in eons and epochs, and beyond that, planetary scales, universal, galaxy scales, space, out into levels of the unknown big, huge, massive, immeasurable God knows what! Whatever is there at those huge levels, we can’t put our understanding at that same level; a creature that lives less than 100 years, how can they grasp 50 million light years?

For the creation of the Sierra Nevada, think of isosity, push the earth’s crust down in one place, it pops up in another. “Isosity: Equilibrium in the earth's crust such that the forces tending to elevate landmasses balance the forces tending to depress landmasses.” Pretty much the granites of the Sierra Nevada were cooked up underground a long, long time ago. Through the forces of plate tectonics and the push factors therein, the North American continent and a constituent part, the Sierra Nevada, got thrust up. They say that it rose up as some of the rock was lighter; it just came up like ice cubes in a glass of water, over a longer period of time. The above is a general outline of some going theories. One theory that is not going, is catastrophism, that the Sierra Nevada was formed in like one day.

We arrive at Benson Lake. There is a big sandy beach and a nice, flat bench. They call it the Riviera of the Sierra. There are big lodge pole, aspen, cottonwood and juniper. Juniper logs wash out of the hills, one really bog one is on the beach; they last and last. We use the big juniper trunk for a windbreak, put the tent right in next to it. The wind is fierce.

We ran into Olive Oil on the trail. We met her last summer in Castella, CA; we remembered Popeye, Pyrite and Chinchilla. Olive Oil is French. Then we met DJ and Kary from BC, retired teachers from small town, veterans of many trips.

9/1

Last night there were packhorses with bells invading our beach camp, in the full moonlight. I ran them off, naked, straight out of my sleeping bag; horses have a big impact, not just on trails and meadows and with shit, but also with shit in water sources; they carry giardia and shit in the water, great! The animals have an impact audibly as well, the whole bells on the animals thing is auditory pollution; it’s hard to call this wilderness with these domestic animals so present. Sometimes as a hiker I feel like the low man on the totem pole of users; hikers have to suck up all the heavier use of the users above them. Horses really thrash the trail, making it a maze of rocks and kicked up rubble. I suppose the pack animals are a necessary use, but they are high impact.

Outfitting and horse packing is a pocket of trail knowledge, a link to the past, a skill set worth keeping around as people may not always have machines and vehicles for transport. Short of roads or helicopters, this is the only way to get supplies into trail crews, or to supply a fire crew, a scientific crew; the pack stock outfits them all. Many people hire packers to bring in all their gear, older people, wealthy people… it keeps the packers employed, keeps the skills alive.

On outfitter trips they should mandate that people have to do a little trail project, to mitigate the impact, one animal packed with tools, half a day, fix up some rough trail, cut some brush, give back, don’t just erode and pay and leave the wasteland for the hikers to walk through.

I really liked my packers, (while leading trail crews on public lands), Ken Graves, Bill Roberts, Jim Upchurch, I’ve got a personal connection with these people, backcountry horsemen, people with stock culture, La Mesa de Abajo cattle ranching people, salt of the earth, good folks. For me it’s a taste of an authentic agrarian world, a window into another culture, into the past, and besides, I’m a fun fella, have a good sense of humor, I’ve got a few things to say, so it’s not like city folk and rural home boys can’t connect, they like me, I like them. Where the rubber met the road, my packers and I connected, not the current hyper partisan stuff where any differences are totally disrespected.

I asked Ken Graves, one of my packers, if he ever rode bulls? As a young man he did all the rest in rodeo but not bull riding, he said, “I never saw the reason to get off a good horse…” This is the type of homespun wisdom you find with packers and country folk. It’s a no bullshit, to the point, not overly complex way of looking at things. I feel the same about my external frame pack, no reason to get off a good horse, some stuff is just solid even if it is harder, everything new and different is not necessarily better. You don’t see packers with all new fangled gear. They use the same basic leather stuff that’s been used for 1000s of years.

The wind was rough yesterday; life in the tent was tolerable in the windbreak of the old juniper log on the beach. This morning it’s nice, still, quiet and cold, near freezing or below. The moon sets behind some wild mountains; the day dawns. We move to get warm, move to get out of Dodge early, to avoid getting stuck in some conversation. We don’t mind chatting but early and cold is not the time to stand around and talk about where you’re going. We are usually early birds.

DJ mentioned Thoreau, others have mentioned Muir, many folks are here in a quest for solitude and inspiration. DJ and I had a good science talk, string theory, alternate strands of reality, the big bang as the explosive effect when strings touched, it reset the arrangement of matter. The idea of whole alternate realities side by side, this is as fantastic as any religious creation stories. There’s not much different really, a story and some information that allows you to situate yourself in the universe. At that level, who cares if it’s true or not, it doesn’t matter. You’re never going to empirically know at that level. The specific content of a get-well card doesn’t matter; it’s just the fact you get one that counts. Your creation story doesn’t matter either, just so long as you have one.

From Benson Lake we make a “grueling” ascent up to Smedberg Lake, 3000’ in three to four miles. We see our last year’s camp and recapitulate that hike.

Sierra light, it’s dappled with long Fall shadows, low angle seasonal sun, glowing, lines definite and sharp, the atmosphere clear; the shadows set everything off within this clarity, within this rarity of granite, elevation, framed by mountains and trees. There comes to be an emergent property of the light, the whole more than the sum of its parts.

“In the order of nature, because man is top predator, he must prey on himself.” Kim Quaker moment, with a one-hour response time limit… Kim is sharp, perceptive, alert, with well-developed ideas. She’s a handful and she delivers her goods in her own inimitable way, not much of my bullshit is going to impress her. I met my match! Her thought here: there are way too many people, people are ruining the earth, species going extinct, pollution, climatic effects, system-wide trouble; what will we do? Well, since man rules as the dominant species, it is inevitable that this will be turned back on ourselves; we’ll do ourselves in by war.

9/2

Up early in the dawn, gone by 6:30AM, frost, gloves, hat, two light shirts, got a shell core temperature effect going, have to move to stay warm, too many clothes are too heavy to carry, we move or make a fire, find some sun to stand in or get in the sleeping bag, there’s not many other options.

Walking down the trail is pretty much all you do, this provides lots of space to work over many ideas. This idea popped up, a model for a self-sustaining grocery, general store to sell organic, non-genetically modified, non-hormone soaked, non-antibiotic fed, non-nano tech goods and make it affordable, make it undersell the competition. Poor people can’t choose healthier alternatives because of cost. This idea finds a way to lower costs by using the existing system, just in a way downsized manner.  Drive the market to a healthier product and have it be affordable, not just for the rich. Here’s the way it would work: for workers and administrators, people commit to five years and live on site; workers get housing and food free and a very low stipend, administrators get a little more; what they all get is to be taken care of in exchange for work, costs are kept down by limiting wages, the idea is not to “get ahead”, to have workers “make money”  but to offer healthy products that are environmentally and production labor friendly and to have these products undersell the industrial model. If it is cheaper to buy, people will be able to choose the friendlier alternative. Somehow the cost of friendly, healthy goods has to be lowered, take out the labor, take out wherever possible, get the supply networks on board to take less in fees. The critical part is to make sure all the people involved are taken care of housing-wise and health care-wise. There would need to be an initial investment in a building. An empty lot could be found near center city and an architect could design an inexpensive model, standardized materials, retail and housing all together. The whole system would be transferrable to any region or community. If rich guys can give billions to political campaigns, get some of them to fund this; there would need to be a large capital outlay to start up each unit. It all comes down to money to start it up and the will to do it. There are probably many idealists ready to start tomorrow.

The will to act is related to faith in and ability to participate in some program of action. How to be conscious of this? As part of this whole idea, an anthropologist can come on board to design a goods distribution system that appeals to people’s basic instincts; marketing, business, housing, society, can be made over into a genuine culture. People could gain a real sense of purpose and belonging. Past pitfalls with intentional communities can be studied and avoided. Troublesome members can sign a release to be turned into dog food if they don’t behave.

Another issue to be tackled: how to cover or eliminate fixed energy costs and get goods distributed equitably? The building would need built-in savings for energy use. Transportation costs could be modeled on Wal-Mart’s supply system but instead of lowering the price to enrich six heirs, the price here would be lowered by distributors and suppliers because it is the right thing to do. The prime purpose would be sharing wealth, not for generating profit along a pyramid scheme. The whole thing would be a juggernaut of good will and it would kick the market’s ass and move the whole game to a friendlier level. The basic idea: to make the eco/ labor friendly, healthy goods available at a good price so people will go for it and not the industrial production goods.

The west facing slopes have more mountain hemlock with scattered western white pine.

We met two women, Emily and Susan, on horseback doing a big section from Kennedy Meadows north; their gear was specialized and compact, no extra pack animals, just their two horses, a Thoroughbred and a Morgan/ Percheron mix. One hot blood, one cool blood. These two women and their horses were a rarity; you barely see people like that. One thing interesting, the horses had strapped on shoes, the women were able to file the hooves but not get the horses shod while on the trail, so they had these special hoof covers, which they were having trouble with. The trail is rough with rubble, must be really hard on a strap-attached horseshoe. We had a fun little chat and then we headed south, they north.

This time of year the thru-hikers are all gone. There are lots of people of our age set going south now; we have more in common with them. The thru-hikers are aloof, they have a different thesis, are generally from a different age set, it’s a different hike. Developmentally we are at different places, the older age set has more experience with life, more common understandings, perhaps running with similar theses. The thesis of a thru hike is more like an athletic event than a wilderness experience. It’s curious to have the flux between different users; we all have to come to grips with the fact that there are many ways to do this same activity, and everybody is totally immersed in their own way. Perhaps some of the dissonance stems from the corollary fact that “every man’s way is right in his own eyes”. (Proverbs 21:2) You get an “intimate enemy” phenomena; the more similar you are to someone; the more pronounced slight differences can appear. Someone who is way different, like these horse packing women, there’s no issue to compare.

Here’s an insight. With Protestants, salvation is supposed to be by God’s grace only; For Catholics, good works count. Yet the Protestant way ends up doing just the opposite, Protestants work hard to demonstrate their Providence, to show they have grace, and God’s blessing, even though their salvation is supposed to be independent of performance. It all ends up being the same thing, how to justify, how to demonstrate to the public that you are in good with God. Talk about intimate enemies! Santa Claus is kind of a minor god, he knows if you’ve been bad or good and will reward you accordingly. I’ll explore this a bit further along when we meet “the Professor” on the trail, and how the locus of social control got put onto individual conscience.

If people eventually realize that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are not real, why don’t they ever progress to realizing that Jesus is not real either, that this is just another fantastic story. And if people believe so whole-heartedly in Jesus as this omnipotent figure, why don’t they believe in Santa too?

A magic trout revealed itself to Kim, “once in awhile you can get shown the light in the strangest places if you look at it right”. She was down by a stream and there it was. She comes away with a new name, Trout Lily.

In the Grapes of Wrath, which I’m reading on the trail here, Al and Tom talk about Al going to look for some girls and Tom refers to it as “beat it down the line”. This is also an old folk song lyric usually referring to getting out of town, moving on, but here it seems to possibly refer to looking for prostitutes or one night stands. Al was going to “beat it down the line” looking for girls. I couldn’t find any outside reference to this as looking for girls, maybe I read it wrong. This was towards the end of the book when they were in one of their last camps in California.

It might be dusty but at least there are no bugs or mosquitos, it is late season in a dry year.

We meet The Professor; that’s his trail name. He’s an actual professor of medieval literature at a small religious college. We all take a break, sit down and start to open up some fun stuff. I think we all can tell this is going to be a good one.  

The Middle Ages, were a world of honor; social control was group-based. The world of individual, internal regulation of behavior comes with Christianity. The individual trajectory was maybe not caused by Christianity, but Christianity opens it up, creates the groundwork for individuality and eventually, at the dawn of the modern world, at the time around the Renaissance, sets it free with secular humanism. The Professor says that the individual is like a single chess piece on a board by itself; he sees the modern world as lacking in some core meanings. He feels a difference between genuine and spurious culture. The Professor is a man of some substance, sensitivity and intelligence. He got a $175 fine for having no wilderness permit in Yosemite! Personally he’s had a loss of faith yet still teaches and encourages students in their faith.

How refreshing to witness such honesty. Personally I think the more educated a person gets the harder it is to have faith in fantastic supernatural things. To believe so whole-heartedly on something for which there is not a shred of evidence, is really a stretch, yet the majority of human beings buy in to this. The world is divided into people with faith and people without.

With Christianity the nexus of social control is put inside the individual. Shame, guilt, original sin, Jesus dying for your sins, redemption, all this got transferred into an individual’s mind versus having this stuff play out in the public sphere. It’s pretty slick, use a person’s own conscience to control them, use the carrot of everlasting life and the stick of eternal damnation.

This is an insidious meme to put a stop to. The whole Christian motif is so interwoven into our culture that in many cases you don’t even recognize it as such. It’s so pervasive that I’ve been forced to confront the story and become actively conscious of how to reject it. It is really stunning that I have to keep dealing with this over the years when I’m not even religious.

The challenge of religion and social control: how to make everything turn out right in the end? How to define justice, right and wrong, what is pure, what to be loyal to, who to respect? How to balance the scales and have everything accounted for? How to give a narrative that for independent individuals is worth going for? How to manage society so that people will buy the explanations and accept the control? The Christian thing is heaven, the eternal afterlife, it makes the world a stage, a practice event, so that animals, the environment don’t matter, we can fuck everything up here on earth and it’s still OK, it’s all about you and God. But this doesn’t add up to making any sense, to making everything right in the end. How can you devastate the earth, cause major mass extinctions and have that be OK in the eyes of the creator? People have a lot of hubris.  

Personally I don’t see the emergence of the individual as that complicated of a historical phenomenon. There’s a latent individual present in anybody, at any time, in any communal people. I think individuals have always yearned to have the yoke of oppressive social control off of them, yet when they get it, there is an unexpected booby prize: a lack of any organizing principles for the society that all these individuals live in.  

With the modern world you get a rule of laws and not men. The rule of men (before the modern world, before @1492) is arbitrary, based on honor, blood feud and revenge; this is what people might like to be free of, but with just laws and cops, there is no real fabric to bind people together. Laws are just rules, not culture. So there is always a tension between individual desire and community control; there’s a baseline yearning to be free of constraints; if individuals get their way, the community dissolves. Perhaps individuals don’t need community to survive today, in the First World, because there is enough material prosperity, technology, and enforcement of laws so that individuals can go it alone. Take away these props and individuals would need to band together to protect against other groups of men.

The Renaissance was tops for the Professor, he sees it as the crossing, the intersection of two worlds, the traditional world and the modern world. For him it’s all been downhill from there. We talked about critical junctures in history, why? Accidental determinants big men, environmental factors? He recommend last 100 pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, from the 2007 Volokhonsky translation, as a window to understanding the tides of history. Like my Dad, the Professor gets his understanding of the world through literature. Like Dad, the Professor is way into Chaucer.

Medieval literature has a characteristic omnipotent 3^rd person narrator, symbolizing God and the static order in the universe. This compared to the modern 1^st person narrator/ perspective. Modern literature explores the dimensions of a person’s inner psychological state, puts the onus on the individual, subtly defines that it is the individual who is important, not God. It’s a secular way, and this started in earnest during the Renaissance time. The medieval world was ordered, everything in its place. Look at things now; we have devolved into a massive Internet, political Tower of Babel.

This modern free-for-all, where seemingly all excess is allowed and OK, rubs old style literalists the wrong way. They really don’t like what they see as the immorality of secular humanism. Like the Taliban, evangelicals and Republicans want to go back to the 7^th century…Prophecies of the end of the world would actually be welcomed  by these folks as they think they will have eternal paradise and the rest will go to hell. As I see it, modernization and the role of people in society is not some conspiracy or culture war; this is just how our evolution has panned out; this is something to understand, not judge as good or bad.

The Alcoholics Anonymous 12 Steps are an ingenious hybrid of faith and reason. Step One, the watershed moment: this is out of my control; i.e. admitting that the individual approach has not worked, this is the first step of harkening back to a group-level of social control, to admitting that as an individual, you can’t manage everything.

Any human behavior model has to start with an individual as the locus of consciousness and action. This is where the rubber meets the road. From there, Christianity, and other monotheistic, faith-based systems had to take an initial step to rest control away from the individual’s volition; but step one can also be construed to make things a one way street, I can’t control you, or I can’t control that, but I can control myself and I choose to take this step to isolate myself from whatever it is that is the trouble, a wayward sibling or neighbor, a behavior… The movie Flight with Denzel Washington is all about step one; people think the 12 steps are only relative to alcohol, but they really apply to any unmanageable situation. My opinion, of the 12 steps, step one is 90% of the way there.

One huge Jeffrey pine and two smaller on the hillside above camp, Kim spots them. We’re up in Cold Canyon, before our entry into way more people at Glen Aulin. We stay higher up, in a warmer microclimate. It turns out this was our last day and night of peaceful, relaxed hiking, so far this was the more tranquil part of our hike. After getting to Tuolumne Meadows it was a zoo of people, 20 to 50 people a day vs. 2 to 4 people a day to the north.

9/3

Fucking cold wind chill!!!!!!! Cold Canyon yes sir! Tuolumne Falls is in sight a few miles down canyon; we hear the roar from camp; we pulled off trail to hide from people we didn’t want to see; we don’t camp right next to the trail as many do; we like to get away from people, and also from animals that walk the trails at night. Stealth camping we call it. Kim found water in one little pool way down the creek bed; she found the Jeffrey stand above camp, she is good, knows what to do, knows the little details to focus on. Kim has a strong skill set and a good memory; we are a good team.

Tuolumne Meadows hiker campground is a dirt pit, pulverized soil, dust, terrible, buses of bozos coming and going, tons of people in cars, people in a daze, on automatic pilot, loud people, beer drinking in campground, fires, smoke drifting into everyone else’s camps; the JMT is too popular even in the late season; the standard question: where are you going?, we can barely handle it; it’s amazing that for many this type of place is the destination, this is getting back to nature, roughing it is taking a shit in a pit toilet and drawing your water from a pump. Bears are out there all right but nor because this is nature but because they are attracted to people’s trash, attracted to that people are careless with food, that people think the campground is an extension of their domesticity.

We could have had the best, quietist part of our whole hike already. Tuolumne Meadows is the jumping off point for the PCT/ JMT south to Mt. Whitney and the whole world is keyed in; wealthy Germans and Japanese lead the charge; the mountains are spectacular, world class, and it doesn’t rain in the summer and fall. To the north of here it’s nice all the way to Sierra Buttes, plenty nice, maybe nicer for the lack of tons of people.

The section from Sierra Buttes to Mt. Shasta goes through a lot of non-descript, multiple use land but then north of Castella the landscape picks up being super nice again. Wilderness and Park Service managed land is a good indicator of the type of experience you’ll have. This land tends to have inherent inspirational/ visual/ unique qualities that multiple use managed land does not.

9/4

Kim and I aren’t joiners yet we are members of this hiking community by default. We have to come to terms with each actor as they come by. It’s part of the deal being out here; every face demands some attention.

Here we are at the head of the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River/ Meadows. This is a perfect u-shaped glacial valley. For 8 miles there is river, falls, pools, riffles and open water, high peaks rising 1000’ or more from the valley floor. Right at the head of the meadows is a really nice packer camp, then the valley breaks into forest and steep hillside up to Donahue Pass. Donahue Pass is where the glacier began. In all this wildness, there was a robin.

Kim walked one way out of this camp towards water to fill up our bottles. There were two or three other groups of hikers near us staging at the bottom of the hill. Today we saw upwards of 50 hikers on the trail, crazy. Solitude is not what you find anywhere near Tuolumne Meadows or in the Ansel Adams Wilderness but at least we can get water without having to interact with other hikers. Off in the scrubby trees was a snorting buck thrashing its antlers against a tree trunk. Kim called my attention and I went over towards her and the buck suddenly ran out into the meadow, startling us. As kings of the hill we’re not used to any animals giving us any gruff. There was another buck below, they were aggressive, not shy; we pulled back to our camp and they ran around the meadow, close to another hiker’s camp.

I saw that these bucks were initiating us to the high Sierra, “welcome”, they said, “go forth to the high fortress of Avalon. You have our blessing.” Wild bucks initiate us into the glacier catchment magic area where inorganic forces rule.

9/5

Rain, light thunder, lightning at 3:AM; had to get up and put on the rain fly, mountain weather is strong and unpredictable.

We made a good recovery from being taken way out of our center in the mass tourist wasteland of Tuolumne Meadows by the road.

On the way to our packer camp we stopped to have a leisurely mid-day dinner by the river. Kim tried cooking penne pasta in a Zip Loc; it didn’t work, it reverted to flour, inedible, couldn’t even swallow it; I carried it out to Mammoth Lakes.

We have to surrender to a higher population of hikers here, MANY hikers; this is the crown jewel area, the most dramatic jewelry. Somber, post-glacial reflections: as long as the glaciers have been gone from here is as long as the heyday of humanity from dawn of civilization to present; the last glacial advance and retreat coincides almost exactly with the rise of civilization. Somehow I connect these events and see within this space a kind of clock.

There are many things to keep in mind keeping yourself safe and comfortable: Hard weather skills, when to put on more clothes, eat, gear easily accessible and able to be pulled out fast, how to use parka features and wind pants to hike in and be cool/ not too hot yet prevent hypothermia, campsite choice, when to pull up, not camp in coldest area when morning comes, snags, lightning, flash floods. Basically this amounts to controlling your temperature, staying well fed and hydrated, managing weather extremes, being aware of a range of hazards, knowing when and where to camp and not pushing the edge too far, staying in a safe envelope.

We are pelted with photons all day long, blastage, no cover up high, no shade, pure x-ray blastage. Photon furnace, your skin is cooked, you can feel it burning. People in the know have versions of a stereotypical Sierra suit, where the body is completely covered by long pants, long sleeve shirt, hat with shade flaps, sunglasses. This UV protection clothing can be very pricey, as with all high tech gear; I would guess a nice Sierra suit in total could cost three or four hundred dollars, more if getting fancy sunglasses.

Transition zones are fun to observe. There are not any clear demarcations; the boundaries are fluid, the species fluid. The carving work of glacial ice coupled with the mountainous relief and elevation creates a patchwork of fingered together zones, habitats, eco-niches.  Ecotypes (particular organisms adapted to specific circumstances) then mold themselves into these niches, are molded by the landscape. Ecotypes take what is possible to get within the range allowed by their niche. For example, Sierra junipers only live in certain areas. This gets at what they call a patch dynamics view of the landscape and its species. A transition zone is a type of fusion, just like fusion in music. Transition zones always with fusion. Transitions go sideways into steep rocky areas or into riparian areas, not just elevation related or related to slope aspect.

Music has changing time signatures, tension, release, a sense of recognizable order. With fusion, layer in two or more different styles, blend them together, and you have the beginning of an infinite variety of possibilities. In nature this idea can be applied to transition zones. Could  I then conclude that if you like Miles Davis’ jazz/ rock fusion, Bitches Brew, or the Grateful Dead, then you would also like transition zones?

Gauntlet of the bears. Fears of annihilation and mortality are manifested through animals with big claws and teeth; this gauntlet must be run, to be able to stay in the woods of any extended period of time. As with all fears, the reality of it is much less than looms in the mind.

Kim saw the trout and the buck; I saw the chickadee and the Steller’s jay, the lone giant Ponderosa. You see them, in a special way; you make a bond, a connection. You start to be inside the story of nature, you’re not outside looking in, as a stranger; you find an entrée, a door, a key, and then you identify, are a participant, have a sense of ownership.

Selfish gene/ selfish individual, this fits perfect for a modern paradigm, no collective. This shows a political aspect of scientific views and theories. Scientists feud over atomism, collectivism/species level selection; they get stuck in politics while nature itself remains. Then while observing nature, they find what they are looking for but they only see evidence for their preferred theory; this is not how the scientific method is supposed to work. Yet, string theory and parallel dimensions are utterly fantastic, hardly lacking imagination. I guess there is a difference between trying to prove a theory to see if it works, and blind faith in one theory above all else.

Today is first time for extensive above tree line hiking; we get a long view of the Lyell Fork of Tuolumne Meadows; Lyell Canyon is a BIG, impressive landscape feature, amazing how glaciers scraped it all out.

9/6

We’ve gradually opened up to and accepted different types of hikers. In my opinion it’s a working through of basic human tolerance issues, the same issues that play out in politics, religion, ethnicity etc. It’s an internal tape that’s running and who controls that tape? I do; it’s an individual choice, not a defacto inevitability, that the different must be judged. Anyway, cliquey thru hikers, novices, short timers, people like us, all are loving the place to the point that solitude and quiet are gone, somehow the JMT area is just crawling with people.

There is such high use in the Ansel Adams Wilderness that big areas are closed to camping; the closed areas are mostly easy lakefront, streamfront access; next will be permits, quotas, sites preassigned. Voluntary low impact suggestions plastered everywhere did not work; people won’t self regulate. People will only take regulation when forced to , when the sewage is coming in the front door.

We did the Beautiful Mind trick of getting girls at the bar, go past the fanciest one everybody’s looking at, then you get #2 or #3 easy; we have a whole lake with a waterfall and view to ourselves and everyone is at 1000 Islands Lake; we own this small lake solely and completely. This strategy works!

We get progressively in better shape, more limber, fit. It’s an eight mile canyon out to Mammoth Mountain via the Middle Fork of the San Joaquin River and we knock it off quickly with no trouble. On this walk there is one big western white pine, there are not many, few and sparsely scattered.

A few Mammoth Lakes impressions: the town is actually bankrupt, you need a key to get to a public bathroom, locals are terrorized by a few homeless people and so all people on foot must suffer, at the gourmet dog bakery in a deserted mall the woman’s face is plastered with make-up, fake, superficial, she gives me the key to the bathroom. There’s a big sign showing a telephone, but the phone is gone, the only phone is an advertising phone where you dial a number and get a business, no real dial tone; city hall does not know where there is a pay phone. With no cell phone you are screwed, pay phones are getting less and less, there’s $1.00 charge on our calling card for calls made from pay phone yet now there are hardly any pay phones; cell phones have taken over; everybody has one, people have to suck up the onerous contract, play al sorts of games with their plans, get pressure for more and more tricky “smart” phones; the whole culture of it is despicable and rude yet that has all become normal; and with no cell phone, travelling through on foot, you are out of luck.

Cell phones are a good example of technology run amok. Here is something that is convenient, people go for it, and then they endure all the collateral damage as it becomes normal. Like other accusations against technology, I see that a certain genuineness is being lost, the ability to be present, the ability to focus calmly on long term projects. All communications technology advances in history have resulted in great efficiencies at the loss of face to face level interactions.

We have a Capitol One credit card freak out, they did not properly record our payment and now say we still owe a lot of money; also PNC cancelled my debit card in April without asking, so we have no access to thousands of dollars earmarked for this trip. This is a nightmare resupply, no public phones, and we’re in a pitiful municipality of elite recreational posers. This place has no character, it’s all new and cheap construction. We have a quagmire of finance: PNC, Capitol One, American Express billing cycle, limited funds available from Merchant’s; this contingency, that contingency, compounded by lack of phone access and inability to reckon where we stand financially. What’s the worst, a late fee, a finance charge for two months? Fucking vampire squid are forcing us into this bad situation; rich guys will never have a debit card cancelled for non-use. Stress, not listening, crying, yelling, temper tantrum, tangents, blaming, an impossible quagmire. We are both stressed by different aspects of the resupply, Kim by the finances, me by wanting to get the hell out and not linger in this fucked up town atmosphere. Lost in this haze is that Kim did get new boots that fit fine but they are cheap and started to come apart almost right away. Our main mission: get boots, is obscured by all kind of other bullshit, the original intent lost in a sea of crazy tangents and fighting.

9/7

On the flanks of Mammoth Mountain, by Horseshoe Lake, at the western edge of the Long Valley Caldera, there is an area where volcanic CO2 emissions, emanating from below the soil, has caused a tree kill of over 150 acres. In winter there is danger of death by breathing this CO2. The gas moves into and is concentrated in cool, low pockets, you don’t smell it, you walk in there, you pass out and die. Lucky for us it was summer and breezy, we went right up to Horseshoe Lake, saw the dead trees, geared up and headed off into the woods, alive for one more day. This type of hazard is way more straight ahead and preferable to modern societal ones.  If you are going to be the victim of unseen forces, take the ones where your own actions might make a difference.

The last eruption of the Mammoth Mountain volcano was 50,000 years ago. The mountain itself is an aggregate, a succession of volcanic domes formed 111,000 – 57,000 years ago. The current CO2 emissions come from active volcanism below. The Long Valley Caldera formed 760,000 years ago, and is part of larger area of volcanism extending down Owen’s Valley and also up to Mono Craters and Obsidian Dome. The Long Valley caldera proper extends straight east of Mammoth Mountain. Deposits such as the Bishop tuff, various cinder cones and lava flows along the Eastern Sierra landscape, show empirical evidence of volcanic activity.

This whole area is interesting on multiple levels: the ice age and former Lake Lahontan, crinoid fossils by Convict Lake, the history of water wars with L.A., Bristlecone pines, scenically, culturally, geologically, the Eastern Sierra is richly textured along multiple domensions. John Muir called the Sierra the “Range of Light”; Ansel Adams shared the sense of that light via his photographs.

The Owens River drains 100s of miles of eastern Sierra from San Joaquin Mtn. to Olancha Pk; it all goes to Owens Lake, now dry. Los Angeles gained control of the water through buying land, bullying tactics and immoral means not unlike all of colonialism, the consequences of which for Owen’s Valley are a sinking water table, desertification and health/ air quality issues stemming from airborne dust from the dry lake. Dust plumes can be seen by satellite that go all the way to LA.

Ice Age Owens Lake drained to China Lake in the Ridgecrest valley, which then spilled over to Searles Lake, Panamint Valley lake and to Lake Manly in Death Valley. The remnants of these lakes, such as Badwater in Death Valley, have remnant pupfish populations. This whole chain of ice age lakes went from Mono Lake to Lake Manly and then out the Colorado River drainage. Today however, being in the endorheic Great Basin, the fate of all these lakes is and has been to eventually dry up, become more salty, and never go to the sea.

The bulk of land in the Owens Valley and the eastern Sierra in general is government owned and undeveloped.  This contributes to feeling of wide-open space. Government in various incarnations is the main employer of the region. Outdoor-based tourism is close behind employment-wise with fishing being the big draw, fishing of stocked trout in rivers and lakes. What draws all the outdoor people is this sense of huge space framed by the Sierra escarpment on one side and the Basin and Range mountains on the other. The region has a unique scale and grandeur. This is big country with huge, long views and massive mountainous features; no wonder people come from far and wide to get a taste of this place.

Mammoth Lakes is exercise freak city. From where I stand I see a pitiful municipality of elite recreational posers. The “public bathroom” is Rite Aid, no other businesses will allow public bathroom use. The Rite Aid bathroom is trashed like a freeway gas station. This is the underbelly of a world of well-to-do posing tourists, get that underclass out of sight! Like the Okies if you are homeless, if you are on the road with no car, money or cell phone, you are scum and get no respect. We as back packers, dirty, on foot, get a taste of how society treats the most vulnerable.

More Mammoth Lakes impressions: this is a place where even alcoholics and grandma are in great shape!, posturing, (fake hipsters: clothes, haircut, sunglasses), sporty vehicles, roof racks, sand rails, motorcycles, ATVs, hunters, fishers, golf, snow sports, cross country skiing, downhill skiing, snow shoeing, skate board, rock climbing, mountaineering, bouldering, hiking (with poles), stock outfitting, ski lifted mountain biking on summer Mammoth Mtn. ski slopes, “extreme” sports, you name it, it’s a Mecca for this type of stuff yet set in a town with no character, it’s all new, no services, it’s calculated, not real. Young folks suck this up; they think it is a great adventure just to even be here, yet they are exploited for ski area and other low-wage work.  

The Mexicans don’t go for all the athletic posturing. They’re the ones who clean up for all the people whose mothers aren’t there. A bus comes to luxury condos and drops of a load of Marias, Hispanic women workers. The condo people have $1000 dogs for the dog bakery store. There is just something entirely phony about the whole scene.

Mammoth Lakes is bankrupt and in receivership. What is wrong with this picture? It’s all about individual indulgence, there’s no community. It’s fake.  

Mammoth Mountain ski area is the big fish of the whole scene. Big fish are dependent on water and this case the water comes as winter precipitation, snow. Bad weather years equals low snow equals low income; it’s just like agriculture but the economy is based not on survival by growing food but on survival by optional luxury activities, all dependent on precipitation. Behind the local big fish of Mammoth Mountain ski area are the giant financial vampire squid who lent money at onerous terms with fine print stacking the deck against all common sense. Stunning scientific discovery! Rain equals money! No snow, no money, bankrupt the whole scene for lack of short-term profits. The resort is left holding a huge bag of debt, creditors run them under, short-term returns needed at all costs, kill the goose that laid the golden egg because of lack of precipitation. It’s the Dust Bowl all over again, get the money, run them out, leave nothing sustainable on the ground; more and more giant faceless conglomerates that eat people’s lives like popcorn.

The phony thing about it all is that none of this economy is necessary, it is entertainment, diversion, luxury, yet twenty somethings, and everyone else can latch onto it and live a sort of vagabond, boomtown, frontier lifestyle that imitates what a hardscrabble economy used to be. Instead of actual work, which the Mexicans do, the fake work here is to go do your extreme exercise and then throw back a few over-priced beers afterwards. This economy is like wine tourism etc, a big fish of fundamentally unnecessary things ends up trying to sustain actual people looking for scraps to fall out of the big fish’s mouth. And when the big fish croaks and all are left high and dry, everybody is crying injustice when the whole thing was a farce to begin with.

Actually my own strategy for survival is similar. Maybe I recognize a pattern. The big fish of post WW2 economic boom US economy has been so big and strong that I saw immediately I didn’t have to work too hard to survive, as scraps were falling out everywhere. Why hunt when there are huge carcasses strewn across the landscape? The scavenger/ jackal niche opened unto me. This is a version of the Beautiful Mind strategy of when everybody is going for the number one thing, you just go for number two, and there it is. With over-all US wealth so high from my birth year of1957 on, all I had to do was set my sights lower and voila, a comfortable life without too much work. I know a contrived economy when I see one! Having lived in Mexico and seen real poverty I soon realized that what passes for poor here in the USA is just not that hard. This jackal has now made it 55 years and survived the real estate bubble popping with not much trouble. I just have to get maybe 30 more years and that’s a charmed life.

A few nights ago we had penne pasta glop. Why? Because we tried to cook it in a Zip Loc bag to conserve fuel. This works well for some dishes, you just pour the hot water in the bag over the food, put the bag in an insulated pouch and let it sit for 15 minutes and the food hydrates. Pasta however just seems to turn to dough and the penne was inedible, couldn’t swallow it, pure, hot glop, ecch! In the Grapes of Wrath, they ate fried dough. When there was barely anything, they fried dough. That sounds way better than amorphous penne pasta glop.

You can’t in good conscience bury food along the trail as animals will surely smell it, dig it up and then start to associate people with food. These animals then become pests and in the case of bears, have to be shot if they harass people, all this from being careless with food. I carried out the penne glop for days, to the trash in Mammoth Lakes.

We landed at an old campground of ours in Mammoth Lakes where we have stayed twice before on various regional travels. It’s kind of nice with big Jeffrey pines, lots of needles, a sense of the woods but with town right nearby. At campgrounds people seem to need noise, music, noise of all kinds will do; it’s just annoying, fires, smoke, invading other campsites with their presence, drinking, loud, obnoxious. On one hand it appears to be nature, on the other it is a free for all of no social control. Once campground people get a few drinks in them they are beyond reason. Music, smoke, loud talking, hooting and hollering emanates from sites scattered through the grounds. The hosts hide in their trailers after dark, cops are busy with real crime somewhere else; many times campgrounds take on a nightmarish quality of people’s boorish inconsideration for their neighbors. This you will find at any campground, anywhere.

In the Reds Meadow, Devil’s Postpile area, on 11/30/11 there were sustained winds of 110 mph for 12 hours with gusts up to 180 mph. This caused some major tree blow down and closed area trails until these downed trees could be logged out. The winds came from an unusual direction, the north. There’s a thesis that the roots were shorter on the north side and that unbalanced root systems were a major contributing factor to so much blow down.

9/8

Our bus driver up to Horseshoe Lake collects hiker stories, to tell other hikers and tourists on the bus. He regaled us, probed us, saturated us with stories. Some folks really glom onto the hiking subculture and make it a raison d’etre. The whole long distance hiking scene reeks of an apparent authenticity, a flavor of John Muir, a sense of searching for something transcendent, pure and ineffable. And hikers present with genuine need, as they are out on foot and need help to get resupplied or for anything. Providing this help is the niche of “Trail Angels”. You sure appreciate it when someone gives a hand out there, it is welcomed; when you are made vulnerable to other people’s charity, you hope for the best and it is within this sphere that the trail angels find their entree. Yet the charitable actions are proscribed for this niche only. We are not talking about indiscriminant angels here, only angels who deal with hikers, as the bulk of hikers are educated city people, yuppies masquerading as hobos. Hikers might be dirty and full of adventure but they are not homeless. So being a trail angel is fundamentally safe as there are few real bums and hobos to deal with. There are very few, like Ramzova, who lives on $10 a day, who are actual tramps. Nevertheless the hiking scene represents a conscious disengaging from societal norms, a move away from the mainstream, to find something of value non-materially; trail angels and others can be swept along for the Canterbury Tales/ Dead Head flavor of the ride, as it is fun, unpredictable, genuine; it’s a real scene. It’s an off-the-beaten-track lifestyle and all one has to do is start hiking a few hundred miles to enter the storybook, to become a member of the community.

In some sense, hikers with all their gear, are the same general type as the Mammoth Lakes posers, it is the enshrining of an optional physical activity as the center of life. This optional activity develops its own culture and whole lives can be constructed around it.   

Somewhere in the hiking community’s founding principles and antecedents are John Muir et al, the Romanticists, the Transcendentalists. This scene has an actual philosophical and cultural base, a real root paradigm, where the outdoor activity is anchored in a transformational relationship with nature, a move away from industrial relations and big city alienation. Now however, these roots are hidden by a century of fog machine commercial hype and technological illusion. Why then are we doing this? By what means have we become infatuated here and unable to consider anything but our next episode of outdoor gratification? Are we doing this to find and discover? To escape? Is it about the gear, the exercise itself? What is it we are doing? Inquiring minds want to know. For me the long distance hiker follows the path of the Romantics and Transcendentalists, that history is there for the taking. That’s why I am here.

It’s important to know the thesis of your hike, whatever hike that may be, vs. simply mouthing off out of the inertia of unexamined assumptions. At least know your thesis.

In part ways my meanderings here are a reaction to those in the mainstream who question whether we are merely fucking off and not stepping up to the plate of responsible adulthood. My answer is that to reduce a modern spiritual quest to being equivalent to fucking off is just the same as any other type of dehumanization. Being a committed long distance hiker is a choice; yes it is an avoidance of immersion in urban-suburban-industrial life. In this day and age where all modern cultures seem to be transparent, fake constructs, the hiking community is one within which people can find meaning in face-to-face context. This face-to-face aspect is just the thing people want, as an antidote from the alienation inherent in modern, individual-oriented life. And hell, you get the best of both worlds; membership and individual freedom.

From our bus drop off at Horse Shoe Lake we got to Red’s Meadows packer resort and picked up our resupply, rested, raided the free box, shot the shit with some hikers in from the east coast and we then set out again. We’re back on the trail! After the Mammoth Lakes meltdown, something about the energy there…not good; it’s very good to be back out. This is the channel we want to be on; we’re much more in control out here. This is the sweet-spot vibration we want to be feeling.   

Many horses and pack mules have turned the trail to complete dust and when a string of pack mules came by or a group equestrians just riding, we were completely enveloped in clouds of dust. Sometimes as a hiker you feel that pack stock have really degraded your walking experience and hence there is a fair amount of tension between hikers and horse users, bad blood you might say, that the extremists on both sides have sown. I don’t really mind anything about it but the dust and how bad the trail gets torn up.

On our way out of Red’s Meadows we soon entered the remains of the 1992 Rainbow Fire that started near Rainbow Falls, in Fish Canyon, Fish Valley. We walked right through the epicenter. It was really cool to assess how much life had come back, how severe the burn had been in different areas, which areas avoided burning. Some of the trees, Jeffrey pine in particular, had all the branches burned off except the crown. Jeffrey and Western white pine were colonizing, but mostly it was red fir.

On the advice of Chris Ryerson we were headed to Iva Bell hot springs, 12 miles from Red’s Meadow. We’ll then head out of Cascade Valley and meet back up with the PCT at Silver Pass. Iva Bell has 3 or 4 informally improved pools. People arrive in large groups or by ones and twos, seemingly out of nowhere. Since there is no signage, everybody has to reconnoiter and wander around trying to find the springs, all over the hill everyone must go, otherwise you just won’t find the pools. We know how to case out a place in the woods and Fred finds Shangri-La. We get the primo spot with a private pool at @101 degrees and stay for 2 days. It’s a big area yet people come and camp right next to us, with the whole John Muir Wilderness can’t they at least get out of sight? Hot springs attract a whole different type of crowd, people who collect hot springs experiences; I don’t know what makes them tick. I don’t like to be too hot, I get out fast, it’s OK for me, but not to really go after. We’re finally clean for the first time in 3 weeks! We soaked our clothes in a bear container, in the hot water, the grime is off, Kim gets cracked fingers from too much wet, water and immersion.

Chris Ryerson: the new John Muir, he goes off trail, high-risk cross-country antics, feels alive in nature. He told us of the Pine Creek tungsten mine, 32 miles of underground tunnels, he went in; mentioned the Brownstone Mine. He is invigorated by Muir-like adventures out off the beaten track. It’s just one more way to do it.

9/9

The Rainbow Fire started around the Fish Canyon waterfall in 1992, now we see 20 years of regrowth. The new trees are 10 – 30’ high. Many burned trunks are blow down after so many years and many dead trees still stand. There’s a succession going on, there is lots of woodpecker habitat in dead trees after a burn and as those trees fall this habitat transitions towards favoring other species. Habitats wax and wane. In patches of hotter fire or less fire there comes a different succession of plants. All these slightly different patches represent a constantly shifting landscape mosaic. Differing patches are colonized by different species.

Blown down trees show that their root systems spread horizontally, on a flat plane, no big taproot in this predominantly mineral soil. The organic soil is just a thin layer of duff. The trees seem to generate their own organic soil by needle cast, cones falling and bark flaking off. Lots of Jeffrey pine survived the fire but just barely. The bark is adapted to fire. During a fire it starts to burn and then flakes off in little puzzle pieces, falls away towards the bottom, away from the upper living branches. The Jeffrey’s height, some up to 150’ leaves the crowns isolated from fire. Jeffries tend to be widely spaced, in a park-like distribution, so fire doesn’t jump from tree to tree. Ladder fuels (lower branches) are minimal on the tree itself.  The Rainbow Fire left many living trees with blackened trunks, lower branches burned off and only the very top green and alive.

Juniper roots go 30’ or more from the tree through rock fissures to find soil. In this Fish Valley area we see our first oaks, a large leaf oak with white checked bark, acorns small and roundish, mixed with Jeffrey and aspen, juniper, white fir. The biggest oaks are in a shady draw. Oak saplings grow in the litter below Jeffrey trunks, squirrels and birds stash the acorns and thereby plant them and various other seeds. This is a nursing type relationship between the big tree and new seedlings. White fir seems to be associated more with the Jeffrey zone, what I call chaparral, kind of a Manzanita, scrubby zone. The actual chaparral classification for California is different… Then we get into some mule ears and incense cedar! Great transitions! And now into a forest of mixed cedar and big Jeffrey pine. Studying the trees has provided an entrée to noticing all kinds of things about the totality of the nature we’re walking through. I’m discovering in life to notice and take advantage of entrees when they present themselves. The entrée provides a condensation point of sufficient interest, from there you just run with it.

The plant kingdom has photosynthesis. Plants make their sustenance right on site needing only sunlight and water. In the Sierra roots grow into practically pure mineral soil. Maybe the soil does not have to be rich if the plant is making its own energy directly from sunlight; the soil is just an anchor, something to hold the plant in, hold it down. The mineral soil must give something to the roots as the thin bit of organic duff gives precious little. The trees colonize, move into wherever they can get a grip, they are nearly self-sufficient; amazing really, to focus on the trees and let the whole scenario sink in over a period of weeks, a month, you start to notice things you just don’t on a day hike. This more substantial immersion gives a different, longer, more in depth view. The focus seeps in, sticks better over a sustained, concentrated period of time.

We’re in the Devil’s Postpile area. These post piles, which are seen in many places world wide, are basalt columns; Kim has an eye for them.

Kim has hard time with transitions. Transitions are what I love, what I have trained myself to enjoy, jazz, improvisation, fusion, muddy river country. That’s not to say I don’t like something definite to hang onto. I do. If it’s all formulaic anyway, my formula is to try to appreciate spaces where something new emerges. Yet, Kim is very adventurous, always exploring the inner and outer geography of wherever we are, always ordering a new dish at a restaurant while I order the same things. Maybe novelty and discovery are different from transition? We both like learning and being changed by new information. We both tend towards “middle path” vs. all or nothing type of conclusions. We both like how a long hike will transform us. I guess a transition is the process of morphing, reforming from one thing to another, where rules break down and new order emerges. 

For a hike to be transformational, it has to be sufficiently rare, the experience can’t become rote and regularized; same with meditation, the repetitive breeds a dead zone of nothing new; it’s possibly necessary to have a prior idea of how I want to be transformed; to get into a preferred position where something new can emerge, a setting up for emergent property potentials. The new, or the emergent property, is then consciously created, idea-lized! The new, the novel, the sense of discovery, this is what transforms and transfigures, a new thing is added to the mix and it just feels good; this is as much of what we are after in a hike, an altered inner landscape.

A long hike is a dynamic punctuation of the equilibrium of our normal life. We enter a state of prolonged punctuation between two static states, one regular life, the other growing accustomed to hiking life. In some respects a long distance hike is like one long Quaker Meeting, like one big meditation retreat. You proscribe your environment and then harvest the special things found only there. You conceive of and control the variables, manage your own X-chemistry. It is a formula. Our hike is similar to mystical religion and naturalist discovery; we set the stage, go in and try to find what we’re looking for.

People without a larger map/ context, they only know where they are in the trail corridor, have no larger sense of the area, range, region, drainages. This can be a safety issue; you’re more exposed the less you know about where you are. Many are out there as if it is like the city; the trail seems domestic, there is horse shit, lots of people going by, but the Sierra is big, powerful, unfeeling, no cell reception; many are exposed without even knowing it…particularly the ultra-light set with little gear and food; you get spooked off trail, can’t find your way back, you’re then equivalent to a wetback lost in the desert, fate waiting to fry your ass in the high altitude sun and freezing nights.

Modern first world people live in a world mostly free of danger from the elements and large predators. A certain arrogance and ease of movement emerges out of having domesticated the natural environment. It can be a fatal mistake if wilderness travel is seen as just an extension of city life. Sure you might be only 15 miles from a trailhead but those 15 miles can eat you up one step at a time.

Regulation: the big anti-regulatory thing, the big freedom of the market thing…how about no regulation by religion? Thought police always want to regulate too. If you don’t want regulation, make it a fair shot across the board. Total individual freedom, legal drugs across all state lines, abortions, bazookas, dump paint thinners and motor oil on the ground, a free for all of no regulation. Let’s take this premise to its absurd conclusion! Or do the anti-regulators only have some specifics in mind to free up for their own market, 2^nd Amendment preferences and then have a regulatory agenda for the rest of us? I can see the whole anti-regulation thing is really about ideology, not rules and regulations per se. “Regulations” are really just the natural manifestations of any controlling ideology, be that religion, the US Constitution, the New Deal or whatever.

Kim Quaker Moment: there is no good, there is unity

On the way out of Cascade Valley, after weeks and weeks of looking at red firs and mountain hemlocks and trying to divine just exactly what a white fir looks like, all of a sudden there are white firs, easily recognizable, they have a different needle profile, clearly not as robust a needle profile as red fir. They live at a lower elevation. 

9/10

Very relaxed, stream noise night. The mind just quiets right down; the static of civilization is turned way down, opening the space for other more interior things to rise up to the surface.

Yellow jackets/ hornets cruise just above the ground, on patrol, hovering, searching, smelling, they sniff out and are attracted to foot odor, they fly in my Crocs. My feet smell like dead, rotten meat, smelly, sweaty, these bugs are hard after it, kind of annoying. It’s an issue, blundering into nests or having them creep into your toes while you’re not looking. I got stung. The bite hurts bad at first, then itches for a week, you scratch, then a scab for weeks after.

Some woman we met in Yosemite, she and Kim were talking, the woman asked Kim how she could be out for two months? Kim said she was “independently poor” and the woman responded, “oh, authenticity”. That’s right lady, we didn’t buy it at a workshop. We got a laugh out of that, this person objectifying us by turning our hike into a noun, an object, she got her handle on us. I guess she was onto something. If the rich getting into heaven is as easy as getting a camel through the eye of a needle then I guess they are inauthentic. Lots of money is a commonly associated with corruption. If we are independently poor, are we not corrupted and therefor authentic? Cognitive dissonance re-emerges daily on the trail as you have to deal with the varying flavor of every individual who comes by. Any genuine consonance is much appreciated.

I get a kick out of reading the labels on the various energy bars we have. Bars have gotten big commercially, there are all kinds available in stores. In free boxes you find even more types and varieties. Here’s a good one: Mrs. Mays Trio Bar, nuts-seeds-fruit, vegan, Kosher, 0 trans fat, no preservatives, no GMO, “Mrs. Mays Naturals”, St. Carson, CA, product of China; this is all that whole food organic yuppies want and produced and packaged by wage labor slaves to give you a good price!

The east-west drainage break in the Sierra Nevada pretty much goes right up along the eastern escarpment. The eastern Sierra drains into the Great Basin which is part ways contiguous with but larger and different from the Basin and Range province. The western Sierra drains into California’s Great Central Valley and all that water goes out the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into San Francisco Bay and out the Golden Gate to the Pacific Ocean.

Squirrels really get after the pine cones, they gnaw the cone off the tree, knock it down, work it over at the base of the tree, they roll the cone around like corn on the cob, ripping off scales, get the nut, roll it, repeat process, fast, serious, focused. As long as you don’t move, they will sit there doing their thing until the cone is gone.

p. 373 Grapes of Wrath, the Preacher quotes the Bible: “Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat; but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.”

p. 378 Grapes of Wrath, Ma: “Woman got all her life in her arms. Man got it all in his head.”

9/11

Dry lightning flickered most of the night over clear skies, slept wonderfully relaxed; Kim up at 4:30AM for a last soak in the hot springs, back on the trail, boots on early, cold down-canyon breeze pretty strong, need all the clothes to be warm, don’t have many; the whole hillside is a cacophony of freshets, streams, and seeps, some hot, some cold. The hot springs are a sign of igneous activity close to the surface.

Being outside all the time engenders an expansive feeling, an opening up to and a participation in nature; you see the dawn slowly arrive, the night slowly come; it’s the rhythm of a day, the earth turning, the shadows, the breeze; we hike slow and soak it in the lessons of another timing; we tune into the feel of deep patterns of the planet. Here I sit, a ring around the crescent moon with Orion and the Pleiades bearing witness. How countless many have sat and seen the same? Through this I share a space with all my human ancestors.

In this same way I focus back and feel a commonality with all of life; I am all of life become conscious of itself. That slime on the tidal rocks was me billions of years ago and here I am now, on the bow wave of evolution, time and space. My momentary self consciousness rides on top of multiples of extinctions, branches and ancestors. Somehow here I am able to reflect on the whole sweep.

There’s a built in paradox between seeking a John Muir-like solitude in the Sierra and too many people trying for the same thing. Overcrowding ruins the solitude; constant social interaction is not why you’re here. Your head and heart is taken out of focus. The quiet mystical space Muir found in wilderness is just not there now along the major, popular trails. The places that once were isolated now attract hordes. A mystical quest now might have to go off trail, away from people and ironically, negatively impact more nature just to get away from more people.

We’ve seen little brushy oaks with small acorns. We saw them last year on the sides of the Sierra Buttes. Both cottonwood and aspen are poplars. The genus name is Populus. Cottonwood has a leaf shaped like a spade; the aspen leaf is ovoid.  Both trees can be found in riparian areas but cottonwood goes no farther, it needs lots of water; aspen goes out onto the hillsides.

Recently (10/9/12) the Forest Service in Tahoe National Forest, along Independence Creek, north of Truckee, cut down many old growth evergreen trees, legacy trees, 6’ in diameter, to make room for more aspen, to make up for fire suppression, to restore aspen groves, as conifers out compete them. This caused quite a ruckus, why destroy some really nice nature to bring back one idea of balance? This brings up an interesting issue in land management philosophy; what is nature supposed to look like? Are mankind’s effects unnatural? Is there ever any stasis? Is such a thing a climax community an illusion?

This issue came to the fore big time after the 1988 Yellowstone fire; did the Park do right by allowing fire to have its’ role or should the stasis of thick lodge pole pines have been better protected? If the Park Service mission is to “preserve and protect”, do they protect nature in its changeable dynamism or a just static snapshot of nature in time?

Junipers can grow in a thicker forest, not only exposed rocky slopes. They grow along with red fir, lodge pole, Jeffrey pine, white fir, all in a high percentage of mineral soil. The juniper has its sweet spot where it likes to live and grow but it also has outliers that push the edge. Junipers are my pet project. I see them as an amazing, magical tree that survives against all odds and is enchantingly beautiful at the same time. Junipers have qualities of incredible endurance and a stately elegance. Looking at and being with junipers brings out the veneration in me.

9/12

Watching the dawn come is just magic. I love it.

We meet a girl who had a tiff with her hiking partner and they separated. They had just met anyway… Kim brought her in, Rosie the Riveter was her name, a mini Kim personal rescue mission, it gave Kim a special meaning and purpose for a short while. Rosie’s dog spills liquid food right near our tent, the girl has no bear-proof container, she sleeps with her food, with the dog; “the dog is good protection”; actually it’s said that dogs attract bears and mountain lions. This is an example of why camping near strangers is not always desirable; their habits may compromise your safety and/or your peace of mind.  

Hear ye hear ye! Fred’s rant on “consumptive hype inertia”: case in point, hype to buy things that seem to be cutting edge technologically but are really unnecessary and basically useless: collapsible hiking poles, you can’t put your full weight on them or they collapse, they are useless to lean on to help on a bad step, but everybody has them. Everybody is walking down t he trail with two super expensive hiking poles. The poles dig into the side of the trail. Now instead of a one foot trail corridor it is three feet. The insidious nature of the consumptive fog machine just ramifies out. Industry and business keeps coming up with new toys and people are guilty as well for mindlessly wanting them. Gas hog SUVs are another good example. How many soccer Moms actually take those things off road?

Glacial theory in geology was developed in Europe in the mid 1800s through observing evidence on the ground in the mountains. John Muir was onto this trajectory as well. Geologists who believed in catastrophism challenged him. Muir won out by the force of his gathered evidence. It made too much sense. Eventually glacial theory was proven correct. However, no one person was responsible for developing glacial theory.

Outwash, moraines, polishing of rock, cirques, tarns, arête, hanging valleys, all these and many other glacial features are very evident in the Sierra. The old outwash is spread as giant alluvium, over whole valleys. The deposition of glacial outwash is a one-time large-scale event. Aggregate material will never move like that again until there is another glacier. Regular alluvial fans are much smaller than glacial outwash. The scale of it all is just tremendous and the glaciers that did it all are gone. The causation is all inferred ex post facto. The carving is done. The landscape is sculpted. All that remained was to divine the sculptor. And who might that sculptor be? Ice and lots of it, miles thick of it. 

The scenery in the Serra Nevada can be a dramatic overload, blow by blow one spectacular vista after another. The sky is super blue, especially to the north. A small dust devil whirls at 9000’. The NW slope has western white pine high, then opens below to juniper, lodge pole, chaparral, upper riparian areas and aspen. Jeffrey pine get right in with juniper on the rocky cliff action.

An old juniper log may have been alive 4,5, 6000 years ago. I touch it and feel respect for the tree in its death pose. Juniper is so hard with such a durable chemistry that it preserves insanely well. Old stumps, trunks and logs last and last; they don’t hardly rot. Gravity slowly pulls them downhill towards streams and lakes, away from their rocky lair. Then you find them in a seemingly out of place context. They may once actually lived at the lower elevation or on different slope aspects than now. It’s hard to say. I have theories. The junipers live, stay in one place silently for 1000s of years hanging onto life by the last conceivable thread of fibrous bark; finally they succumb, the bark is cut, the tree dies and then they last another 1000 years as dead wood. In these 1000 years, there is plenty of time for gravity to pull downhill. Alternately, if a juniper log can be 6000 years old, in a changing post glacial climate going from colder to warmer, juniper logs at lower elevations could actually have grown there in place. As the climate warmed, the junipers were pushed up higher…

Over the last 5 years permits have doubled to 5000 per year on the John Muir Trail. Who are all these people? I’d say in late summer, early fall, 60% are from an older age set: retired, bored, extra money from Silicon Valley types. Baby Boomers have the money and the health; they are who we are seeing late season. The hordes of northbound thru-hikers are mostly a young age set. They come through earlier in the year

In the freezing morning we walk fast to get warm and are glad for a patch of sun. But later, mid day and up to sunset we avoid the burning storm of rays except after a swim or dip in cold water. 

9/13

The dawn is an imperceptible yet inevitable change of night to day, the cusp of dawn spreads in the shimmering night sky and little by little the stars fade away. I’m up; I see it everyday. At 6:30 AM we are on the trail after an hour of getting ready. As the season progresses the day starts later and later, a shorter time to be up to get from here to there. The seasons are clocking us.

The “outdoor industry” is essentially the same as other business. Companies are not in it to be nice guys; they want sales, market. The outdoor industry has sort of a soft glow to it, fuzzy, back to nature, but these guys are sharks, smart and able to sell, hype and steer consumer desire. They have the magazines, the clubs, the websites, the momentum to cash in. They work to manipulate wants and desires. Let’s not fool ourselves that a green veneer is not hiding greed and consumerism. The fact of the matter is that people do not need all this new stuff and the media popularization of outdoor activity is ruining the very places advertised as so special.

The basic problem is not that alienated modern people have an impulse to connect with nature; you’d expect that, no, the problem is simple: too many fucking people, too many; overpopulation by affluent consumers is the real problem. And ironically it is these very overpopulated affluent, alienated Americans who, as eco-tourists, are expected to save the environment from extractive exploitation. What happens to nature instead is that the very places identified as special get ruined and over run by tourist bozos. Instead of mines and cattle we get an endless parade of people with $1000 dollar cameras and $1000 dogs.

Guys who have the big watch with all the gimmicks: it’s a status symbol, a symbol revealing something about the owner, his membership in the elite spenders club. What does this watch do? Nothing but tell you what you already know: you are here now, at this point, at this elevation, at this weather condition; big bucks for a useless toy but it does intimidate other males and possibly attracts females to power and predisposes them to mating. Modern man is highly evolved, yes? Expensive status symbols possibly attract a mate willing to procreate and produce new consumers of useless products, why, it’s its very own cultural ecosystem! It all starts with the watch. 

On the borders of rocky slopes, junipers are nursed in the debris pile at the base of a big Jeffrey pine tree. Birds and rodents stash the berries, the young juniper grows, has protection, then the Jeffrey falls and the young tree gets all the nutrients from the rotting hulk plus more light, if the big tree doesn’t crush it on its way down.

We came through a whole section of aspen with graffiti craved into the bark. The graffiti lasts about 30 years before becoming illegible. There are no dates from before @ 1980.

Cutting off switchbacks is a form of cheating. There is 10 - 15% rate of marital infidelity. Salmon colonize new streams, breaking any obligation to return to the sane one every time. Thus what we see as cheating actually equals a bone fide survival strategy. There are no hard fast rules when it comes to life getting itself by, whatever it takes; the proof is in the pudding. Parasites, scavengers and cheaters are all legitimate niches.

Energy bars look like pasty shit going in and coming out; sometimes I comment, when nature calls, that I’m going to give that tree over there a power bar… I saw a brown recluse under that tree…

Juniper bark is thick and fibrous; it must get soaked with rain and snow. Does this  moisture then wick it to the cambium? Could this be why junipers seem so vital even on barren slopes, that they can harvest, store and protect moisture in more ways than one?

Aspens show spirit, the wind rustles the leaves, inspires, the atmosphere respires, breath, wind, spirit, trees transpire, spires in a church; you’re in the ineffable with poplars and wind. Wind is the breath and spirit of nature. At 10,000’ I see some mighty big lodge pole pines. A big tree always calls my attention. Legacy trees they say.

Stealth camping: how to get off trail, away from other hikers and be positioned well for the next days hike, how to avoid the hordes of bozos, have water and a nice spot; don’t camp in popular places or next to the trail. Everybody’s going for the blond with big tits; stealth is adjusting the objective, to focus on areas away from the hordes, to avoid glommers and being stuck with the same people over and over again, just like you get stuck with people in a pack of cars. Stealth camping is an effort to be in control of the movie.

9/14

6:30 AM we’re on the trail, we like an early shot at passes and scenery, but it is cold! Frost. But cold is good, shadows are good for a long climb, you get heated up, you don’t want to pull a pass in the full sun at midday. Body temperature can be controlled better when it is cooler to cold. When it’s too hot, there’s nothing left to take off, nothing to do but be hot, stop, find shade.

There are schematics in nature books show elevations for different plant communities. In reality there is no uniform line for the elevation of different plant communities, it varies and depends on slope, aspect, exposure, substrate, topography etc. These elevations can vary by a 1000’ or more.

We met some hunters from Florence, CA, Roy and Stan. Roy can kill you from 1000 yards, Stan only 500.

p. 105 Grapes of Wrath, “you’re just as free as you got jack to pay for it.”

“Wilderness is…an open area retaining its primeval character and influence” Wilderness Act of 1964. 95% of Yosemite is wilderness.

The chickaree is also known as Douglas’ squirrel

9/15

Time rolls along, up early again, listening to the flow of a fork of the San Joaquin River, down in the Jeffries, good sleep among the gnarled roots and boles of large lodge pole pines; the roots wick your dreams down below the soil, down into deep, dark sleep; down through the roots and molder into the fabric of time, the long, into the low pulse of the earth and universe. We’re there; we’ve found what we’re looking for. “Waves of what’s happening breaking on the shores of the moment.” (Chris Baisan)

Each step produces a cloud of dust, on the trail, by the tent, in the kitchen, anywhere, dust, snot, stuffed up, sinus issues, can’t walk together, must be separated by a big distance. Low light is good because then you can’t see the dust. You can pretend it’s not there, then we can walk closer together. Pulverized dirt and dust is ominpresent, high use trails, a dry year plus predominantly mineral soil, it all adds up to stuffy noses.

A raven gave me a tune while I waited for Kim to finish up some business at Muir Ranch. I was in the woods alone and the raven up in a tree nearby. I had a definite communication. I don’t know the message other than, “hey, I’m here, I’m intelligent, I can send you a code.” The raven spoke a pattern of croaking noises and I translated it to a tune that I whistled, then we stayed there doing the same thing back and forth at each other.

With fusion in music, there are no clear lines, it involves recognizing and integrating two or more dissimilar aspects at the same time, aspects that have different boundaries and rules, different shapes and textures are mixed. This is similar to liking transition zones in nature, appreciating the improvisational.

We enter Kings Canyon National Park, take a shit, there’s somebody around. Yes, privacy issues get worse with more and more people.

As an amateur naturalist/ philosopher/ anthropologist you don’t just walk in and find yourself able to clearly see what is happening. You’re not just freshly discovering what’s there, you find your idea of it too, the prior idea colors what you see, dyes it in the wool. You find a connection, corroboration, a feeling, an understanding. You make a thesis; maybe it adds up, maybe not, your insight is maybe a fantasy, a wishful construction, a symbiosis of objective and subjective, you’re lucky if you see close to the objective, lucky if you can realize your assumptions, there’s a good chance to find nothing more than your own illusion. How you marshal your forces will affect the outcome. You must be limber and open-minded to not find what you’re looking for. Deft use of reputable sources, evidence, research methods, all adds up to a more solid argument, an argument with more basis.

9/16

We made a frosty river crossing in the early morning; we had crossed the river in the first place yesterday afternoon to avoid people, to get off the main track. We like our illusion that we are the only ones around. We like to have our camp and be playing house and don’t want strangers to come and booger us up with stupid small talk.

There was a deadfall in the night. We heard some groaning, creaking noises, what the hell was that!? I got up with my light, saw no eyes over there, came back to the tent and shortly after a large tree just fell over, right near our stashed bear containers, sort of a close call.

For the “outdoor industry”, ultra light can’t be the dominant paradigm as too little would be sold. Short trippers, weekenders, they take massive amounts of gear; these guys are keeping the suppliers afloat economically. Ultra light is a minimalist thing and what great consumer oriented business is going to thrive consciously trying to sell less? I guess ultra light just has to reinvent the same items over and over to make people feel like they need the new color.

The sound of footsteps is the morning’s backdrop to an immense Fall quiet. Frost, river on rocks, still trees, cold air…it really touches you, a communication with nature down to the fibers of the soul. The High Sierra is a sustained crescendo of inorganic forces. Life gets marginal; it’s similar to desert, to the Pinacate Biosphere Reserve in Mexico, Kim and I savor the barren landscape for its sparse beauty. Lingering behind these full moments of joy and inspiration is the land’s potential severity; it can kill, without intention or malice, this stark finality juxtaposed with sublime beauty. This is life. Life always has mortality looking over one shoulder. The beauty and fragility of life is seasoned by an abrupt point of no return, death. Yet I never go around worrying that I will die one day. The carpe diem feeling comes on every now and again when someone dies, but ultimately, life is for living; death will have its share. I wont worry then either.

The snag that fell, it almost got me, I was up, checking for bear on our food containers, heading that way… a simple twist of fate. Twenty more steps, 2 more minutes. We inevitably end up camping near snags (standing dead trees), sometimes we take a risk, there’s only so many flat spots…

We meet the occasional John Muir wannabe who’s been off trail for a week, crazy climbing and scrambling, digging boots into fragile terrain to find enlightenment, running roughshod over cryptogrammic soils for personal gratification. Impact: how much is OK? How much matters? Do we get to be here without guilt? Do the steps I make in the wilderness belong to the order of nature?  

9/17

We camped at 11,000’, 1000’ below Muir Pass, very nice, waterfalls, remnant glaciers draining to the Middle Fork of the Kings River. Lots of packing in the morning, my own packing is contingent on Kim’s packing; we’ve made it that way by design; I’m always last by a half hour, my stuff goes in last: tent, food, dental. It’s just as well, then there is no pressurized waiting for Kim if I do my super early pack up.

There is an unbelievable amount of rubble, very rough walking, very hard on boots and shoes. The forces that be have torn this rock up in every conceivable way and then we walk through it. Muir Ranch is 20 miles from Muir Pass, from alpine tundra to lower montane forest of Jeffrey and juniper chaparral.

On this landscape, the last glacial maxima sets the clock; up high in the refugia of the last remnants of glacial ice is time now; civilization’s trajectory happened in the time it took the glaciers to melt back from their last maximum extent to today. From up high among the peaks and passes and down to the valleys and terminal moraines, our hike is measured and mapped by the ice’s effects, by the ice’s footprint; 10,000 years ago to present, that’s what clocks civilization and also this last pulse of ice out of the Sierra Nevada. Sequoia tree rings go back to and clock Jesus, the Bristlecone chronology goes back 10,000 years too, the glacial valleys go back 10,000 to humanity’s rise from hunter gatherers to urban agriculturalists.

The goals of the modern public lands user are individual in nature yet these goals are enmeshed in a context of common purpose and focus. Just what this common ground is for outdoor users is at once the same and different. It serves no great purpose to make individual volition a pejorative thing; there is no escape that people are at once individuals and members of some type of community. There’s a background sense that modern individuality is divorced from meaningful communal context and maybe so, but the flip side is great freedom of choice and potential for discovery; what you gain in freedom you lose in belonging and social stricture. And when was behavior ever not individual in nature? To criminalize one and exalt the other is nothing more than applying today’s hyper partisan dualistic sensibility to everything; it’s a smear job, lack of thought, the automatic pilot application of a metaphor. This is the academic illusion, that the socio-cultural fragments we analyze are as real as objects. Behavior is multiple things at once. You conceptually take apart and then put the pieces back together. Anybody can take apart a radio, putting it back together completes the cycle. The one and the many, ramifies to libertarianism, to communism, two poles on a spectrum; extremism either way. I’m with the Dalai Lama, go for the middle path. The Dalai Lama also says humanity is one; anyone you see is a reflection of your own humanity. All of us are really not that different.

We’re heading down from the high country. There’s a nice stand of western white pine mixed with white bark pine, farther down we get into the first Mtn. Hemlocks, farther down we go into the warmer more forgiving valley. We saw a huge, elk-size buck. Could it have been elk in Kings Canyon N.P.? I saw a frog on a lake just north of Muir Pass. That’s a cold frog in the winter, a rare frog these days, amphibians are under duress from pollution, invasive species; the most helpless suffer. I don’t like it that my species is causing the extinction of so many others now. The extinction rate now equals or surpasses past mass extinctions! Humanity is really fouling the nest. The land management agencies have stopped stocking trout in the mountain lakes because of the negative effects on amphibians.  A good reason to get environmentally conscious is the sad fact that humanity is killing whole species at a high rate; we need to get that shit under control. It is not morally right to permanently wipe out so many species. 

A tune comes into my head from the Beatles, “We’re so sorry, Uncle Albert, but we haven’t done a bloody thing all day…” That’s right, nothing more than go from here to there. It’s a tough job and we’re doing it, somebody’s got to. Sorry.

We met a mountaineer, Klaus, a German guy, a world-wide mountaineer, I named him the Mountain Man; he said the “Sierras are world class, plus it doesn’t rain!” Nice fella.

The longer we are out, the more and more there is a process of surrendering, to every aspect of the hike. You can handle a marginal camp spot, can tolerate the bozos, the cold, floaties in your drinking water, being dirty… the physical discomforts pale to the inner opening up.

9/18

A nice big fire really takes the chill off the dawn air, Orion looks down over my fire, “nice and cozy” he says. We don’t have many fires; when it’s cold and there’s lots of wood and we’re not in any hurry, it’s nice.

We camp in the zone of the former Palisades Valley Fire, 20-40 years ago. This area is not as highly impacted as the Rainbow Fire, still it was cooked pretty good, lots of small trees and bushes killed.

Huge alluvial deposits from glaciers are now forested over. There are house-sized rocks, alluvial fans made up of cattle sized rocks, some or a lot of this is probably glacial outwash more than regular alluvium.

Collapsible hiking poles are a manufactured “want”, not a need. A need would be a stick, one pole, that can help with river crossings, steep steps etc.

On a weekday and south of Bishop Pass there are less people; it’s the end of the JMT season. Mather Pass: these passes are high, long 1-2 day affairs. Mather Pass: kick ass steep and long; the south side is like the moon, very cool; worth it to arrive with the low angle sun in the afternoon, to get the long shadow photos.

Everything here has a story to tell, rocks, sky, stars, moon, mountains, valleys, if you only have time to listen and tune in.

9/19

A pungent (poignant) moment, another great Kimmieism. Kim hurt her back yesterday and today again; we’re on Plan B. Hiking on is probably not in the cards, i.e. this hike could be over…

The JMT/ PCT goes south past impressive mountains of pure rock; our trail out now, Taboose Pass and Taboose Canyon goes east out of the Sierra to Rt. 395. We’ll collect our resupply packages and head home maybe via Nevada.

9/20

We take a rest day to give Kim’s back a break and take stock of her condition; we have the resources for extra time, enough food, she’ll get some R and R and we’ll get a sense of her range of movement, her level of pain.

Immense quiet here, a citadel of rarified earth and air, crème de la barren, only highly adapted organisms can live here year round, mostly trees, a few birds, squirrels, lichens. 

Today, after Kim hurt her back again, I stashed her pack in the woods and we walked up the trail, then I went back for her pack, in stages, so she would not have to carry any weight. When I went back it made me sad to see her pack stashed in the woods all by itself; a big change, then to see her disappear into the trees on the far side of the lake in a test walk. She must be disappointed; these hikes really clean house on her soul; they are big time for her, to have to leave early and go back to civilization, all the humdrum clutters her mind, makes fog, muddy water that she has to struggle with. The woods are clear and pure, no people to mess things up; the trees and rocks and stars are to be wondered about, not conflicted about.

The rock is cold! There is no conscious awareness. The seasons they just are, they exist, being; everything that Is, a variation on being. All of life and non-life, occupying the same space as this immense quiet.

Waterfalls trickle in distant basins following the glacier’s path. Today is cold; the sun is not warming things up. The moon was out last night as me and Hoss settled into our little nest. We started a fun thing by both calling each other Hoss.

As I touched on before, “cheating” is a legitimate survival strategy: little frogs hiding near big ones, little bucks mating while the big ones fight, at the human level it seems to stand contra to our main adaptation (cooperation/ strength in numbers), yet being a backdoor man works to spread your genes, at a certain percentage; Fred’s Baseline Cheating Rate = 10-15% One thing’s for sure, if you decide play by cheaters rules, to go after what you want, keep in mind that others are doing the same thing; you’re never safe; there’s always another streetcar ready to pull into that station.

As mentioned before as well, energy bars/ power bars/ bars, they make all sorts of fantastic claims, like it is magic: 100% organic, gluten free, wheat free, nut free, all live (dried under 105 degrees), Kosher, no GMOs, no trans fats, no cholesterol, all handmade, all raw kitchen, all family owned, raw, vegan, certified organic, more nutritious and much easier to digest, ingredients preferably from local growers, maximized enzymatic and nutritional integrity and flavor, this all from Freeland Foods, Mountain View, CA. Go Raw! Real Live Foods spirulina energy bar!!!!!!! This is like religion; purify yourself! It covers all the PC angles needed for guiltless eating; pleasure foods are analogous to sin, if it tastes good and has fat, salt or sugar, the three main ingredients of good taste, then you are a sinner, are guilty and you need to buck up; this all plays on deep rooted moralistic instincts we have to conform to group-think. There is no way to assess the truth of this; you need faith; who can verify “maximized enzymatic and nutritional integrity and flavor?” Bullshit. One thing’s for sure, the purity angle is worked just as hard as any matter of straight up nutrition.

In the right conditions there can be really big white bark pine with thick trunks, 80’ tall within 500’ of tree line, among bushy, shrubby growth of the same trees.

Hikers pass along the trail going south. Where are they going? Mt. Whitney and Whitney Portal more than likely, knocking off the JMT. Here hidden above an unnamed lake I read Gabriel Garcia Marquez short stories, contemplate white bark and lodge pole pine, listen to water run and watch breeze rustle the pines. Kim studies the maps, hopes to resurrect the trip; were we were really going somewhere? Or is it just the time was cut short?

I go on a day hike and leave Kim back at camp. At 11,000’ plus, like junipers, white bark pine logs are pulled downhill by gravity, cut loose from the soil they move imperceptibly down by forces unseen. And it’s true, the south facing tree line is higher in elevation than the north face, you see it.

If you squint your eyes and look over a whole long swath of mountains, trees become like lichens on a rock. In an exercise of scale, I refocus on this vast, monstrous view and see the mountains as rocks with lichens, but the “lichens” are trees; my imagination has free reign. In this current view, the JMT looks north towards Pinchot Pass, eastwards is Taboose Pass to the Owens Valley, south is the lunar valley to Mather Pass, west is Bench Lake; all these passes open to a huge basin where I stand now at tree line surveying from a commanding location where someone long ago built a stone bench and a wind shielded stone fire break. I see the appeal of off trail hiking; it’s just you and nature, a rush to actually be alone, surrounded by nature, without the feel that someone will soon walk by. Now that I’m in a space to be able to focus my attention on nature, able to be quiet and not in a hurry, this alone time is delicious.

Up here you can feel even more the grandeur and scale of the Sierra. You are dwarfed by it, like an ant, amongst elemental forces, elements spun by the stars whose light we bathe in every night; it’s all just magic. We’re a piece of this but so small. We belong but are no more important, in the outsized way our egos might suggest. I have a towering view of the lakes up to Pinchot Pass; white bark pines cling to life amazingly amidst severe wind, cold, snow, ice and altitude. The white barks put up a multi-branched crown which is a result of multiple seeds stashed by Clark’s nutcrackers; to differentiate a lodge pole from a white bark pine at a distance, the lodge pole top has a more conical crown.

Off trail into the Spartan hinterlands is as alone as you can get in the lower 48; you’re a speck, with no electronics you rely on yourself and your judgment. It may be only 40 or 50 miles to a road but that is some distance if you find trouble, and the road itself may be 10 miles from any traffic. The point: be safe, keep a lid on it; it’s too far out to have a bad accident.

Passes we have crossed on this trip: Carson Pass, Ebbetts Pass, Wolf Creek Pass (white bark pine day hike), Sonora Pass, Bond Pass, Seavey Pass, Benson Pass, Tioga Pass, Agnew Pass, Mammoth Pass, Seldon Pass, Donohue Pass, Island Pass, Silver Pass (after Cascade Valley), Muir Pass, Mather Pass (like the moon).

9/21

We go out, exit the trail to save Kim’s back from any further injury. Taboose Pass is right on the wave of the escarpment. Down the canyon on the east side is steep rubble en extremis. We get to a limber pine grove and camp by a creek. These are my first limbers of the trip, how exciting! Older limbers have one straight trunk up to 3’ plus thick. They seem to keep a single trunk and maybe a double leader and then they branch out higher up. Do they get multi-crowned like white barks? Limbers are thin barked and put out a lot of sap. Watch out for putting anything under them. There are a couple of small Jeffries and lodge poles mixed in this stand of limbers in upper Taboose Canyon, also a couple of good sized lodge poles. At 60’ tall, these limbers are full size, mature trees.

9/22

Dawn breaks over the White and Inyo Mountains. At 5:30AM, there are thin wisps of light on the eastern horizon. Windy night, creek rolling down, the limber pines take us into new dimensions of sleep and unconscious. Clouds ripple across the sky like waves marking sand on the beach.

It’s really nice to be up with the stars and see the day come on slowly, for over an hour, quiet, no personality, no social, just the world, the universe, the outline of the mountains becoming clearer, light opening another day, the mystery of everything darkly surrounding and then comes the light. This is like the Sierra Madre sunrise from Tavo and Maria’s front porch in remote Chihuahua, Mexico, timeless, isolated, from on high, a new dawn, a new eon, so much unknown out there under that burgeoning light, so much space leading up to this little speck of consciousness, where all comes into and through the focus of my being, all of life and being, reflected from each point to the center, a snowflake of consciousness here, FCA at the center of the sunrise.  People are like snow flakes, are all different yet the same.

Each dawn, each day is a tick on the clock of how many days you have to live and be conscious, your life a series of moments, events, ineffable qualities; the ultimate quantity and duration of a life is unknown until the final tick. Until that time I don’t see any reason to worry. I’m going to play the hand I’m dealt.

The day really catches fire as the sun brightens the clouds more and more until boom! there’s direct light. The sun to rise and cross the sky one more time. The whole dawn takes about two hours.

A wider net of what a hike means; so much more than gear. Gear only reflects the general objective, not the end all of a trip. A trip is about the trip, not the gear. We descend from 11,500’ to 5000’. That’s a lot for just a few miles. Red fir start to get mixed in, not many at first. We meet a crew from Marin County, some slick hard-chargers, week end warriors. One guy, whose brother-in-law built Bob Weir’s TRI Studios in San Rafael, he equated the “independently poor” crack with having reduced expectations. I guess that telegraphs that he has higher expectations…Are these expectations of which I speak, material? Kim and I are materially disengaged. We live low on the totem pole. Down, down, down: a solid stand of red fir mixed with white fir, Jeffrey and curl-leaf mahogany. Less and less trees now, the landscape opens into prickly pear, sage and pinyon, to the valley bottom, shadscale scrub and desert. I look back at the mountains and see the limber pines way up there, specks, lichens. Are we really gone?

We get to the road, Rt. 395 and with no town nearby we are in the middle of nowhere, traffic rips by at 80 mph; we start to hitch hike, dirty, packs propped up on hiking/ ski poles still from the dumpster in White River Jct. Jimmy the ¼ Paiute gave us a ride to the burger joint in Big Pine, Kim gives him some obsidian we found and he gives her an arrow head he found. Just like Ma said in The Grapes of Wrath, it’s the poor people who help you out; Jimmy was a poor man but had the heart to extend himself, he turned around, came back for us and took us to town.

We eat and go to do laundry; we meet an 88-year-old Marine veteran from WW2 who gets $565 per month from the VA and trades that for a room at the back of the Laundromat. He’s tethered to a long oxygen tube; he comes out and talks.

9/23

We walk over to Glacier View campground outside Big Pine, at junction of Routes 395 and 168; this is a rude shock, lights in our eyes all night, drunk people, tons of dust, dog shit, noise, the host is drunk. The 395 Corridor area is economically depressed, lots of Romney stickers. The newspaper Inyo Register has content of @ 20% religion of the most simplistic, literal sort, plus tax protestors, fire fee protestors, no separation from church and state folks who want a Christian state church. Lack of historical knowledge causes people to idealize the Dark Ages and past repressive religious regimes, and somehow that dovetails with libertarianism?

I went for a walk around town to take in the flavor of the place. I look at the local trees with much interest. Trees are now my thing. Arizona cedars were given away free here some 30 years ago as wind breaks. They serve well for that but are highly combustible, a fire hazzard. Water from two or three big east slope creeks is free all summer, run right through town in a system of ditches that go right by everyone’s property. This old style irrigation is fun to see.

9/24

With no cell phone, no public phone, no car or Internet, we are crippled. The library is closed, open at odd hours and when you show up dirty with a big pack you are stigmatized. Homeless? This is a taste of being the underclass, on foot, no resources. It’s tough enough to start turning a guy antisocial. You get angry at the poor treatment, lack of resources. Along the Rt. 395 main drag of Big Pine we walk miles to get to a phone or the library, things are depressed, storefronts closed, for sale, for rent, local businesses run out by national chain mini-mart gas stations. Once the librarian discovers we are just masquerading, she becomes very helpful and friendly, “we’re on the trail”, “oh how interesting!”

We are a long way from our John Muir Trail inspiration, being enveloped by web upon web of social interference. No longer the captains, our pink cloud starts to turn grey.

This campground is really a shit hole, dust and dirt blowing in our tent, crack heads in broken down old RVs living here permanently, alcoholics, noise all night, no cover, no place to hide. I was going to go to Independence and get our resupply package but the bus was a half hour late making it impossible to get a turn-around trip until the evening. The bus service is horrid; you are stuck out here in poverty stricken eastern Sierra; no car, no home, liberal, not a good fate. A drunk Indian lady with stitches on her face came out of the bushes to the bus stop and panhandled me. Hard times.

On the trail we are in command. We decide where to camp, everything is potentially under our control, come to town we’re no longer in control. It’s the beginning of the end of the time we bought; we’re still on an adventure but the space now demands a shifting of gears.  

At the library I get a science book and discover a new term: bilaterians. These are animals that have bilateral symmetry as compared to say, radial symmetry. A sea star is radially symmetrical, a fish is bilaterally symmetrical. Fred once again escapes from the crush of objective reality by retreating into his mind! That boy knows how to keep himself occupied.

Big Pine is taken over by the gas station convenience marts, chains, franchises and plastic signs. The strip takes on a the fake character of vampire squid money from New York City. The old store fronts fade into disrepair, even the Chamber of Commerce office is gone. Years ago we got nice posters from them. The residents are left with nothing but seedy motels, gas and Carrol’s Grocery. Paiute Indians from Independence come up to Carrol’s one after another, 45 miles away, no grocery down there, out of business. Some come from sleeping in the bushes to panhandle for booze money, first thing in the morning. Imagine living in a rural area and your grocery is gone forcing you to have to drive an hour for food, or to wait forever for the bus to go shopping. This is not even close to middle class. This is rural poverty. Not the plump Bay Area with lots of dinero to spare, yet to be poor in Sonoma is much the same, you will be mocked by food you can’t afford while you wait forever for the bus too.

When homeless, like we are getting a taste of, you quickly become disillusioned, you lose all faith in humanity. You are shunned. It’s a downward spiral. Your progressively worse attitude feeds you being shunned even more; the cops run you out; you cant sit on the sidewalk, can’t use a bathroom, can’t sleep anywhere, just get out of town so we can’t see you. This is exactly like the Grapes of Wrath, get these hobos out of sight! Build a fence, close the shades, these bums are just a bunch of “takers”, just get them out of here, this is what our state Christian church tells us.

9/25

Third night in a row in a low-life campground as we wait for Monday to come to be able to catch a bus, phew!

We’ve had a chance to ask locals all our questions and develop a sense of the place. Water is the central issue. In the 1930s LA pretty much stole all the water from the Owens River and funneled it to LA, same as San Francisco did by grabbing the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Obversely, LA would say they bought the land fair and square, no “stealing”. Whatever, this caused Owens Lake to dry up. Ground water has then been over-pumped to make up for the loss of river water and all together has created a major dropping of the valley water table and of the lakebed itself. A dry lake makes for lots of dust. It’s windy here anyway, very windy, unsettlingly windy; the dust blows up in huge plumes that can be tracked from space to over LA and beyond; people have respiratory problems. Who might these people be? The poorest of them all, the Paiute Indians, living in shacks on a teeny reservation next to the dry Owens Lake. A small bit of water was released by LA into the lake, after years of legal wrangling, to try and settle the dust, so far: too little too late. The dust is a regional problem. The pumped down, lower ground water level makes it so soils cannot produce, sage and desert plants invade and take over. This is all just like colonialism only LA was the colonizer and ranchers with no political power were their conquest. The Indians sit at the bottom of the whole pile, double colonized.

Government is the main employer in the Owens Valley, public land management agencies of all sorts, BLM, Forest Service, Park Service, the LA water and power agency plus other utilities. Number two economically is tourism: fishing/hunting/ recreation. It’s ironic that the very people who detest government must depend on it most here. Ironic that it is government that creates the wide-open spaces that attract the tourists. Take away government work and this place would be a dust bowl, nothing doing. Services are generally lacking except in Bishop; you must to drive to Bishop to get anything or else get reamed by local mark-up. Carson City is the next big town north of Bishop and there is nothing really to the south of any size. Bishop is the anchor for towns an hour or more to the north and south.

It’s curious, in other parts of rural CA like Red Bluff, the prices are lower than the Bay Area because the market can’t support Bay Area levels of inflation. The price is only inflated in the Bay Area because people can afford to pay more and businesses shrewdly figure just how high they can push it. Whereas in Red Bluff, gas is cheaper, food is cheaper; businesses there can’t squeeze as much out of the people. In the Owens Valley and Eastern Sierra however the people can be squeezed because they have no other options, they are caught on the flypaper of capitalism. Yet, there’s always exceptions, Carrol’s Market in Big Pine has good deals; Kim found them, a ton of pork at the expiration date for just two bucks. Kim is an excellent shopper, she’ll case out all the prices.

That the regional land is primarily government owned is why you see these vast open expanses, valley to mountain peaks on all sides, wide open, undeveloped. It is undeveloped as well because there is no water to be had; LA took it all. They took it all during the same era as large private interests bought all the land in the Dust Bowl and drove out the Okies. It’s a bad process; an abuse of power, just like colonialism but done to our own people. Screw the little guy, that’s the American way! Freedom is for businessmen, not citizens with no land or power. The American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, for the merchant class, not a revolution by and for working people. Revolutions that enfranchised the little guy, the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, quickly succumbed to moneyed, powered interests. Revolutions are just expressions of frustration at elite excess, afterwards the elites quickly move back in and reconsolidate their power. Like Machiavelli said, you need to throw some bones out there to mollify the masses, the cruel rulers lose power more quickly

In the Owens Valley there’s an ecological shift happening, ground water has been pumped below the surface water table and the plants and trees are dying, a new plant assemblage adapted to severe drought is coming in.

Rt. 395 is way too noisy. Lots of semi trucks roll through. The neighborhoods in Big Pine are all within a mile of 395, to live here is to listen to one semi after another. Route 395 is the only north/south artery for eastern California. Nothing is possible north/south through the Sierra Nevada. To the east of 395 is all Basin and Range, nothing out there to go to. So put up with the noise, that’s the only way you’re going to get goods delivered.

I live at the margins of society anyway. I’m the jackal sneaking scraps of metaphorical wildebeest from the big carnivores of life; it’s a viable strategy, scavenging, parasitism; if there are scraps why waste them? I’m a small scavenger, not a licensed contractor like the hyena. A few big feedings can hold me for a long time. Maybe I am more like a python, one good feeding can last a year! I can at times adopt a profoundly alienated perspective, with a bitter tone, but this only if I remain unreflective of the fact I pretty much have chosen to not buy the mainstream narrative of what success is. And since I am not buying, how could I be alienated? Alienated would only be if I was buying and couldn’t afford it. I prefer to preserve the illusion that I am in control; I choose my paradigm, to value the inner over the outer. Of course this is all predicted on a certain minimum level of material prosperity.

Everything is colored by its context and how you are feeling. You can be in a great place but it seems fucked up and vice verse. Mood and tone determine a lot. Could have been the right place, but it was the wrong time…Being freshly laid makes the world seem a brighter place! You got that rosy flushing. A Mountain Dew gives a surge of energy. Same world, same day, who you are is somehow different. A kaleidoscope of feelings and thoughts, if we could only command at all times, but no, we are sometimes as if seed blowing in the wind. Out here in Big Pine we are more seeds in the wind than conscious co-creators of any meditative space.

The wind has blown me to temporarily homelessness. In a culture of poverty, when everything falls completely apart it becomes progressively harder to put the pieces back together. Africa, Paiutes, Mexico, you get corruption, survival mentality, loss of community, loss of unifying principles, busted down to the lowest levels of existence, prey for the unscrupulous, those with more resources take advantage. Is this nature? Human nature? Is this capitalism? I got mine, don’t mess with mine man; I can’t share or it will mean I have less and I want more!

We get books and knick-knacks at an alley yard sale; I get Planet of the Apes, Kim gets another outlandish book, Interview With The Vampire for the bus and train ride. Nothing like a little light reading.   

We make our escape from crack head used car lot campground and now are bound for Sin City #2, Reno, Nevada. In spite of the experience as homeless, once on the bus, Rt. 395 is outstanding for the natural features and beauty. Give a guy a little comfort and he’s liable to even turn Republican.

Kim does a wonderful job of navigating all our logistics, from a pay phone, with limited information. We stayed in the campground waiting for the week to start, when things would be open, all public service, including the bus to Bishop, is shut down on the weekend here. The waiting got interminable. We got stuck in our minds: what to do? Which option? Ask Ken for a ride, go south, go north, go back on the trail? Finally I said, let’s get the hell out of here and do it on our terms, go to Reno, get AMTRAK, go home; we’re in control here, eh?

So Kim does it up, $56.00 per ticket for the Eastern Sierra Transit up to Reno making a connection in Bishop in front of the Vons. $49.00 each for train ticket from Reno to Martinez. She gets through to MaryAnn to come pick us up; we are all set. Many questions have to be asked of recalcitrant bus drivers who, like the librarian, assume we are rough homeless and not simply regular people out for a non-mainstream lark. Once Kim opens her mouth they know we are OK; they soften up, she has the voice, the face, she will wow them; they will see she is good people. Only an ogre could be hard with Kim.

9/26

Now we are living inside. How bizarre, a mirror to reflect on myself while simply brushing my teeth! Mirrors, Narcissus, glorifying our identities; where are we going that it matters so much how we look? Who cares, as long as we look presentable! If we look good enough the Confidence Fairy will maybe bless us.

We take a walk downtown and as we stroll along the riverfront promenade I pick up bits and pieces of info: The Black Rock desert is a 400 square mile, flat, prehistoric lakebed 100 miles north of Reno devoid of vegetation, site of the Burning Man festival. Myron C. Lake was the founder of Reno, the Lake Mansion looks like a fun place to visit. Pyramid Lake is the largest remnant of Pleistocene ice age Lake Lahontan. Right in downtown Reno along the Truckee River is Wingfield Park, specially designed for kayaks to fool around in.

Impressions of Nevada: gluttony, greed, gambling, sloth, lust, corruption, decadence; people even are smoking inside. We might as well get with the program. Shoot, we need food for the train ride. Welcome to the next exciting adventure of All You Can Eat Buffet Rustlers! With a good handful of gallon Zip Loc bags in Kim’s big collapsible Chico Bag we load our dinner plates up and start to stuff the bags full of: roasted vegetables, chicken fajita, ½ a pizza, fried chicken, cold fruit, rolls and butter, pork taquitos, baked potato, pork fried rice, prime rib, macaroons. Of the macaroons Kim said “I stoled them. I can eat them when I want.” At first Kim was nervous about rustling the food, but once we got started she figured if we were going to get caught, we might as well get as much as we could. As a hedge against being busted I spoke Spanish to the hostess on the way out, as if that cultural camaraderie might convince her she could let us go, if she was going to turn us in... We put the food on ice in the sink and covered it with a few towels, in our room on the 14^th floor of Harrah’s Casino, overlooking the Truckee River and downtown Reno.

Dawn in Reno from the 14^th floor, few stars, lots of city lights, climate control in the room, quite the change. Having a room at Harrah’s is like being a zoo animal. I look out the window at the glacier carved mountains, the Cambrian rocks and think, this too shall pass. All the sparkle and grandeur of Reno is nothing in the face of geologic time. From the perspective of such mountains it’s hard to take man’s immediate concerns too seriously. Mankind, hubris, arrogance, hell bent to foul the nest in the name of progress, justified and counting on God to bail out the faithful in heaven; in this moment it all seems fairly absurd: Reno, Christianity, glaciers.

The quiet grace of nature from which we have recently been immersed has momentarily changed my channel. I catch a glimpse of how to think like a mountain. This focus lingers now, contrasting with Reno, will evaporate more and more that I am away from the immense stillness. Evaporate it might yet I know what I’ve seen and felt in the Sierra will call me back, call me back searching for the mystic.

There is a real homeless camp along the river; they have a fire. I see them from 14 stories above. It’s cold out there. Maybe the whisky will take away the pain. Nevada, a state glorifying excess with no social services. Down by the river there’s an excess of nothing. Nevada is not a Mom and apple pie kind of place.

Nevada markets excess, intoxicants, food, entertainment, sex, age-old attractions. Blow-by-blow entertainment acts brings the people in. Then there is the outdoor exercise culture marketed along with, go get your exercise, pay your dues, inoculate the excess, counteract the sin and then come in and defile yourself with drink, whores, and gambling. Maybe running, skiing, mountain biking will make up for the ingestion of all the sinful products? It’s a complex system of punishment and reward. 

There are no unions in Reno like there are in Las Vegas. In Reno, benefits are on the chopping block, up to be cut; there’s an economic downswing, less casino earnings means less pay. One casino owner is a billionaire throwing money by the millions at the Republicans. When times were good why didn’t some of those billions get funneled to the workers? A complex system indeed.

And so we finish up our trip in Nevada, at the train station with an exhibit about Temperance Leagues, blue laws and Prohibition. These are Progressive ideas. They amount to the regulation of behavior, contrasted to flat out libertarianism and allowing people to do whatever they want, guns and ammo, drugs, excess, no motorcycle helmets, no speed limits. Pretty much a society with no boundaries is not a society; it’s anarchy, a free for all, survival of the fittest, allow the 1% to dominate and manipulate the rest, no equity.

From the standpoint of the mountain, equity does not exist in nature, balance may but not equity. The one tree by the lake was hale and hearty, big and fat, fifty yards away a tree of the same species was scraggily and dwarfed. To mountains none of this matters, there is no right or wrong, all the hubbub and static of humanity is just a short-term storm to be weathered. All the morals, ethics, ideas, strengths and faults, all the technology, all the pollution, these matter not to the mountain. Whatever the fate of our race may be, this trip has allowed for a chance to glimpse for a short while a world apart, a world whose rhythms are not contingent on humanity in the least bit. To see even a small glimpse of this other world is exactly what I was after.

Stuff FCA studied while on the trail

Project One: memorize and be able to name all of life. One time years ago I had the flash that if I could name all of life, that would be akin to religion somehow, it would plug me in to big-time, earth-sweeping stuff at a very real level.

I started with the animal kingdom and did not make it to plants, fungi, prokaryotes, Achaea (anaerobic) or viruses (non-cellular molecular parasites) and in fact these other than animals represent a complex field of taxonomy of which the amateur dabbler like myself is quickly overwhelmed and outgunned by many complex and arcane considerations. When I studied this topic years ago there was a five kingdoms model now apparently there is a three kingdoms model. The lumpers are winning! Whatever the classification scheme, the map is not the territory, the life any model describes is what it is regardless of the model. Life is life for that matter, so ultimately there is one kingdom, the living.

As mentioned above, classification of life gets into a lumpers and splitters dilemma. Lumpers want to make things simpler, they want less categories; splitters always want a new category, they keep dividing things up into smaller pieces. Splitters are atomists at heart; lumpers are systemic thinkers. A good example of this classification of wolves: are all wolves just Canis lupus or is each regional group a subspecies or even separate species? They can all interbreed but behaviorally they may not mesh; and local wolves worldwide do look different. Everybody has a point. I guess the trouble comes with a primary assumption that this has to be resolved with an all or nothing solution. All or nothing is not reasonable when each party has valid points. The consequence of one side winning is that some valid points are ignored. The upshot, politics is very much alive in science.

I can’t resolve that mess here but I do get caught in it. For example, a Superphyla is proposed here, an Infraphylum there, Jesus Christ, how do I know? I include the splitters categories here just for fun and also because I can’t say if it’s good classification or not. If I’m going to name all of life I have to start somewhere. The following will give the general idea of what I was studying on the trail.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum:

Protista- single celled, microbes, most are aerobic

Porifera- sponges

Placozoa- flat animals

Cnidaria- hydras, jellyfish, anemones, corals

Ctenophora- sea gooseberries/ comb jellies

Platyhelminthes- flat worms and lawyers

Nemertea- coastal and marine worms

Rotifera- with a complex round feeding apparatus

Nematomorpha- horse hair worms/ Order Gordiodea/ FCA saw one in Romero Canyon

Nematoda- eel worms

Mollusca- bivalves (clams), cephalopods (squid/ octopus), gastropods (snails), brachiopods (shelled, similar to bivalves)

Annelida- segmented worms, earth worms, tongue worms

Onychophora- some features of annelids and arthropods

Arthropoda- insects, spiders, crustaceans, centipedes, millipedes

Echinodermata- sea urchins, sea stars, sand dollars, sea cucumber

Chordata- the overwhelming majority of Chordates are vertebrates, i.e. with backbones/ spinal columns, I go on here to get way into the chordates; chordates are my tribe!

Superphyla: Craniata- cranium, visceral arches, brain

Phylum: Chordata

Subphylum: Vertebrata- backbones/ spinal columns,

Infraphylum: Gnathostomata- vertebrates with jaws and usually paired appendages

Subclass: Pisces- paired fins, gills, skin with scales

Class: Placodermii (ancient fishes), Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fishes), Osteicthyes (bony fishes)

Subclass: Tetrapoda- paired limbs, lungs, cornified skin, bony skeleton

Class: Amphibia, Reptilia, Aves, Mammalia

Amphibia: Salientia- frogs and toads, Caudata- salamanders, Meanres- small front legs, no tail, Gymnophiona- no limbs

Reptilia

Subclass: Anapsida

Order: Cotylosuaria- primitive ancestors, Testudines- turtles

Subclass: Eurapsida- ancient marine reptiles

Subclass: Icthyopterygia- ancient fish-like reptiles

Subclass: Lepidosauria

Order: Rhynocephalia- primitive, lizard-like, Squamata- lizards, snakes, amhisbaenids

Subclass: Archosauria- four extinct orders including dinosaurs and pterosaurs, (Aves/ birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs)

Order: Crocodilia- alligators, crocodiles, gavials etc

Subclass: Synapsida

Order: Pelycosauria- early mammal-like reptiles

Order: Therapsida- advanced mammal-like reptiles

Aves

I didn’t have the material to really cover birds

Mammalia

Order:

Insectivora- tenrecs, shrews, moles, hedgehog

Edentata- sloths, anteaters, armadillos

Pholidota- pangolin

Tubilidentata- aardvark

Chirpoptera- bats

Dermoptera- flying lemur

Primates- lemurs, monkeys, apes, humans

Carnivora- Canids, Mustelids, Ursids, Viverrids, Procyonids, Felids, Hyaenids, Phocids and Otarids

Proboscidea- elephants

Hyracoidea- conies

Perissodactyla- odd-toe ungulates, tapirs, rhinos, horses

Artiodactyla- even-toed ungulates, pigs, camels, deer, sheep, goats, giraffes, antelope, cattle

Cetacae- whales and dolphins

Rodentia- rodents, gnawing mammals

Lagomorpha- rabbits, hares

Superhyla: Acrania- no cranium

Phylum: Chordata

Subphyla: Hemichordata- notochord short and anterior, nerve tissues in epidermis

Class: Enteropneusta- tongue worms, Pterobranchia, Graptozoa- graptolites, colonial, branched, with chitinous covering

Subphyla: Tunicata

Class: Larvacea- tadpole-like, Ascidiacea- tunic with scattered muscles, many gill slits, Thaliascea- chain tunicates with circular muscle bands

Subphyla: Cephalochordata- notochord and nerve along entire body

Class: Leptocardii- lancelets, slender, fish-like, no scales, many gill slits

Infraphylum: Agnatha- no true jaws or paired appendages

Class: Ostracodermi- ancient armored fishes, Cyclostomata- lampreys and hagfish

Yes, I mostly memorized all of the above and could rattle it all off. One cool epiphany of our AT hike in 2005, “I am all of life come conscious of itself.” I found myself walking along and realized, 4 billion years later, I am a descendant of life on earth, here now, contemplating that life on earth. I had a similar one on the Olympic Coast looking at some slime on the intertidal rocks and realized that was my antecedent for life on land; I’m descended from intertidal slime and there it was, still clinging on billions of years later.

For me to be conscious of life, all of life, at the planetary level and through geologic time, this is equivalent to sacred. It’s big time. The Bible is for people, for culture, for the city, it doesn’t speak to the stuff I’ve listed above. Although, God did command Noah and all of life to be fruitful and multiply, God didn’t say “only people be fruitful and multiply”. God made us the stewards, recognizing our vast aptitude, given that we had eaten of the tree of knowledge. So to the extent that we disrespect and destroy life, that we cause extinctions, we are countermanding God’s orders; we are bad stewards if we let life go extinct on our watch.

Project Two: learn the trees. The following trees I mostly got down cold. My identification notes below are for after you’ve done you basic homework.  These notes represent my cues for getting a positive ID. All talk of cones below refers to seed cones unless otherwise noted.

Western white pine:

- a five needle pine, the needles are much shorter than Ponderosa/ Jeffrey, the cones are @ 6”, bigger than lodge pole cones and smaller than Jeffrey/ Ponderosa cones, bark is  roughly checker board patterned, with clear horizontal breaks, after a while you can tell them right away by the cones and bark without even looking up, when you see the shorter needles, you have a positive ID, can’t be confused for a lodge pole because of number of needles and cone size, red fir bark is similar but man can’t ID on bark alone

Lodge pole pine: 

- a two needle pine with needles and cones @ 2” long, lots of cones under the tree, bark uniform finely scaled, bark thin, decidedly not a thick bark, the only other tree it might be confused for is white bark pine, a 5 needle pine

White bark pine:

- delimited to high elevations and rough, exposed, rocky areas, 5 needles, cones @ 2-3” and purple in color, cones disintegrate on ground, no full cones under the tree/ only cone spindles, grows in clumps with multiple crowns, bark may be similar to lodge pole but check the elevation, number of needles and get to know the crown shapes and cone sizes, colors and shapes

Jeffrey pine:

- a three needle pine, needles long, 5-10”, bark deeply fissured and reticulated, reddish in color, bark smells like vanilla, cones bee-hive shaped with cone prickles pointing in, i.e. you can pick up the cone and it doesn’t prick you; scattered in canyons or in solid stands, never dense on benches or flats, Jeffries predominate on the eastern side of the Sierra

Ponderosa pine:

- same as above but bark smells like turpentine and the cone prickles point out, pick up the cone it will prick you, likes it more moist than the Jeffrey, Jeffries and Ponderosa can hybridize but I never saw a hybrid

Sugar pine:

- cones 1’ and up to 18”!, the tallest pine in the world, needles 2-4”, needles have silvery band down one side

Foothill pine:

- a three needle pine, multi-branch crown, grey-green needle, large heavy cones with savage spines, characteristic of piedmont (foothill) areas, altitude delimited to lower foothills, also called Digger Pine

Limber pine:

- five needle, high elevation, on eastern escarpment only, pollen cones yellow/ new seed cones green, heavy, thick seed cone scales with thin tips without prickles, cones 3-6”, similar to white bark pine in texture of bark and color of young branches but the cones give you the positive ID for their lager size than white bark pine and there will be cones under  the tree

Sierra juniper:

- squat, trunks many times thicker at bottom than top, mostly in steep rocky areas, bluish berries, not cones, reddish stringy bark, small scale-like leaves on bushy branches

- junipers are in the Cupressaceae or cypress family, including cedar, arborvitae (red cedar), redwood (tallest tree), sequoia (largest tree), cypress (second stoutest tree/ Montezuma cypress/ National tree of Mexico), dawn redwood, Fitzroya cupressoides (second oldest, in southern Andes)

- the Bennett juniper in Stanislaus National Forest is the oldest and largest Sierra juniper, @ 3000 years old

- Sierra juniper is hard to date as the rings show temperature and precipitation, a mixed signal

- junipers in Carson Pass area have been dated to @ 2000 years, many Sierra junipers are 1000 years old

Incense cedar:

- 1” winged cones, mid-elevation, flat branch tips, leaves with jointed scales, can get impressively big, reddish stringy bark like Sierra juniper but usually much taller and straighter than the juniper, look for cones and needle shape for positive ID, also notice why type of forest you’re in, Incense cedars mostly grow in different places than junipers

Quaking aspen:

- has a more ovoid leaf than cottonwood, cottonwood has a spade-shaped leaf and is strictly riparian, aspen has green bark

Mountain hemlock:

- one needle, short needles, needles show yearly growth with a silvery tip, branches droop down to forest floor, crown has characteristic wispy, flopping over look, has a scaled cone 2-3” long, firs don’t have scaled cones, tree likes shady draws with deeper soils, tree can get big, if you see the small scaled cones, wispy top and it is not a pine, you probably have a mountain hemlock

red fir:

- red bark, bark deeply fissured with fissures running vertically, no horizontal breaks in bark as with western white pine, needles point upward like a spruce, thick needle profile, cones upright 6-8”, a big tree, 180’

white fir:

- leaf profile is more flattened than red fir, cones 3-5” upright, bark not reddish

Douglas fir:

- slender pointed needles, cones 2-3” hang down, mouse tail bracts  grow between cone scales

Some general stuff about Sierra Nevada ecology and geography:

The Sierra is 400 miles north to south, from the Susan River and Fredonyer Pass in the north to Tehachapi Pass in the south. The Sierra is 70 miles east to west. There are 3 National Parks, 20 wilderness areas and 2 National Monuments. The Sierra granite formed underground @100 million years ago and uplifted @ 10 million years ago. To explain this uplift see the geological principle of isosity, when you push down one place, something comes up somewhere else. The Gold Rush of 1849 brought many immigrants. Hydraulic mining of gold caused a lot of environmental damage particularly with silt and gravels washed out into rivers and to the San Francisco Bay.  Plenty of people still have gold fever, we see them out there prospecting, really after it, dredging rivers with mobile dredge set ups. Current issues in the Sierra: sheep, logging, dams, weather, and drought. All of California is dependent on precipitation from a good Sierra winter snowpack, no snow, no water, no agriculture, no money.

The Eastern Sierra has 6 or more life zones: since it is warmer and drier; the life zones go higher up in elevation.

alkali sink/ greasewood below 3500’

shadscale scrub 3500 - 4000’

sagebrush scrub 4000- 7,500’

(pinyon pine/ juniper) 5000 – 7000’

pine/ fir forest/ Jeffrey/white fir 7- 8,500’

subalpine  forest/ white bark pine/ foxtail 9,500 – 11,000’

alpine Fell-Field/ alpine tundra, alpine willow, 11,000 – 14,000’

The western Sierran life zones come at different elevations and the plants don’t go as high in elevation as there is too much snow in the winter.

Foothill woodland 300 – 5000’/ oaky, interspersed with chaparral, foothill pine

Lower montane forest 3000- 7000’, indicator species: Ponderosa

Upper montane 7000-9000’ lodge pole pine, red fir

Subalpine 9000- 10,500’ white bark pine

Alpine 10,500’ and up

The western Sierra gets the bulk of the precipitation and the east is dryer; the east is in the rain shadow. Nevada is really in the rain shadow; it is the driest state in the US.

Sierra Rivers: In our hiking so far, we have crossed or gone across the tops of the drainages of all the major Sierra Nevada rivers. The Great Central Valley is drained to the west by two major rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. The Sacramento River runs north to south and the San Joaquin runs south the north. Both rivers meet at the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta which then flows west to Suisun Bay, through the Carquinez Strait to San Pablo Bay, past Point Richmond/ San Rafael to San Francisco Bay and then out the Golden Gate to the Pacific Ocean.   

Rivers that drain west to the Sacramento River, starting in the north. Feather, Yuba, American, Cosumnes, Mokelumne Rivers. The Gold Rush started on the American River.

Rivers that drain west to the San Joaquin River, starting in the south. Kern, Tule, Kaweah, Kings. These 4 rivers go into an endorheic basin but in wet years are joined to the San Joaquin. To the north of these 4 rivers, the San Joaquin comes out followed by the Fresno, Chowchilla, Merced and Tuolumne and Stanislaus Rivers.

The Calaveras River drains right to the Sacramento Delta.

Eastern rivers: all these rivers drain to the Great Basin and do not go to the sea. Starting in the north: Susan River to Honey Lake, Truckee River to Lake Tahoe and then Pyramid Lake, Carson River to Carson Sink, Walker River to Walker Lake, Rush/ Lee Vining/ Mills Rivers to Mono Lake, Owens River to Owens Lake. The Owens drainage goes from Mammoth Lakes area down to Olancha Peak in the south.

 (1) From Wikipedia

Early on, Leopold was assigned to hunt and kill bears, wolves, and mountain lions in New Mexico. Local ranchers hated these predators because of livestock losses, however, Leopold came to respect the animals. He developed an ecological ethic that replaced the earlier wilderness ethic that stressed the need for human dominance. Rethinking the importance of predators in the balance of nature resulted in the return of bears and mountain lions to New Mexico wilderness areas.[14]

By the early 1920s, Leopold had concluded that a particular kind of preservation should be embraced in the national forests of the American West. He was prompted to this by the rampant building of roads to accommodate the "proliferation of the automobile" and the related increasingly heavy recreational demands placed on public lands. He was the first to employ the term "wilderness" to describe such preservation. Over the next two decades he added ethical and scientific rationales to his defense of the wilderness concept. In one essay, he rhetorically asked "Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" Leopold saw a progress of ethical sensitivity from interpersonal relationships, to relationships to society as a whole, to relationships with the land, leading to a steady diminution of actions based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold thus rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt.[14]

By the 1930s, Leopold was the nation's foremost expert on wildlife management. He advocated the scientific management of wildlife habitats by both public and private landholders rather than a reliance on game refuges, hunting laws, and other methods intended to protect specific species of desired game. Leopold viewed wildlife management as a technique for restoring and maintaining diversity in the environment rather than primarily as a means of producing a surplus for sport hunting.[14]

The concept of "wilderness" also took on a new meaning; he no longer saw it as a hunting or recreational ground, but as an arena for a healthy biotic community, including wolves and mountain lions. In 1935, he helped found the Wilderness Society, dedicated to expanding and protecting the nation's wilderness areas. He regarded the society as "one of the focal points of a new attitude—an intelligent humility toward Man's place in nature."[14]

- A Sand County Almanac

The book was published in 1949, shortly after Leopold's death. One of the well-known quotes from the book which clarifies his land ethic is,

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise. (p.262)

The concept of a trophic cascade is put forth in the chapter, "Thinking Like a Mountain", wherein Leopold realizes that killing a predator wolf carries serious implications for the rest of the ecosystem [19] — a conclusion that found sympathetic appreciation generations later:

- Trophic cascades occur when predators in a food web suppress the abundance and/or alter traits (e.g., behavior) of their prey, thereby releasing the next lower trophic level from predation (or herbivory if the intermediate trophic level is an herbivore). For example, if the abundance of large piscivorous fish is increased in a lake, the abundance of their prey, zooplanktivorous fish, should decrease, large zooplankton abundance should increase, and phytoplankton biomass should decrease. This theory has stimulated new research in many areas of ecology. Trophic cascades may also be important for understanding the effects of removing top predators from food webs, as humans have done in many places through hunting and fishing activities.

A Top Down Cascade is a trophic cascade where the food chain or food web is disrupted by the removal of a top predator, or a third or fourth level consumer. On the other hand, a bottom up cascade occurs when a primary producer, or primary consumer is removed, and there is a diminishment of population size through the community.

- A land ethic (or land ethics) is a philosophy that guides your actions when you utilize or make changes to the land. This specific term was coined by Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) in his book A Sand County Almanac (1949). Within this work, he wrote that there is a need for a "new ethic", an "ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it".[1] However, while Leopold is credited with coining this term, specific land ethics were in place prior to his writing Sand County Almanac. For example, Leopold himself defines and argues against an economic land ethic.

An Economic Based Land Ethic

This is a land ethic based wholly upon economic self-interest.[2] For example, a farmer who plants on a slope and lets the soil wash into the community creek in order to obtain the personal benefit of money from the sale of the crops is acting from an economic based land ethic. Leopold sees two flaws in this type of ethic. First, he argues that most members of an ecosystem have no economic worth. For this reason, such an ethic can ignore or even eliminate these members when they are actually necessary for the health of the biotic community of the land. And second, it tends to relegate conservation necessary for healthy ecosystems to the Government and these tasks are too large and dispersed to be adequately addressed by such an institution. This ties directly into the context within which Leopold wrote Sand County Almanac.

For example, the prevailing ethos for the US Forest Service in his day, from the founder of the USFS, Gifford Pinchot, was economic and utilitarian, while Leopold argued for an ecological approach, one of the earliest popularizers of this term created by Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago during his early 1900s research at the Indiana Dunes. Conservation became the preferred term for the more anthropocentric model of resource management, while the writing of Leopold and his inspiration, John Muir, led to the development of environmentalism.^[citation needed^]

A Utilitarian Based Land Ethic

Utilitarianism was first put forth by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Though there are many varieties of utilitarianism, generally it is the view that a morally right action is an action that produces the maximum good for people.[3] Utilitarianism has often been used when deciding how to use land and it is closely connected with an economic based ethic. For example, it forms the foundation for industrial farming; as an increase in yield, which would increase the number of people able to receive goods from farmed land, is judged from this view to be a good action or approach. In fact, a common argument in favor of industrial agriculture is this it is a good practice because it increases the benefits for humans; benefits such as food abundance and a drop in food prices. However, a utilitarian based land ethic is different from a purely economic one as it could be used to justify the limiting of a person's rights to make profit. For example, in the case of the farmer planting crops on a slope, if the runoff of soil into the community creek led to the damage of several neighbor's properties, then the good of the individual farmer would be overridden by the damage caused to his neighbors. Thus, while a utilitarian based land ethic can be used to support economic activity, it can also be used to challenge this activity.

A Libertarian Based Land Ethic

Another philosophical approach often used to guide actions when making (or not making) changes to the land is libertarianism. Roughly, libertarianism is the ethical view that agents own themselves and have particular moral rights including the right to acquire property.[4] In a looser sense, libertarianism is commonly identified with the belief that each individual person has a right to a maximum amount of freedom or liberty when this freedom does not interfere with other people's freedom. A well known libertarian theorist is John Hospers. For libertarians, property rights are natural rights. Thus, it would be acceptable for the above farmer to plant on a slope as long as this action does not limit the freedom of his or her neighbors.

In addition, it should be noted that this view is closely connected to utilitarianism. Libertarians often use utilitarian arguments to support their own arguments. For example, in 1968, Garrett Harden applied this philosophy to land issues when he argued that the only solution to the "Tragedy of the Commons" was to place soil and water resources into the hands of private citizens.[5] Harden then supplied utilitarian justifications to support his argument. However, you could argue that this possibly leaves a libertarian based land ethics open to the above critique lodged against economic based approaches. Even excepting this, the libertarian view has been challenged by the critique that people making self-interested decisions often cause large ecological disasters such as the Dust Bowl disaster.[6] Even so, libertarianism is a philosophical view commonly held within the United States and, especially, held by U.S. ranchers and farmers.

An Egalitarian Based Land Ethic

Egalitarian based land ethics are often developed as a response to libertarianism. This is because, while libertarianism ensures the maximum amount of human liberty, it does not require that people help others. In addition, it also leads to the uneven distribution of wealth. A well known egalitarian philosopher is John Rawls. When focusing on land use, what this translates into is its uneven distribution and the uneven distribution of the fruits of that land.[7] While both a utilitarian and libertarian based land ethic could conceivably rationalize this mal-distribution, an egalitarian approach typically favors equality whether that be equal entitlement to land and/or access to food.[8] However, there is also the question of negative rights when holding to an egalitarian based ethic. In other words, if you recognize that a person has a right to something, then someone has the responsibility to supply this opportunity or item; whether that be an individual person or the government. Thus, an egalitarian based land ethic could provide a strong argument for the preservation of soil fertility and water because it links land and water with the right to food, with the growth of human populations, and the decline of soil and water resources,.[9]

An Ecologically Based Land Ethic

In addition to economic, utilitarian, libertarian, and egalitarian based land ethics, there are also land ethics based upon the principle that the land (and the organisms that live off the land) has intrinsic value. These ethics are, roughly, coming out of an ecological or systems view. This position was first put forth by Aldo Leopold in Sand County Almanac but two other examples include James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis which postulates that the Earth is an organism[10] and the deep ecology view which argues that human communities are built upon a foundation of the surrounding ecosystems or the biotic communities.[11] Similar to egalitarian based land ethics, the above land ethics were also developed as alternatives to utilitarian and libertarian based approaches. Leopold's ethic is currently one of the most popular ecological approaches. Other writers and theorists who hold this view include Wendell Berry (b. 1934), J. Baird Callicott, Paul B. Thompson, and Barbara Kingsolver.

Leopold's Land Ethic

Leopold argues that the next step in the evolution of ethics is the expansion of ethics to include nonhuman members of the biotic community,[12] collectively referred to as "the land." Leopold states the basic principle of his land ethic as, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

He also describes it in this way: "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land...[A] land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."

TRANSCENDENTALISM

-Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both man and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that man is at his best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.

The major figures in the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir,

- Transcendentalism was in many aspects the first notable American intellectual movement. It certainly was the first to inspire succeeding generations of American intellectuals, as well as a number of literary monuments.[7] Rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German Idealism more generally), it developed as a reaction against 18th Century rationalism, John Locke's philosophy of Sensualism, and the manifest destiny of New England Calvinism. Its fundamental belief was in the unity and immanence of God in the world. The Transcendentalists found inspiration for their philosophy in a variety of diverse sources such as: Vedic thought, various religions, and German idealism.[8]

The transcendentalists desired to ground their religion and philosophy in transcendental principles: principles not based on, or falsifiable by, physical experience, but deriving from the inner spiritual or mental essence of the human. Immanuel Kant had called "all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects."[9] The transcendentalists were largely unacquainted with German philosophy in the original, and relied primarily on the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Victor Cousin, Germaine de Staël, and other English and French commentators for their knowledge of it. In contrast, they were intimately familiar with the English Romantics, and the transcendental movement may be partially described as a slightly later, American outgrowth of Romanticism. Another major influence was the mystical spiritualism of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Thoreau in Walden spoke of the Transcendentalists' debt to Vedic thought directly.

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water-jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.[10]

EDWARD ABBEY

Desert Solitaire, Abbey's fourth book and first non-fiction work, was published in 1968. In it, he describes his stay in the canyonlands of southeastern Utah from 1956-1957.[22] Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac^[citation needed^] and Thoreau's Walden.[23] In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical landscapes of Southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a back country park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what he terms the "industrial tourism" and resulting development in the national parks ("national parking lots"), rails against the Glen Canyon Dam, and comments on various other subjects.

-The theme that most interested Abbey was that of the struggle for personal liberty against the totalitarian techno-industrial state, with wilderness being the backdrop in which this struggle took place.[41]

-Abbey felt that it was the duty of all authors to "speak the truth--especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic".[43]

Abbey's abrasiveness, opposition to anthropocentrism, and outspoken writings made him the object of much controversy. Agrarian author Wendell Berry claimed that Abbey was regularly criticized by mainstream environmental groups because Abbey often advocated controversial positions that were very different from those which environmentalists were commonly expected to hold.

Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, see pp. 40-41

The following copied from: http://www.enotes.com/future-life-salem/future-life

The eminent Harvard scientist Edward O. Wilson has spent most of his life doing pioneering studies of ants and other tiny creatures, but in The Future of Life he steps back to survey the state of the entire planet’s ecosystem. Beginning with an imaginary letter to Henry David Thoreau, the patron saint of environmentalism, Wilson laments that the present world is being cut down, plowed under, and gobbled up. He chronicles the struggle between economic and ecological forces in countries such as China, where rapid population growth and increasing food production have placed enormous pressure on the environment. He is also concerned with the rapid extinction of species, which he sees as a telling effect of the massive depletion of forests and other natural habitats.

After decades of studying nature close-up, Wilson is now convinced that the earth’s fragile ecosystem is in serious trouble and we are to blame. He previously regarded environmental activists, a small but vocal group who were the first to sound the alarm, as merely fanatics, but now sees them as heroes. They sometimes resorted to extreme tactics such as living in redwood trees to prevent them from being cut down, but, writes Wilson, they kept the important issue of the environment in front of the media.

Wilson sees the depletion of natural resources and the rapid extinction of species as more than just issues of politics and economics; they are moral problems as well. He calls for the creation of a “universal environmental ethic” to raise the consciousness of all human beings to see that we are now living on the edge of ecological disaster, and the time left to save the earth is growing dangerously short.

This book is a passionate and eloquent plea for environmental awareness by one of the great scientific minds of our time.

Sources for Further Study of E. O. Wilson’s book

The American Spectator 35 (March/April, 2002): 54.

Booklist 98 (December 1, 2001): 604.

The Boston Globe, January 13, 2002, p. E7.

Choice 39 (June, 2002): 1793.

Commentary 113 (April, 2002): 65.

The Ecologist 32 (May, 2002): 40.

Library Journal 127 (January 1, 2002): 147.

New Statesman 131 (April 29, 2002): 46.

The New York Times Book Review 107 (February 17, 2002): 11.

The New Yorker 78 (March 4, 2002): 83.

Publishers Weekly 248 (December 17, 2001): 73.

(2) In the Sierra Nevada the state of California and its utility companies have many reservoirs that store water for summer and fall use. The state and its municipalities are dependent on this water for agriculture, drinking and electricity. The Sacramento/ San Joaquin Delta and its wildlife are dependent on this water also. Dry years come on just as soon as there is not enough snow pack to fill the reservoirs.

PS

Issue of whether going hiking for months at a time is an escape from reality? There’s definitely an undercurrent of criticism from multiple quarters. Who are these fuck offs who go hiking all the time? Why aren’t they working!? The bottom line is that in life there are many ways to skin a cat. Every man’s way is right in his own eyes Proverbs 21.2; everyone tries to justify their own way and in the process negative comparisons get made.  That’s par for the course.

In the light of Thoreau, Muir, Leopold, Edward Abbey and E. O. Wilson, I’d say there is good substance behind a transformational hike; it’s a solid pastime.

It certainly doesn’t hurt much if people go hiking for months at a time. Your energy and consumptive footprint go way down. It seems the criticism is mostly that a three month hike is self indulgent, not responsible, not planning well for the future... Kim made a great metaphor, “when the Titanic is going down, everybody doesn’t have to be doing the same thing.” I see there is enough room for people to live life in many low-impact, substantial ways of which one is looking to the long distance hike as a form of inspiration, transformation and connection with primary, root-level experiences.