Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

Frank meanwhile was an easy presence, cruising the tight aisles of the rustic store peering at things, comfortable with all their talk of gear and food and trailhead firewood. Charlie was pleased to see that although he was still very quiet, a tiny little smile was creasing his features as he looked at displays of beef jerky and cigarette lighters and postcards. He looked relaxed. He knew this place.

Out in the parking lot, the mountains to east and west hemmed in the evening sky, and told them they were already in the Sierras—or, to be more precise, in the space the Sierras defined, which very much included Owens Valley. To the east, the dry White Mountains were dusty orange in the sunset; to the west, the huge escarpment of the Sierra loomed over them like a stupendous serrated wall. Together the two ranges created a sense of the valley as a great roofless room.

The room could have been an exhibit in a museum, illustrating what California had looked like a century before. Around then, Los Angeles had stolen the valley’s water, as described in the movie Chinatown and elsewhere. Ironically, this had done the place a tremendous favor, by forestalling subsequent development and making it a sort of time capsule.

They drove the two cars out to the trailhead. The great escarpment fell directly from the crest of the Sierra to the floor of Owens Valley, the whole plunge of ten thousand feet right there before them—one of the biggest escarpments on the face of the planet. It formed a very complex wall, with major undulations, twists and turns, peaks and dips, buttressing ridges, and gigantic outlier masses. Every low point in the crest made for a potential pass into the back country, and many not-so-low points had also been used as cross-country passes. One of the games that Charlie’s group of friends had fallen into over the years was that of trying to cross the crest in as many places as they could. This year they were going in over Taboose Pass, “before we get too old for it,” as they said to Frank.

Taboose was one of what Troy had named the Four Bad Passes (Frank smiled to hear this). They were bad because their trailheads were all on the floor of Owens Valley, and thus about five thousand feet above sea level, while the passes on the crest, usually about ten miles away from the trailheads, were all well over eleven thousand feet high. Thus six thousand vertical feet, usually hiked on the first day, when their packs were heaviest. They had once ascended Baxter Pass, and once come down Shepherd’s Pass; only Sawmill and Taboose remained, and this year they were going to do Taboose, said to be the hardest of them all. 5,300 feet to 11,360, in seven miles.

They drove to a little car campground by Taboose Creek and found it empty, which increased their good cheer. The creek itself was almost completely dry—a bad sign, as it drained one of the larger east-side canyons. There was no snow at all to be seen up on the crest of the range, nor over on the White Mountains. Frank stuck his hand in the creek and nodded to himself. “Glacier blood,” he said.

“They’ll have to rename them the Brown Mountains,” Troy said. He was full of news of the drought that had been afflicting most of the Sierra for the last few years—a drought that was worse the farther north one went. Troy went into the Sierras a lot, and had seen the damage himself. “You won’t believe it,” he told Charlie ominously.

They partied through the sunset around a picnic table crowded with gear and beer and munchies. One of the range’s characteristic lenticular clouds formed like a spaceship over the crest and turned pale orange and pink as the evening lengthened. Taboose Pass itself was visible above them, a huge U in the crest. Clearly the early native peoples would have had no problem identifying it as a pass over the range, and Troy told them of what he had read about the archeological finds in the area of the pass while Vince barbequed filet mignon and red bell peppers on a thick old iron grate.

Frank prodded the grate curiously. “I guess these things are the same everywhere,” he said.

They ate dinner, drank, caught up on the year, reminisced about previous trips. Charlie was pleased to see Vince ask Frank some questions about his work, which Frank answered briefly if politely. He did not want to talk about that, Charlie could see; but he seemed content. When they were done eating he walked up the creekside on his own, looking around as he went.

Charlie relaxed in the presence of his old friends. Vince regaled them with ever-stranger tales of the L.A. legal system, and they laughed and threw a frisbee around, half-blind in the dusk. Frank came out of the darkness to join them for that. He turned out to be very accurate with a frisbee.

Then as it got late they slipped into their sleeping bags, promising they would make an early start, even, given the severity of the ascent facing them, an actual early start, with alarms set, as opposed to their more usual legendary early start, which did not depend on alarms and could take until eleven or noon.

So they woke, groaning, to alarms before dawn, and packed in a hurry while eating breakfast; then drove up the last gravel road to a tiny trailhead parking lot, hacked into the last possible spot before the escarpment made its abrupt jump off the valley floor. They were going to be hiking up the interior sides of a steep and deep granite ravine, but the trail began by running on top of a lateral moraine which had been left behind by the ravine’s Ice Age glacier. The ice had been gone for ten thousand years but the moraine was still perfect, as smooth-walled as if bulldozers had made it.

The trail led them onto the granite buttress flanking the ravine on its right, and they rose quickly, and could see better and better just how steep the escarpment was. Polished granite overhead marked how high the glacier had run in the ravine. The ice had carved a trough in hard orange granite.

After about an hour the trail contoured into the gorge and ran beside the dry creekbed. Now the stupendous orange battlements of the side walls of the ravine rose vertically to each side, constricting their view of anything except the sky above and a shrinking wedge of valley floor behind them and below. None of the escarpment canyons they had been in before matched this one for chiseled immensity and steepness.

Troy often talked as he hiked, muttering mostly to himself, so that Charlie behind him only heard every other phrase—something about the great U of Taboose Pass being an ice field rather than just a glacier. Not much of the crest had gotten iced over even at the height of the Ice Age, he said. A substantial ice cap had covered big parts of the range, but mostly to the west of the crest. To the east there had been only these ravine glaciers. The ice had covered what were now the best hiking and camping areas, where all the lakes and ponds had been scooped out of the tops of mostly bare granite plutons. It had been a lighter glaciation than in the Alps, so the tops of the plutons had been left intact for lakes to dot, not etched away by ice until there were only cirques and horns and deep forested valleys. The Alps’ heavier snowfall and higher latitude had meant all its high basins had in effect been ground away. Thus (Troy concluded triumphantly) one had the explanation for the infinite superiority of the Sierra Nevada for backpacking purposes.

And so on. Troy was their mountain man, the one whose life was focused on it most fully, and who therefore served as their navigator, gear innovator, historian, geologist, and all-around Sierra guru. He spent a lot of hiking time alone, and although happy to have his friends along, still had a tendency to hold long dialogues with himself, as he must have done when on his solo trips.

Troy’s overarching thesis was that if backpacking were your criterion of judgment, the Sierra Nevada of California was an unequaled paradise, and essentially heaven on Earth. All mountain ranges were beautiful, of course, but backpacking as an activity had been invented in the Sierra by John Muir and his friends, so it worked there better than anywhere else. Name any other range and Troy would snap out the reason it would not serve as well as the Sierra; this was a game he and Charlie played from time to time.