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It was my third time over this terrain and I still couldn’t find the trail once I climbed past Frog Lakes, and that wasn’t very far into the valley. Well – I’d find my own way up. To the south, the valley was bounded by the now-familiar Black Mountain and the ridge from which it arose, and to the north by another ridge dominated by Dunderberg Peak. The valley was wide and flat, shaped more like a U than a V. Probably glacial. At the valley’s western terminus, the rocks rose abruptly from the wooded floor to a nameless peak on the southern edge of the terminus and to a saddle on the northern edge. All of the valley’s edges – Black Mountain, Dunderberg Mountain, the nameless peak, the saddle – were well above the timberline. All of them were snowy and rocky. All of them were over 11,000 feet high. For a Georgia boy, that’s up there.
I had two options for reaching the saddle. I could either stay in the valley floor until I reached the terminus, then climb up to it, or I could gradually ascend the valley’s northern wall as I moved west. The valley floor was wide and flat, and the sides steep. Normally I’d have stayed in the valley floor as long as possible – one of the lessons I’d learned about off-trail walking was that hiking along a hillside was hard on ankles. Especially with a full pack. Going directly up a hill was tiresome, but easier on the body. But today, traction would be the issue. Even with my crampon-bearing snowshoes, I couldn’t climb steep terrain, as I’d found out earlier when I slid in reverse down a little hill. So I angled up to the northern ridge.
Today the sun glittered off the snowpack as I trudged through the silent valley. The sky was bright blue. Duke followed behind in the broad tracks of my snowshoes where the walking was easier. How would this scene have appeared to the members of the Walker Expedition? No doubt they were more accustomed to hiking though snow than me. They may have been less worried. But they had no idea – none – what they were getting into. I knew that I had about forty miles to walk until I reached my cache, which was located near the middle of the Sierras Nevadas, and I had six days of provisions in case I got snowed in. I knew I had several peaks and several steep-walled valleys before I even reached the mountains’ midpoint. But the Walker Expedition had traveled for hundreds of miles through the basin and range, where solitary ridges separated wide valleys. Zenas Leonard seems to have believed the Sierra Nevada mountains presented a similar obstacle: he wrote of a scouting party that found a trail that it believed “led over the mountain,” and wrote about arriving, after a day or two, “at what we took for the top.”
Oh no, Zenas. Your use of the singular is misplaced.
With such expectations the expedition headed into the Sierras in late October. They were already down to the last of the buffalo meat they had prepared along the Bear River, having found little game along the Humboldt. The breadth and the cold of the Sierras took the expedition by surprise. Some of the mountain men –the prudent ones, arguably – wanted to turn back for buffalo country. Though they were a minority, neither the appeals of their compatriots or the exhortations of Captain Walker could alter their intentions. And in this loose-knit expeditionary force, no one could force them to stay. Reluctantly, the majority acceded to the minority’s wishes to turn back. But the majority – “which always directs the movements of such a company,” according to Leonard – imposed a condition: the dissenters couldn’t take any horses or ammunition with them. That ended the issue. The expeditionary force remained intact.
High up on the ridge, I stopped again. I was panting. I stood at the bottom of a hundred-foot-long talus slope that lolled out like a tongue from the ridgetop. I had reached the saddle’s elevation, but I still had several hundred yards of ridgeside to traverse to get there. The terrain between me and the saddle was steep and snowy, and there would be little to stop me if I started sliding. In fact, I could end up sliding and butt-bumping over rocks all the way down to the timberline. A painful prospect, particularly because other sensitive parts of my anatomy might also receive a thumping. The top of the ridge looked like it provided comparatively flat walking, if I could only scale the talus slope. But the rocks were loose and – being talus – already tumbled down once. By their nature they lay just shy of the angle of repose. But I remembered my lesson from the Wasatch Front: the going is often easiest on ridgetops. I looked at Duke, who sat gamely beside me.
Across the snow.
Up the talus.
I kicked a boot into the talus and put my weight into it. The boot slid about half a step back and I kicked my other boot in above it. Before it could slide all the way back I took another step. I scrambled upward. When the rocks got to small to support me I clawed at the slope with my hands, shuffling and sliding and clacking my way up on all fours. My pack pulled at me like the tire you drag at football practice and I gasped for breath in the thin air. I fought upward toward a big rock sticking out above the scree, scrambling with all four limbs. I lunged for the big rock and caught it with my right hand. Grasping it, I knelt in the talus to rest. Ragged breaths. Nothing was ever easy. Why, I wondered, did I set myself to tasks like this? But I’d freeze if I waited around to answer that one. Finding the question more irksome than being out of breath, I pulled myself up to the rock, hooked an elbow around it, then used it for a footrest. I clamored toward the ridgetop, four steps forward and two steps back, slipping and sliding and clattering to the top.
Wind ripped across it, but there was a wide, flat rock on top of the ridge. I sat thankfully and dug my jacket out of my pack. I looked over my path below – talus slope, then steep snow and rock, then scraggled trees, then thick trees, then Frog Lakes, Cooney Lake, Virginia Lakes. Beyond that, Mono Lake basin.
Well. I was that much closer.
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