Sierra Crossing: Day Three (11/1)

The snow on the north side of Tuolumne Peak was treacherously beautiful.  An unhalted sun highlighted its rises and shadowed its recesses.  Above the timberline, with no evergreens to disrupt its undulating purity, only scattered brown boulders shouldered through the snow.  It blanketed everything else: smaller rocks, the soil, high-altitude brush, the trail.

I was 9800 feet above sea level, and had climbed 1800 vertical feet from Cathedral Creek to get here.  I breathed heavily, hands resting from my shoulder straps.  Duke sat in the snow beside me.  Before us the mountainside fell away, revealing the deep-green forested valley through which Cathedral Creek ran.  On the opposite side of the valley the trees grew thick near the creekbottom, thinned as the land rose toward another series of mountaintops, became isolated as the slopes gave way to rock, and failed altogether where white snow sat atop the otherwise bald mountaintop like an old man’s hair.  I pulled my notepad from my pocket.  The mountaintop was completely, utterly silent.  The kind of silence that doesn’t happen in the developed world.  I heard my pen scratching on the paper as I made notes; I heard the snow creak as Duke shifted his weight.  Then we were still, and – nothing.  No rush of traffic, no drone of an airplane, no hum of a central air unit.  No buildings, no roads, no campfire rings, no candy wrappers, no footprints, no trail.  Quiet.  I listened, and smiled.

The fur trappers lived most of the year in wilderness, but they thought like Europeans.  The new continent was unimaginably vast; its boundaries undiscovered.  Their views of America’s natives would be called racist today.  They trapped to make money, a commodity useful only in European-descended societies.  And most importantly, they identified themselves as part of the European cultural landscape.  They viewed themselves as gloriously free, bravely self-reliant, as vanguards of the civilization from which they had come.  The adjectives they applied to themselves were rooted in a European perspective.  The notoriously boastful trappers were not, by and large, men for whom freedom and exploration were merely incidental byproducts of the way they made a living.  In written accounts of their lives, whether written autobiographically or by professional biographers, the trappers almost always emphasized the wild country they had seen and fights they’d had with Indians.  The trappers saw themselves as frontiersmen, wild and free, and were cocky about it.

So encountering terrain like this – “discovering” it, if your cultural perspective is European – was a big part of the trappers’ motivations.  It made good storytelling.  I made a couple final notes in my notepad.  The trappers sometimes chose adventures with an eye to bragging about them afterward.  Joe Meek, for instance, told his biographer that he went along on the Walker Expedition because traveling to the Pacific would be “a feather in a man’s cap.”  I paused and considered, for a moment, how I might transform my scribbled notes into a polished written product, then pocketed the notepad.  Although the trappers had to be constantly attuned to their surroundings, they were not oblivious to the stories they could tell afterward.  I zipped my pocket closed to keep the notepad secure, then knelt to buckle on my snowshoes.

I crunched into the snow, winding between half-buried boulders and passing beside a high-alpine pond about the size of a swimming pool.  Duke, happy that I was wearing my snowshoes, followed in the compacted snow behind me.  I walked to the edge of steep drop, then turned around to find another route.  I walked along the bottom of a high cliff face, momentarily cold in its shadow, then veered again to the north looking for a way down.  Far below me, the snow had melted to intermittent patches, revealing a glistening stream that ran through stands of willows and evergreens.  Beside the stream I could see the trail, but I couldn’t get down to it – a rocky dropoff, nearly as steep as the cliff in whose shadow I’d walked, blocked my descent.  I hiked back up to the cliff face.

A pool with a view.

Searching for a route down.

Finally, I thought I saw it: a ravine running from my elevation to the trail below me.  It was steep, but I could handle it.  I grinned as I walked into the ravine, striding easily in my snowshoes.  The rocky walls of the ravine were fifteen yards apart.  The snow in the bottom was firm enough that I didn’t sink into it, but loose enough that Duke could keep his footing.  This would work.  In one of the ravine walls, someone had carved a three-foot-tall letter “O.”  Maybe that meant I was on top of the trail.  At any rate, I thought, I’d found a perfect corridor to the bottom.  Maybe I’d make a mountaineer after all.

I was sixty yards into the corridor when it pitched down.  Pitched steeply.  The slope wasn’t sheer, and the ravine bottom was still covered with snow, but it was way too steep for me to carry a pack down.  From the way the sun glinted off the snow, I could tell that broad stretches of it were hardpacked snow without a covering of powder.  That meant that Duke couldn’t keep his footing either.  I looked back up the way we had come.  The walk back up to the cliff face would be hard, if I could do it at all.  And once I got back up, there was no guarantee that I’d be able to find a better route down.

An idea.  If Duke and I slid down the ravine, we’d be traveling about thirty yards on our butts.  But I could see where we’d stop, and there were only a couple rocks in the way.  I could avoid them pretty easily, I thought.  Duke would be able to maintain better traction than me.  I could slide feet-first and steer with my heels, and if I left my pack on, it would protect me from hitting my head.  On an intuitive level, the idea of sliding spooked me.  But the thought of climbing back out of the ravine, only to hope for some more passable route, held even less appeal.  And on an intellectual level, I couldn’t see how sliding would be any more dangerous than picking my way down over some alternative rocky route.  It might even be safer.  I looked at Duke.

“You want to slide?” I asked.

He looked up at me gamely.

I took that for a yes.  I took off my snowshoes, buckled them together, and threw them down the slope.  They slid to the bottom.  I threw Duke’s pack, and it came to rest nearby.  No turning back now.  I put on my gloves, closed the vents in my pants, and zipped my jacket all the way up.  I dug in my heels and sat on my butt at the top of the slope.  I looked at the “O” carved on the ravine wall.  Probably stood for Oh Shit Canyon, I thought.  “Stay,” I said to Duke, and lifted my heels.

I slid fast.  I braked with my bootheels, kicking up a spray of snow that fell across my face.  I leaned back on the pack and braced with my elbows and hands so I wouldn’t flip over.  The snow was cold against my butt.  I skidded around the first rock.  Snow pushed up the sleeves of my jacket and shot between my cuffs and gloves.  I heard myself giggle as I slid past the “O.”  I bounced over gentle rises and recesses in the snow.  My sleeping pad scraped over the hardpack.  I dug in my left boot to steer toward the snowshoes and dog pack, and the spray intensified.  I started to spin so I tapped my right boot to straighten.  The mountain air was cold and clean as it rushed over my snowy face.  Too soon, I slowed to a stop within an arm’s reach of the snowshoes.  I looked up.  Duke was waiting anxiously at the rim.  I called him and he stepped onto the slope.  He stayed upright, half-running and half-skidding down the slope, until he barreled into me at the bottom.  I lay back in the snow and laughed out loud.

The sky was bright blue and the sun shone down on my face.  Tail wagging, Duke buried his nose in my jacket and snorted.  I scratched his head and whooped, loudly.  It echoed off the rock walls.  I grinned.  That’s why you make trips like this.

Two shots of the western juniper, which tends to grow on sheer, rocky slopes.