Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Alps.”

“Rain, too steep, no basins, dangerous. Too many people.”

“But they’re beautiful right?”

“Very beautiful.”

“Colorado Rockies.”

“Too big, no lakes, too dry, boring.”

“Canadian Rockies.”

“Grizzly bears, rain, forest, too big. Not enough granite. Pretty though.”

“Andes.”

“Tea hut system, need guides, no lakes. I’d like to do that though.”

“Himalayas.”

“Too big, tea hut system. I’d like to go back though.”

“Pamirs.”

“Terrorists.”

“Appalachians.”

“Mosquitoes, people, forest, no lakes. Boring.”

“Transantarctics.”

“Too cold, too expensive. I’d like to see them though.”

“Carpathians?”

“Too many vampires!”

And so on. Only the Sierras had all the qualities Troy deemed necessary for hiking, camping, scrambling, and contemplating mountain beauty.

No argument from Charlie—although he noticed it looked about as dry as the desert ranges to the east. It seemed they were in the rain shadow of the range even here. The Nevada ranges must have been completely baked.

All day they hiked up the great gorge. It twisted and then broadened a little, but otherwise changed little as they rose. Orange rock leaped at the dark blue sky, and the battlements seemed to vibrate in place as Charlie paused to look at them—the effect of his heart pounding in his chest. Trudge trudge trudge. It was a strange feeling, Charlie thought, to know that for the next hour you were going to be doing nothing but walking—and after that hour, you would take a break and then walk some more. Hour following hour, all day long. It was so different from the days at home that it took some getting used to. It was, in effect, a different state of consciousness; only the experience of his previous backpacking trips allowed Charlie to slip back into it so readily. Mountain time; slow down. Pay attention to the rock. Look around. Slide back into the long ruminative rhythms of thought that plodded along at their own pedestrian pace, interrupted often by close examination of the granite, or the details of the trail as it crossed the meager stream which to everyone’s relief was making occasional excursions from deep beneath boulder-fields. Or a brief exchange with one of the other guys, as they came in and out of a switchback, and thus came close enough to each other to talk. In general they all hiked at their own paces, and as time passed, spread out up and down the trail.

A day was a long time. The sun beat down on them from high overhead. Charlie and some of the others, Vince especially, paced themselves by singing songs. Charlie hummed or chanted one of Beethoven’s many themes of resolute determination, looping them endlessly. He also found himself unusually susceptible to bad pop and TV songs from his youth; these arose spontaneously within him and then stuck like burrs, for an hour or more, no matter what he tried to replace them with—things like “Red Rubber Ball” (actually a great song) or “Meet the Flintstones”—tromping methodically uphill, muttering over and over “We’ll have a gay old—we’ll have a gay old—we’ll have a gay old time!”

“Charlie please shut up. Now you have me doing that.”

“—a three-hour tour! A three-hour tour!”

So the day passed. Sometimes it would seem to Charlie like a good allegory for life itself. You just keep hiking uphill.

Frank hiked sometimes ahead, sometimes behind. He seemed lost in his thoughts, or the view, never particularly aware of the others. Nor did he seem to notice the work of the hike. He drifted up, mouth hanging open as he looked at the ravine’s great orange sidewalls.

In the late afternoon they trudged up the final stony rubble of the headwall, and into the pass—or onto it, as it was just as huge as the view from below had suggested: a deep broad U in the crest of the range, two thousand feet lower than the peaks marking each side of the U. These peaks were over a mile apart; and the depression of the pass was also nearly a mile from east to west, which was extremely unusual for a Sierra pass; most dropped away immediately on both sides, sometimes very steeply. Not so here, where a number of little black-rimmed ponds dotted an uneven granite flat.

“It’s so big!”

“It looks like the Himalayas,” Frank remarked as he walked by.

Troy had dropped his pack and wandered off to the south rise of the pass, checking out the little snow ponds tucked among the rocks. Now he whooped and called them all over to him. They stood up, groaning and complaining, and rubber-legged to him.

He pointed triumphantly at a low ring of stacked granite blocks, set on a flat tuck of decomposed granite next to one of the ponds. “Check it out guys. I ran into the national park archeologist last summer, and he told me about this. It’s the foundation of a Native American summer shelter. They built some kind of wicker house on this base. They’ve dated them as old as five thousand years up here, but the archeologist said he thought they might be twice as old as that.”

“How can you tell it’s not just some campers from last year?” Vince demanded in his courtroom voice. This was an old game, and Troy immediately snapped back, “Obsidian flakes in the Sierra all come from knapping arrowheads. Rates of hydration can be used to date when the flaking was done. Standard methodology, accepted by all! And—” He reached down and plucked something from the decomposed granite at Vince’s feet, held it aloft triumphantly: “Obsidian flake! Proof positive! Case closed!”

“Not until you get this dated,” Vince muttered, checking the ground out now like the rest of them. “There could have been an arrowhead-making class up here just last week.”

“Ha ha ha. That’s how you get criminals back on the streets of L.A., but it won’t work here. There’s obsidian everywhere you look.”

And in fact there was. They were all finding it; exclaiming, shouting, crawling on hands and knees, faces inches from the granite. “Don’t take any of it!” Troy warned them, just as Jeff began to fill a baggie with them. “It screws up their counts. It doesn’t matter that there are thousands of pieces here. This is an archeological site on federal land. You are grotesquely breaking the law there Jeffrey. Citizen’s arrest! Vincent, you’re a witness to this! What do you mean, you don’t see a thing?” Then he fell back into contemplating the stone ring.

“Awesome,” Charlie said.

“It really gives you a sense of them. The guy said they probably spent all summer up here. They did it for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. The people from the west brought up food and seashells, and the people from the east, salt and obsidian. It really helps you to see they were just like us.”

Frank was on his hands and knees to get his face down to the level of the low rock foundation, his nose inches from the lichen-covered granite, nodding as he listened to Troy. “It’s beautiful drywall,” he commented. “You can tell by the lichen that it’s been here a long time. It looks like a Goldsworthy.” Then: “This is a sacred place.”

Finally they went back to their packs, put them back on their backs, and staggered down into a high little basin to the west of the pass, where scoops of sand and dwarf trees appeared among some big erratic boulders. The day’s hump up the great wall had taken it out of them. When they found a flat area with enough sandy patches to serve as a camp, they sat next to their backpacks and pulled out their warm clothes and their food bags and the rest of their gear, and had just enough energy and daylight left to get water from the nearest pond, then cook and eat their meals. They groaned stiffly as they stood to make their final arrangements, and congratulated each other on the good climb. They were in their bags and on the way to sleep before the sky had gone fully dark.