edited excerpts from Diary of February 5, 2022
also images from related tour of 3-1-2021 at https://highwildramblings.com/march-1-2021/
Sunrise finds me shuffling into the forest from home, and back up and around and out the ridge, each phase of the time worn route following the last, parting the layers as step by step I move deeper into the wild, my neighbors’ ski and snowshoe tracks thinning behind me, until it is just me and the critters, and mile after mile of crusts, from our prolonged doldrums, recent thaw and subsequent hard freeze. What’s a guy to do?
These are not good conditions for descent skiing, but they are for covering ground. I’ve been working out a technique where I skin up to a ridge top, then rip the climbing skins off and glide traverse along the flank of the ridge, side hill skating as far along as I can, covering quick easy horizontal ground. I call it ‘skooting’, like pushing on a skate board or scooter. I’m not so sure it saves much energy but it saves time in the right conditions, and it feels more productive than just shuffling horizontally with skins on. This ridge here is strait and level, and has fairly uniform slopes facing north so it’s conducive when its frozen smooth and I’m feeling energetic. I’ve been trying to fine tune just where the optimum transition spots are.
I skin to the next little knob past the ridgetop cube boulder bench landmark I used last time, before I rip skins to start my big gliding traverse, trying to come out a little higher on the Crest saddle, off the end of the ridge. I work harder at saving vert on the traverse, side stepping more, gliding less, and predictably, come in too high on the crag guarding the final north facing draw on the west end of the ridge, and have to drop down anyway, beneath the little cliffs, making wild traverses across the firm steeps amongst the exposed clean lined, chartreuse lichen splattered granite outcrops, to where I can cross and resume side-hilling around the corner onto the westerly slope.
I am still plenty high though, and wrap around beneath the point looking for the vague old, mostly healed, logger’s skid track that follows down along the edge of the glacial cut above the creek, then follow this edge down to the saddle and contour onto the south facing moraine, into the base of the bowl beneath Lost Corner Mountain, crossing my tracks from the other day. I feel like I covered quite a bit of ground pretty quick and easy already, into a whole different quadrant of a whole different drainage. This ‘skooting’ thing is the ticket.
Skis are such an awesome tool, and side-hilling is one of the otherwise awkward things they make so easy. Now I just have to find some decent descent skiing to put it to good use. Haven’t seen any smooth surfaces so far. But I can hold out hope that the snow I can’t see on the other side of the Crest will be better, opting for what’s behind curtain number two, rather than what I can already see, you know how that goes. It’s often times easier to maintain hope in the absence of hard evidence.
The shattered lost corner of Lost Corner Mountain is likely the most dramatic spot in our worn down little valley. Excess glacial ice crossed the Pacific Crest from west slope Rockbound Valley, into these three adjoining sister drainages, and on into Tahoe, wearing the mountains down much more than other comparable west shore drainages, and depositing that debris to jut Sugar Pine Point out into the Lake.
I don skins briefly for a couple hundred foot climb up the low moraine, where I then rip skins again for a quick quarter mile skoot to the base of Rattlesnake Ridge, to then reskin yet again. It’s a bit tedious all this gear futzing, but in these conditions, it allows for efficient travel in this rolling terrain, doing more work with my head and hands, for less with my legs. And yes, I have encountered rattlesnakes here a couple times, years back, but they are sleeping now.
In this case I am maybe excessively efficient such that I am on the Pacific Crest by ten thirty, before the sun has even shown directly onto the west slope. Which means it will be frozen hard for a while yet. But at least I find the frozen wind fins are, somewhat predictably, even worse on the windward side of the crest. Sigh. It’s not easy skiing corn in February. It just doesn’t seem natural.
But I am thoroughly stoked none the less, to be back visiting this iconic land apart, this hallowed terrain, across the great divide, the limits of my home range, the frontiers of my psychic landscape.
We’ve nice human scaled mountains like that around here in the Tahoe Sierra. On the East side of the #High Sierra, on the other hand, south of here a couple few hundred miles, it’s a vertical mile to the crest, so skiing the backside mountains is somewhat herculean, but I reckon even he could find the flow state on this here journey (hopefully he’s got some thing along besides that toga and sandals.) This tour is more about mileage and technique than raw vert, a Tahoe style double trans-Sierra, up and over the crest and down the back side, then looping back up over and out, most of twenty miles, all told.
From the top of Rattlesnake Ridge I decide to try ripping skins and traversing over to my usual route down into Rockbound, instead of following the rolling ridge top like in the summer, since I have snow cover and skis to traverse the thickly forested sidehill. Is it false economy to try to save time and energy when I am already too early? But economy is part of the aesthetic I seek, as a maturing skier. I love getting creative working these little angles, saving time and energy, amortizing my past travels, optimizing utility. I’m lazy like that, albeit in somewhat extravagant fashion.
I push through and work around thick spots in the forest, and come out into an inviting opening leading down into the sprawling canyon yawning below, but it doesn’t look quite right, and I realize it is draining back down towards the Rubicon River instead of towards the reservoir above it and so I continue along, still uncertain. I figure I will know it when I see it. And if I’m not sure, then that ain’t it.
I don’t have a photographic memory for routes (lots of photos though), no continuous detailed verbatim course, (and I opt to not use an electronic prosthetic for fear of stunting my growth) rather I visualize my general route, counting on making the same logical calls in the same spots consistently, with just the setting of key junctures memorized. It’s not a literal, lingual description of the juncture, more of a gestalt, a general feel, with a particular arrangement of elements; trees, rocks, slope, exposure, that resonate when I see them. It’s a little loose and flowy and uncertain, but I find it quite reliable. It’s tricky, and takes a while to develop a trust in the process, and a tolerance for ambivalence. It looks quite different than the Hollywood platoon leader marching with certitude, forcing his way, and works a lot better when the objective is nearing the limits of what you can do. Stubborn willfulness has a way of working against you, when you most need it.
I round the broad rib in open forest, until I spot the Poodle Tree camp area ahead, and glide back onto my mental map, once again on familiar ground. I can envision the glowing strands of my tracks here over the years, superimposed, reinforcing this pathway in the topo-neural net (yes I just made that term up).
Here’s the big slouching Jeffery, and the gnarled smoking tree, and the shed sized erratic whose shadow we followed around like shade worshippers when camped here. Broad cavernous Rockbound Valley sprawls before us, its glacier plucked facets repeated like a motif, fractalized angles and juxtaposition. This is a whole different world from the forested landscape behind me, where we live beneath the vast undulating green canopy, down yonder by the alpine freshwater sea we call Tahoe.
I love seeing this landscape cloaked in snow, making it new, with fresh framing and settings, accents and highlights, the trees standing poised like statues on plinths, above the ground made smooth and crystalline, lit from within. I glide over the surface effortlessly, the snow giving me wings, lifting me above the ground, sailing over obstacles on a frozen cloud, piled up in banks by the wind in places when it was new, and scoured down to bare ground in others.
This place is charmed, and I feel at once empowered and humbled, like a small part of a vast something, that is alive with beauty and meaning. As if. Even if I couldn’t see it so plainly all around me, why wouldn’t I imagine such a place for myself. We create the world we live in (unless we let someone else do it for us).
Sharp little fins have melted into the old snow surface, angled steeply down towards the low winter sun, creating protected pockets where the sun melts the snow in tiny greeenhouses, while the glassy overhanging fins are kept frozen by the breeze. In the alps they call it nieves penitente, after the posture of bowed worshipers of old in with their pointy white hoods. It’s a snow condition I associate with the High Sierra, rugged and forbidding, lovely to behold, but not so much to ski. So apparently I am to do penance for some original sin or another, since I can not afford the indulgence of a groomer. My edges chatter across the tops, like scraping down a cheese grater, which is better than up a cheese grater any way. It feels like tiny jack hammers on my knees though, and I apologize to my cartilage.
Like gravity’s child, I am drawn down in by my accustomed course, the pull of this natural, glacier hewn line, carved in stone. Below the Poodle Tree camp I look for the Flat Iron tree, staying to the subtle cusp of the convexity, the tangent, where the fall lines divide and I could ski either into Rubicon Reservoir on the one hand, or down into the river below it, at the other, with but a flick of an edge. The broad canyon rolls out of sight below for miles in either direction, the level U-shaped glacial valley floor spanning across to the Crystal Range rearing twenty five hundred vertical feet steeply beyond, bare granite walls enclosing this vast open space in jagged fractal ranks, like a gaping maw, or a gap toothed grin, depending on the mood. This mass of air, this chamber of winds, breathes ana/katabatically, drawing up sun warmed air in convection helixes, released then to flow cool back in beneath at dusk.
This place of cartoonish archetypes is drawn in broad strokes, worn smooth, edges softened, friendly and inviting, and I feel like I am made to its scale. The giant bonsai Junipers, the marshmallow pillows of granite, decorating broad landscaped boulevards, cotton candy clouds gliding suspended in bottomless blue skies, the roar of distant waterfalls backdrop the joyful tinkling sounds of snow melt near at hand, coursing all around and through this world that water has made, and constantly remakes.
I drink in the beauty in big gulps, taking as much as I can hold into each cell of my being, trying to embody, to be that beauty. I spread my arms wide, exposing myself to this elemental, essential reality. This place is so much bigger than us, it just goes on and on, dwelling in deep time. We are but a twinkle of light. I find peace in knowing such beauty exists so free of us. We are completely unnecessary to its existence, just another random bit of space junk, all lit up in passing. Bobbing in the time currents, I feel the way unfolding before me, and yield to its pull.
The terrain here is rugged, the way I like it, and I move through it at will year round, cross country in direct, purposeful lines, like a tree top flyer, apparent when zoomed out on the topo and satellite maps, crossing the PCT/Rimtrail through-hikers’ packed-out tread at right angled cross purposes. Sometimes I will hop clean over, to avoid even touching it.
It’s a natural crossing spot, where routes up and down the west and east slopes cross the route that follows the crest. Probably has been all along. I found a chert arrowhead fragment just above the trail here. I use this route because it is the cleanest way through in the summer, mostly on granite, top to bottom. And even in the winter, it’s the way to go. The snow collects where the vegetation is thinnest, and vice versa. Even in brushy spots, game trails push through. The critters know the ways, since time immemorial. This place molds us in it’s likeness.
It’s a point of intersection here, a nexus, in ways my conscious lingual mind can’t articulate, but old brain, pattern recognition and vestigial animalistic sensibilities can sense. There is so much we don’t understand about this Life and our being. That is a given. If we can shut down the jabbering verbosity and second hand fairy tales and cultural norms in our minds, our atrophied senses can suggest much about how to move in this fluid, space-time, wave-form medium we refer to as Life.
The Flat Iron Juniper waits at a siding, and I line myself up within the composition in passing, placing the profile of Lost Corner mountain off its shoulder, foregrounding the large erratic that settled here, then split open like a stone garlic clove. I open my shutter to let it stream through my eye holes into my skull, click. I sense the connection spark the gap across space-time; myself standing there on Lost Corner peak last week looking down at myself standing here on the slabs now, as I have stood on these same slabs times past with various good partners, in all seasons, the spirals overlapping, recombining, transmitting a moment’s portent, crest to crest, conducted onward by the spiraling wave’s oscillations, reciprocating iterations, everything on the one in time.
Below the Juniper, the slope rolls over towards the first steep wrinkle in the terrain, and I spy the landmark propped-up snag above the proper descent line, and drop over the edge, recognizing the barely protruding cairn in passing. I drop the steep little constriction into the trough between the faulted granite ribs, carrying speed up the other side. I ski over across the buried manzanita, because I can, instead of down around under the behemoth downed Jeffery that recently fell astride the game trail I follow, and then work the narrow way through to the next wrinkle, below the top of the cairned surveyor’s line, as I call it.
I spot the top cairn from across the draw, and pick my way down to it, schussing through a narrow icy spot, carrying momentum up the other side of the groove to the top of the broad uniform slope below, with widely spaced gesticulating Jeffery pines and wizened junipers baking in the expansive views. Here our route jogs south a bit, diagonally across the fall line, aimed now toward the point at the top of the Three Pin Ramp, instead of Tells Peak. I thought the cairns necessary here to navigate to the one passable gap in the cliff below. I placed these cairns in a perfectly strait line, so you can get oneself back on route at any time by looking up or down the line. The cairns below look mostly buried, and the fall line leads my skis down away from the diagonal route, but I don’t fight it for now, turning where it looks easiest, using little bumps in the terrain to unweight, changing tacks on the choppy frozen sea.
During these long dry spells, when high pressure sits over the region, we often get temperature inversions forming, and above freezing temperatures persisting up high, with cold air trapped beneath. Winds blowing on these sunny exposed slopes help form overlapping ranks of plates, we call penitente, covering the surface of the broad canyon walls like a scaly hide. Traveling slowly up hill, your skis sink into the softer snow beneath, but coming down the skis tend to skitter on the icy, downward facing fins. Novel but not that fun to ski.
There are trees of great character on this slope, and I recognize many individuals by their posture, and so when I’ve skied down to where I sense the slope is rolling into the broad cliff band that I know lies below, I traverse back towards my route, keeping my eyes open for my old friends, to let me know when I am crossing the route that will lead me down to one of the very few spots you can sneak through an easy gap in the unseen cliff, which stretches for miles across below me, guarding the canyon bottom, now looking so tantalizingly close. It’s a sandbag because you can’t see the cliff from above, and its mostly only fifty feet tall, but steep, and you have already come over a thousand feet down the canyon wall. I blundered around for years figuring it out, in the summertime when I can ride my bike the first five miles upcanyon. In the winter the exposure is far more keen, and the route finding existential.
It is such a blessing to be able to ski around out here time and again in my home territory, for what’s been shared anchors me deeply in this place. It’s beyond what I dared dream of when I first started back country skiing in my early twenties. I would have laughed and shook my head in disbelief, to hear I would be skiing from home clear over the crest and down the backside far beyond the nearest track, alone in a hundred square miles of wild country, as a grandfather, albeit in a global pandemic, on the brink of a mounting fascist climate catastrophe, as I had intuited as a teenager, which is why I built my life here in the mountains in the first place, instead of pursuing professional success as our corrupt society would have had me. More and more these tours feel dystopian, like a surreal respite from the chaotic, nightmarish unraveling of our civilization, and wanton destruction of our blessed home biome. This stone and snow and gravity is what’s real, not the artificial make believe human bullshit. I dont come here just to escape, but to see it more clearly.
The cairn here at the very bottom of my surveyor’s line pokes its head free of the snowpack, and I get below it and look back up the half mile to the skylined cairn at the top, a few intermediary rocks and lumps visible directly on line, climbing the slope at an odd angle. I set the widly spaced cairns in such a way that at any point I could look forward or back to line up distant cairns and put myself on route, precisely on line, an old surveyors trick to minimize the number of cairns needed, and because it feels clever, and geometrically aligned with universal archetypes. Our ability to perfectly describe and define vectors, strait lines and bearings, is part of what sets humans apart. Our ability to conceptualize and define movement in three dimensions of space is our window to the cosmos.
I noticed other folks have added cairns, maybe folks I’ve brought here, maybe others. Years back I would have pruned them, but friends of mine like bringing their kids down here, and I don’t want them getting lost (though I cant resist truing the cairns up on to proper line.) I love sharing, but it does come with compromises. Interweb pollution is everywhere, overwhelming special places. The attention economy is relentlessly thorough. But I have made a conscious decision to let go of that, increasingly, to share what I’ve found and been shown, in moderation.
I talk about it with the folks I bring here. It’s easier now than it used to be, now that its common knowledge how much rampant internet sharing has ruined so much quality, not that anyone much has done anything about it, as if the progress of this disease were simply inevitable. But reality is a wave function. When we take license from current trends to ignore the coming correction, and continue accelerating into it rather than anticipate it’s arrival, we exacerbate its abruptness, which inevitably leads to sudden massive changes in momentum, resulting in ensuing loss of structural integrity, and probable resumption of ambient temperature. The laws of nature abide no lawyerly word games. Reality doesn’t care if you believe or not.
I snap back into the moment, standing on the slope, leaning into my ski boots, edges set. Its funny how my mind roams out here alone, swept into little eddies of internal monologue, mini-rants to the macrocosm. I love the conversations my partners and I get going out here, unfolding over the day’s and year’s travels, touching on myriad subjects, distracted for the moment by the tasks at hand, then resuming where ever we left off, or somewhere new, later to circle back upon itself. My solo trips follow a similar pattern.
I have to pick my way down through the little weakness in the broad cliffy fault step that crosses the slope here, where it is broken down it tilts a bit more southerly and is partially melted out. This spot is steep and brushy and loose in the summer, but now I just sweep on through, making a few big turns where the snow swath does, and carrying speed out onto the open slope below. My skis and knees chatter on the rough hard frozen snow, but standing tall, arms wide embracing the vast open space within the confines of the broad glaciated bedrock canyon I am lowering myself down into, turn by turn tracing the pressure wave of kinetic potentiality realized in my descent, making my subtle mark, re-enacting the sacred oscillating sign of matter in motion, moving forward side to side to go forward, like everything else from the intergalactic reaches of space time to the inner atomic workings of each molecule, iterations of waves within waves within waves.
Around the edges the snow melts away from the exposed rocks that collect the suns warmth, revealing a layer of ice laying against the ground, the cumulative freeze thaw of this seasons snowpack. I give this shiny dark ice layer a wide berth. Making turns on this stippled snow surface requires extra English, to horse them around. I hop off the top of little rises to make the transition in the air, and land already fully committed to the next turn, to keep my tips from being deflected during that subtle transition. Survival skiing; it ain’t pretty, but it works. Still beats walking, as I am fond of saying, though not without irony. My joints may object.
This surface reminds me of the badwaters salt flats in Death Valley, except not so flat. Or maybe Bumpass Hell in Lassen? It’s like the surface of an alien world. Luckily I have specialized surface transportation equipment specifically designed for this planet. Its eleven thirty. The sun is high but still not shining very directly onto the west slope, too obliquely for much softening. February corn skiing is rough, the math is unforgiving. Ice is hard. The nights are long, the fathomless firmament sucking the earth’s warmth away. The wane sun sheds light, but scant heat.
I’m getting pretty low now, below 7000’. The snow is still firm. I had had hopes. As they say, Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which fills up first. Reality is asserting itself. No appreciable softening. Its not dangerous, just awkward, and ignoble, and hard on the joints. This calls for a ‘timing move’, a strategic pause, to adjust the rhythm. Something about wave mechanics, and tight funk grooves, seeking maximum constructive interference. Better living through physics, and music. I glide over to some bare slabs in the shade and step out of my skis.
I sprawl on the granite with my head in a shadow and my legs in the sun. I guess its technically granodiorite, on the spectrum between granite and diorite, more mafic than official granite, less silica in the mix. Geology is pluralistic, not black and white, mineral types are matters of degree and gradation. To study something, we must name and categorize, but it becomes an easy shorthand to think of things as either/or, when in reality things are swirling intermixing probability clouds of unfolding potentiality. Schrodinger’s Chesire. It’s best, when we are done geologizing, or philosophizing or what have you, to translate our arbitrary concrete distinctions back into ambiguously squishy reality.
Now this spot I stopped could be a turnaround point, if I wanted to cut bait. I am curious to see what I’ll do. While I was skiing, I had the constant reminder of how bad it was, but sitting here now the visceral memory fades already. I am caught up in the timeworn narrative of this route, one step leading naturally to the next. I am eager to skim across the expansive ‘skate park’ slabs below. Heck, I’m here, I’ve come this far, might as well continue, right? until I have a good reason to turn around, like a really vivid, immediate and inarguable reason?
We use this rationale a lot. I think it would be considered the ‘sunk costs’ logical fallacy, throwing good money after bad? The real question remains, who is the greater fool? the merely ignorant, or those who know better but, through elaborate rationalizations, proceed regardless, naming the fallacy then exercising it. One of my partners loves to ponder all the intricacies, and debate and discuss details ad nauseum, but he’ll never change his mind. He’d sooner abandon the partnership. Skiing alone, I am always the greatest fool. It gives me someone to mock anyway.
I would love to just dink around here till it maybe softened up in a couple hours but there isn’t the time. I have to get home by dark, mama said. It’s tough skiing corn in February. I had intended to return home via the next ridge south, to try and employ my skooting technique on that ridge for a change. I used to come out here on three pins and fishscales when I telemarked exclusively, and more recently would shuffle skinless freeheel on my rondo rig down canyon all the way home from here, but it’s a pedestrian slog, and today the snow is a little firm to really be conducive to shuffling with no skins. Anymore I’m not so enured to that extra effort, what with my various wear issues, and need to be more clever, and less forceful.
It looks more direct on the map to take the ridgetop, and I haven’t been up there for a while. It’d be nice to get up high again, taking in the views for the return, and work some gliding in as much as possible. At this point I don’t mind the extra climbing if it saves me mileage slogging. So that is an unknown, timing wise, which I want to leave plenty of allowance for, and I’m also keen to go see. And I so love that terrain. After nearly a half hour sitting around here on the sunny granite, my body gets up and puts its skis on, but not skins. I suppose I will tag along.
Somewhat ambivalently, I shoot through the choke, crossing the wrinkle at the whale boulder, entering the Skate Park slabs. I ski fall line towards the reservoir, drawn by the exposure, instinctively looking for a little softening in the sun. Skiing to the lip of the scramble through the cliff band I run out of snow entirely. No in-between to milk, just strait from fields of firm wind fins to bare ground. The snow continues below, but the steep exposed slope tilted up into the hot afternoon sun has cooked itself free of snow, so I glide along the ridgetop, down into the skate park. Sure is fun just buzzing around this terrain at will. The only thing easier than walking the clean expanse of granite here, is gliding over it on skis. Now if I had creamy smooth corn I’d be spoiled rotten. But it’s not to be.
So I traverse back to the north, following along the top of this final continuous faulted cliff band above the river, conveyed by this clean bedrock ramp that naturally brings one down into the canyon bottom. I nose along, looking for the top of the Bent Frame route, the cool layback flake, where I found a broken backpack frame from the seventies, years ago where someone presumably dropped their pack off the cliff to climb down unencumbered. No rope? Wonder how that worked out?
Downclimbing the bouldery, committing layback is substantially harder than climbing it, requiring strength, skills, and nerve. You have to grab the vertical edge and lean back sideways against your arms to press your feet into the mostly featureless granite, and walk your hands down the rail, the strenuous body tension of holding your feet against the wall through opposition, sapping your strength. It is committing because there are no proper downward holds to stand or hang on to rest. You resist gravity only by engaging the opposition between arms and legs. Apparently, this has been the sight of other struggles, as I also found a more recent Nalgene bottle there at the base one time, half full. Hopefully they weren’t heading up the ridge, it’s a long way to water in that direction.
Cliff bottoms are interesting, somewhat fraught places, detritus collects there like at seashores, hinting at epics, with ongoing hazards potentially still looming. There is a jumbled pile of motorhome sized granite blocks strewn at the base of the big exfoliating granite onion skin slabs my ramp here leads towards, with cool interconnected chambers and passages within the pile. The big winter of 2019 added another few shipping container sized boulders to the jumble. Yikes. Not a good hang during earthquake weather.
Glacier scoured granite slabs are aesthetically compelling in part because they reveal the taught skin of the land, revealing what lies beneath the verdant green robes. And the exposed slabs display a broader lay of things, and somehow seeing at that scale, makes me feel bigger too, expanding my own sense of my self, in this world I am of.
The snowpack does the same, and is particularly striking when it is so partial, framing a scattered mosaic of discrete gardens, like natural art installations. It allows one to see through the chaotic profusion of vegetation, to recognize the underlying patterns. The generative narrative reveals how in past times when it was colder and wetter, each season’s snows piled onto the season’s before, the piles growing so big they slowly flowed down, busting up the loose rock and carrying the pieces along with it, the river of ice following the general lines of the water courses, but straightening out the wiggles, cleaning up the lines, abrading it smooth with the embedded debris. It gives one a sense of how plastic this surface crust we float on is, and how gradually yet dramatically it changes, and how long and slow the progress of time is, and how short and fleeting is ours.
Looking back I see I passed a distinctive leaning Jeffery on the rim, and seem to recall it as a landmark from below, so maybe that was the top of the ‘bent frame layback’. I picture the way all my different paths out here down the decades cross and interweave, often unbeknownst. On the website for my satellite tracking and rescue beacon I can view all my tracks at once going back years, a chaotic tangle of overlapping routes, but with certain narrow courses strongly delineated by repeated use at bottlenecks in the terrain, reinforced like neural pathways, as if reading a brain scan of the environs, where I am but a notion, an electrical pulse coursing neuron to neuron. If you see awareness as being an emergent property, you can sense how we might participate in that, contributing our own consciousness to the emergence of a broader intelligence still, that of this living planet or universe, which is beyond our comprehension by definition.
I shuffle around the corner, my attention keen, taking it all in with focused appreciation, relishing, savoring, caressing the precious landscape with my eyes, my mind, like a prayer of gratitude. Not that I expect anyone is listening, but because it feels good to be grateful, puts one in a humble healthy position in relation to this generous world.
Here’s a juniper as big around as it is tall, sculpted by the elements over the centuries, time worn like bedrock. These hoary wizened lichen encrusted old trees seem almost inert, as if part mineral, with no give in their boughs. They have born most of an eon of wild extremes of drought and flood, blizzard and heat wave here. This makes it particularly poignant to see how many mature five hundred plus year old junipers are dying back just now, in just the last few years, abandoning the majority of their foliage to turn brown and die, self-pruning to maintain key branches that are more protected and well fed by roots, moving to adopt the classic ancient juniper form where standing dead wood serves as shelter for the few meager twisted strands of living bark that remain, growing in it’s own lee, constructing it’s own shelter, like a tortoise.
I had envisioned this being a long slow process of Juniper senescence, so it’s interesting to see that it rather seems as if they are reaching a tipping point, triggering an abrupt strategic reaction, as if of their own volition, to prune away most of their branches, paring back their own metabolic activity to a minimum, out of some native defensive thriftiness. They are slow and patient creatures, with a deep time outlook. How do we get humankind to make such a move? Or do we just go full tilt till we hit the wall?
Personally, I’m hoping to make my aging a more gradual process and avoid tipping points. I lament the irony that I spent years in the mountains learning how to push myself, to explore the bounds of my endurance and skills, to overcome fears. And now as I get older and lose a step, I have to work against those hard won habits of mind and body, to recalibrate and relearn conservative restraint. Funny how the mental processes seem to lag, as if oblivious or in denial of changing capabilities. Dissonance can be destructive.
The big sprawling symmetrical old Jeffery pine that stands silhouetted at the base of the passage to the upper slabs, hoves into view above, as I round up onto the rim of the Skate Park bowl. Here I pause to take in the details. The creek is flowing in the bowl and has excavated out a course for itself through the few feet of snow that lies consolidated here, what’s left of our record setting December snows, worn right back to the bare granite in the channel. Whenever I come down here in the summer I eye the smooth rolling concavities, picturing the forces that the shapes represent, the latent potentiality for motion. Coming here on skis is the manifestation of that, and I relish the subtext to my little ski run, picturing my knowing smile here come summer. Its like a little gift to my future self, a flirtation with time’s penchant for circling back.
This is a special spot. World class a young friend called it when I first brought him here, would be a sought after destination if it weren’t so far from anywhere. Ephemeral little bedrock pools at the base of the slab are home to tadpoles in the spring, incongruously surrounded by bare rock under the blazing sun. The rare Cutleaved Monkeyflower (Erythranthe laciniata) grows here, spackling the seams and joints in the granite where water seeps out, making a living green border, framing the outcrops. They bloom bright yellow in early spring, intricate little flowers with red spots on their hairy little tongues, decoratively carpeting the crevices bounding the slabs in dense bright foliage. I usually come down here on foot when I have finally hung up my skis for the season, as soon as I can manage the creek crossings closer to home.
I wonder if the laciniata is considered rare in part because it is so specialized in its preference for moist granite slabs, and blooms so early in the season that it is difficult to even approach its chosen habitat when it’s in flower, due to lingering snow and flooded creeks, on approach trails and roads. I can really appreciate the flower’s taste and style, the way they sympathetically complement the aesthetics of this niche. This place’s gratuitous beauty suggests some sort of overarching sense to it all. That’s why we’re here.
The snow in the bowl skis better than it looks, which admittedly isn’t saying much, but I link turns around the features, channeling forces, skimming on the slick tops of the little wind fins, working the underlying waves of granite, cranking turns on the steep little roll overs, tap dancing down the broad convex ribs, grinning. In my normal pedestrian life I reel and stumble around comparatively, teetering on a skeleton originally evolved to move on all fours. I can just hear the Ravens and Chickarees mock my clumsiness. I stand in absolute awe of the speed and powerful athleticism of the Black Bear; tree climbing, lake swimming, wrecking machines that’ll gallop fast as a horse and open your locked car like a tin of sardines. Only on skis do I feel remotely suited to the environs, on some sort of footing with the natives.
To feel adept is why I’ve come. It may sound silly if you do the math, for all the work and discomfort involved, which by now I’m habituated to crave and enjoy regardless, but it’s really about these fleeting moments of grace, rushing spontaneity, when you catch up to the flow, and it floats you up dancing, melding your mass in the surrounding motion, all one under the sun, as the mountain skis you, in sparkling radiance.
I come here hoping to find the sublime. I don’t actively pursue this furtive wild thing, for it will only come of its own volition. I just try to make myself receptive, going where I think I might meet it, showing up ready, with the needed skills, conditioning and state of mind. It’s a subtle balancing act, willing myself out here by strategy and discipline, and then quieting my chattering mind, to engage my pattern recognition, to take this place in, and read its range of conditions, its controlling variables, on it’s own terms. To suss out the optimum place in time, and make my way there, I exercise my will judiciously, free to meander and circle back, sniffing out the goods, calmly following where the groove will lead.
These fleeting contacts are a gift from the universe, hinting at so much around us that goes unrecognized. It’s at once empowering and humbling, glimpsing how much more magical this existence is, than I can even perceive, let alone articulate. These peak experiences are far beyond the pale. The compounding waves coincide, the tight rhythm drives deep, in the pocket, on the one in time, melodic harmonies resonate, with sparkling arpeggios, and fills and rapturous grace notes.
I like to rub up against that which defies explanation, to expose myself to these elemental forces, let them wash over me, and mold me in their image. Flirting with the bounds of the knowable, right up against the edge of magical thinking, weeding out assumptions and wishful thinking, I try to let this place show me how I am to live.
The ramp falling before me as the cliffs rise above, I follow along the joint-controlled drainage heard flowing in the fault below, the scene of massive rending and folding, earth shaping forces converging gradually, and then all at once, even now, beneath my feet, on this spinning, swirling planet. I try to stop and relish the views as I descend, not just to give my throbbing quads a rest. The snow melt accents the water streaked granite slabs, as thick, arched, inexorably exfoliating, slabs slowly slide down the mountain, still adjusting to the departure of the rivers of ice that repeatedly filled this canyon, left stranded at the angle of repose. But maybe not again for a long long time, if we manage to disrupt the glacial cycle that’s held sway for the last 700,00 years or so, the entire time of our development as a species. What could go wrong? Who could have known? besides the scientists who have been warning us for generations. (as ol’ Bill Clinton told us, It’s the economy stupid.)
I toggle back to skiing, scoping a nice looking line through one of the spots that’s a little cruxy in the summer. I remember hiking this stretch with friends and their kids and dogs, pointing out footholds, giving boosts. It’s so gratifying seeing families out here, in their natural habitat. I hop my skis around lightly on the steep slope, banking and swooping down through the compression, riding the rail underfoot, the ski bending and torquing, then snapping back as I unweight, shooting out across the flats, past the protruding top rock in my cairn, where the summer route drops to the creek through a broken down weakness in the cliff band guarding it. I could have likely followed it over to the river, but I didn’t feel I had the time. Time weighs heavy here in the winter, so far from home. I try to practice restraint out here, eventually.
Its interesting how my sense of exposure calibrates to the conditions. It feels a lot wilder and more remote here in the dead of winter, with so much less daylight, and temps mostly below freezing, up and over the crest and all the way down the backside. Right now I am likely the only person for a hundred square miles (Which is fun to say, but really only represents a radius of 5.6 miles). Suffice it to say I could yodel to my heart’s content, and no one would hear, though the Nutcachers might get a little worked up. I refrain though. Just knowing I could, is sufficient to make my heart sing.
I can hear the creek at play, splashing and frolicking below me, little snow melt cascades flowing down the broad slabs above, in precious rivulets and runnels where the time worn granite guides. Even buried under a thousand feet of glacial ice this spot would have had water flowing all over it. The rich russet boles of the Cedar and Jeffery contrast their vibrant foliage, the electric green of the wondrous chlorophyll molecule popping, itself originally a partnership, a symbiosis of different creatures, together turning sunlight to starch, splitting water and releasing oxygen, now fueling our entire biosphere. Cheers to good partnerships.
The ramp I follow narrows, the steep slabs above on the one hand, converging with the creek gully on the other, as it approaches the valley floor. I carve in, turn to turn over the blind roll over, hoping there’s enough snow. I arc through the choke on edge, poised to pop off another turn, when I recognize that I am dropping onto a shadier slope, and my skis chatter trying to find purchase on the icy snow. Midflight I change plans, and skitter on across the slope, forgoing the final fall line turn, inelegant but prudent. I am gratified I instinctively made the conservative call on the fly. The self training is maybe working? (good boy, here’s some rubbings) Confidence in my decision making is what gives me the freedom to roam.
I pull up in the shade, kick off my skis, and plop down on a dry chunk of granite, to gnaw pb&j and fiddle my skins onto my skis. I scoop snow into my water sack, adding a liter of corn to the liter of water that’s left in the bag. I put this chore off till now to keep the weight off my knees for the descent, but I’m leery of putting it off too long, and not having enough liquid water left as a starter, to melt the snow. I like to be able to drink heartily when I’m climbing, without having to ration. Today its not real warm out so its all the more important to stay conscious of hydration. I get water security issues out here sometimes, but I hate to carry extra weight, so I balance these. Attention is the crux.
I miss the freedom of just drinking surface water, but I stopped drinking untreated water, after getting giardia too many times, on my wife’s behalf as much as my own, though she never caught it from me. It was actually my daughter’s obgyn who finally laid down the law, if I was going to be in the delivery room, which didn’t happen in the actual event, but the pledge to not drink untreated water stuck anyway. I figure snow’s okay though, right here where it fell from the sky, if its deep, somewhere out in the open and not too old. There’s probably mycelium and bitty airborne dust, particulates, pollen, spores, plant bacteria, and bug parts, but not so much the pathogens like giardia or cryptosporidium? Its not like I wash my water sack regularly or anything anyway, and it’s probably got its own flora culture living in it, and hopefully they know to gang up on the bullies. We could probably learn a lot about living together, from the cultures within us.
It’s quarter to one. I’ve been hustling for six hours. In the summer I figure it takes me four hours to get home from here, which includes jamming on my bike for five miles. These days it’s dark about six. So… better get back at it, slacker. I love this shit. The homeward push, about nine miles, a couple thousand feet of climbing, bring it. My focus sharpens, my body leaps to the task, crunch crunch crunch, pant pant pant, marching up the mountain like I mean it. Endorphins will cover a multitude of sorrows.
As my motor warms up, I ease off a smidge, shortening my stride and turn over, just enough to keep my metabolism purring, like nudging back the throttle on my two stroke snow blower, for that pure throaty braap You can feel the torque, the bass in the back, bumping in the trunk like a subwoofer, boom bap. I just kick it and ride, feeling my limbs all loose and swinging, centered over my spine, getting lifted.
I’ve learned to periodically remind myself to hold it back a bit, and more importantly I’m learning how to listen. I often tend to use a little too much force, and so now try to throttle it back and see how little energy use I can get away with, finding the grace in restraint.
I cover the thirteen hundred foot climb to the crest in a leisurely hour and a quarter, taking lots of pix of the expansive views and local characters along the way. The teeming forests are full of strait tall conformist trees, but a neighborhood like this nurtures individuals of distinction, standing alone, coping on their own terms, wearing their scars with pride. The harshness of this habitat is a feature not a bug, keeping competitors and parasites away. The inhabitants have learned to live slow, and low key, keeping their heads down, their back to the wind, roots exploiting rare cracks in the bedrock, anchoring deep, tapping into little hidden reservoirs of buried moisture.
Its mostly Jeffery pines on this slope, with scattered Junipers, and clots of Lodgepole in wet spots. Lots of Huckleberry Oak, and Manzanita. In June it is decorated with wildflowers; Mountain Pride, Larkspur, Groundsel, Mariposa Lily, Star Tulip, Nude Buckwheat, Pussy Paws, Yampa, Yarrow and Death Camus, dozens and dozens, and each no doubt had its own relationship with the humans here for most of the last ten thousand years. Plants are adept at cultivating relations with likely seeming pollinators and seed dispersers. They apparently figured we were readily trainable.
Plants see through us. They sorta run the show. We are lost without them, they basically built the habitat we rely on, in partnership with wee bacteria and fungi. We evolved from common ancestors, a billion and a half years ago, and plants still speak our endocrinatic language, which is how they provide us so many medicines. The native humans here over time had figured out their many uses, without benefit of our fancy sciencing. But I don’t think the plants will much miss humans when we are gone.
Plants originally incorporated photosynthesizing algae into chloroplast cells, to get the whole ball rolling. Sort of a corporate takeover, amicable or otherwise? How crassly self serving. I prefer to think of these things as partnerships, though given human history the contrary case could be made. I’ll attribute that to human culture though, and give the rest of creation the benefit of the doubt, till shown otherwise. I think our capacity for bad faith and malicious intent are what really sets human beings apart from the lesser beings. Don’t get me wrong. I love so many of the dear people I know, with deep abiding affection. It’s just the performance of the species as a whole, and in particular our Western culture, that I take issue with. I think there are things here in the Nature we can all learn from.
Humans now live outside of evolution, we have short circuited the selective forces, by taking more than our share of the gifts. We have built a doomsday global economic engine to rob the reserves and mortgage the future, and are now running our mounting suicidal course to self destruction, taking the living fruits of eons of hard won evolutionary knowledge along with us, via the global extinction event we have generated so heedlessly. A crime against humanity doesn’t even begin to describe what we are smugly perpetrating now, while racking up huge carbon debt jet setting around trying to sustain the denial. It seems like a foregone conclusion but that does not justify acquiescence. We live right because it’s about our relationship with Creation, regardless of what our neighbors are doing. The gang rape defense is utterly insupportable.
A spider crawls across the rugged surface of the snow in front of me, foraging for littler bugs borne here by the winds. By habit I straddle my skis around her without breaking stride.
Looking over my shoulder, the icy Crystal range is shining in the afternoon sun, beautiful but forbidding. My eye alights on familiar peaks, prompting memories. This is my first look at Rockbound Valley since last fall’s wildfire threatened. At one point, it was reported that a spot fire had blown a mile and a half up and over the Crystal Range to the shores of Aloha Reservoir. From there it was easy enough to envision the prevailing south westerlies blowing the fire to the grove on Mosquito Pass and then on down Rockbound Valley, to eventually get blown over the crest proper at the low spot where I crossed it today, and then on down canyon to Lake Tahoe.
Studying this fire in real time, I realized how much the winds that propel wildfires are terrain driven. And that a lot of the weather and terrain sense that I have developed backcountry skiing translates to predicting how fire might behave in given terrain, depending on how wind directions are affected by prevailing patterns, diurnal temperature changes, and dynamics with frontal passage. I can see how the usual winds around here would drive the fire along this west slope of the Sierra crest here, despite being down canyon. Which would potentially seed fires into the Tahoe basin via any of these half dozen west shore canyons radiating from the Lake between Eagle Creek and Ward Creek, following the glaciers where they jumped the Crest here and flowed down into Tahoe.
That fire path lays out before me now, the strait broad glacial rounded canyon, standing ready to conduct it. Fire wouldn’t move that readily on this sparse granitic slope one would think, but it could hop from tree to tree in stiff winds, grove to grove, stand to forest. How do you hide from fire that is spotting a mile and a half? or fight it? Just flee. And wait for the winds to sift. Thing is, it needs to burn. Physics doesn’t care if you don’t understand. It will burn. The natives knew it, and so they used prescribed fire, for untold centuries, lit it at the right time where needed, then split. The west shore canyons are mostly overly dense stands of trees now, fire starved for a century, thick and overgrown, and now dying off, standing dead, and littering the floor. Snow covered, it doesn’t look so threatening, but I know better.
I suppose this threat puts us in a more natural position relative to our mortality, and the ambient chaos of life on this planet. That native level of insecurity and uncertainty keeps creatures humble, and in their proper good faith reciprocal relations with those creatures around them. Modern mortgaged comfort based economies not so much.
Usually when I’m skinning up this slope the snow quality is getting better, as the sun shines in on the west slope, and I’m scheming on doing another quick run. But that’s usually late March or April, not early February. All day I’ve been reminding myself of this, and it’s been apparent in the snow quality. Chasing corn skiing in these big midwinter high pressure doldrums, reminds me of skiing in the High Sierra, the snow is wind ravaged and frozen hard and rough, and what softening you can find is partial and fleeting, and rarely well timed with our travels. But it still beats walking, particularly on the brush and talus that lies below so much of our ski terrain.
Gully skiing at high elevations is like skiing a sun dial. As soon as it tips back into the shade it immediately starts refreezing. Twice now I’ve turned around at fourteen thousand feet on Mount Williamson in the High Sierra, just a few hundred feet short of the summit, because my southeast facing gully was going into shade, and I cared more about skiing the gully well, than I did about tagging the summit. I also didn’t care enough about the summit to set an alarm for an alpine start, to commence walking in the dark. But that’s not why I’m here, not to prove something or provide fodder for self aggrandizing tales. There’s no bucket list. I’m just here to visit, and do a little dancing.
I’m not here to force myself upon this place. This is like an actual relationship I have here, and there is give and take, generosity and restraint, and I treasure what we share without expectations. That’s what I aspire to anyway. Its easier to pull off when solo. And its easier for me, in some ways, because I am not some big burly ripped testosterone crazed mountain beast. I don’t have the luxury of just bullying and bluffing my way through, I have to get by on my wits and discretion. The bulling part I learned to adopt occasionally, when appropriate, as a tactic not a strategy. Such behavior tends to make me suspect with the conformist mountain jock crew. I wear it with pride.
Today I’m not even tempted to ski another run. The snow is still too rough and firm to be inviting. Plus I’m planning on trying a new route for my return and don’t know what to expect timing wise. This sort of call too is much easier when solo, when it’s just me and the mountain. I do keep track of how long these things take, and I’ve developed a pretty good feel for when I need to head home, but that feeling comes from a deep quiet space within, communicated through feelings and hunches as well as the data and verbiage. Its easy to drown out that voice with clamorous route finding negotiations, or the inclinations of ultra runner partners who actually kind of like finishing in the dark (tree skiing by headlamp? No thanks). Interestingly, most of the biggest days I’ve done have been solo, not with my darkness inclined ultra partners.
The PCT is snow covered and unused, and I cross it with no visible indicators, as if it were merely notional, a line drawn on a map. As if. In the summer its like a throughway, thousands of backpackers, from Mexico to Canada, or even just around the Tahoe Rim, also a popular bucket list trail, that runs concurrently here. I usually stop here at Hortense the Juniper for the view, and the official entry/exit into wide open Rockbound Valley, wisps of vapor carrying my greeting to the four winds, thankful to walk in such beauty.
Frequently when I’m here on foot instead of skis, backpackers will truck on by, intent, goal bound, totally missing the rare view behind me, of where they’ve been or are going. I feel anomalous, with my meager little day pack, sifting crosswise, slinking across the trail, part feral. I gather from trail blogs (not a fan boy but I have lurked on occasion, sampling the subculture) that the thruhikers disdain day hikers and weekend warriors. Does living in the woods make folks even more tribal? Sounds a bit literal minded but apt?
I thinks their superiority is kinda cute, given how little many of them know about the wild world beyond their narrow beaten freeway, and the bitty e.map in the palm of their hand. They are rarely more than a couplefew days out from the nearest fast food and shower. But I recognize them as kin, knowing I have much more in common with them, immersed as they are in covering wild terrain, than your average American work/shop-aholic, but many seem unable to discern, caught up in their own self image and the status of their heroic mission. Their loss. I shrug
I shuffle up my usual way, keeping an eye out for the foot and a half (dbh) Western White Pine beside the boulder where I laid the greenish arrowhead I found here years back, split the long way, missing the tip and half the tang, but a recognizably tooled biface, limey stone, probably chert, maybe from North Fork of the American not far from here? Maybe Nisenan west slope natives? Or Washoe, their longtime neighbors and trade partners from the eastern, Tahoe side of the crest. I think I recognize the nondescript tree, and the snow lump of the boulder at its base, as I skin past, and then hit dead-on the landmark split face boulder a hundred yards above at the top of the gentle grade to the Crest. I feel like I follow paths I cant see. Ain’t nothing but the dog in me. I see coyote tracks on the trail bed of the PCT even when the trail itself is buried under ten feet of snow. They know just where they are.
Many creatures have inexplicable navigation mechanisms and organs, detecting factors we are largely oblivious to. Sights, scents and sounds beyond our narrow band widths, atmospheric pressure, and the gradient and flux of electric and magnetic fields, are all mediums we could read and manipulate, to conceptualize and operate in the world more fully. Could we be exercising echo location via other emanations in the various mediums, to increase our range of detection? Systems of thought and communication based on modulation of scent or electric, gravitational, temporal and kinetic energy fields, could create whole new ways to see and explore this world, as vivid as the familiar ones. We are oblivious, hardly even realizing how little we know. Dunning and Kruger are rolling their eyes.
Imagine the world-view a bear gets through her nose, an intensely intricate mapping of myriad chemicals, carried to it from near and far on unseen currents, and the scents she reads from her neighbors, and those she leaves behind, which communicate complex information back to them, in the ongoing piss-tree conversation thread. Now imagine something like that but in an electromagnetic field, like catfish or stingrays. We lack the vernacular to even formulate a conception of how they might ‘see’ the world.
And that’s fine, we are mortal, finite. The ultimate workings of the universe obviously remain beyond our comprehension and our inadequate language tools of conception. We do well to keep reminding ourselves. And each other. Knowing that our understandings are imperfect, which is to say flawed, means we must be on the lookout for our own and each other’s errors and fallacies. That’s what friends are for. I find it interesting how much our culture discourages the offering and reception of constructive criticism, how we take it as an attack and get defensive, fleeing the cognitive dissonance of dawning realization. It would seem like a learning disability. How convenient for those who would profit from manipulating us. We do their work for them.
I like to put off decisions as long as is practical, to allow for further gathering of information and pondering. That way I am making the call in real time, in the now, not as some abstraction in advance that I will dogmatically adhere to. There is an ambivalence and uncertainty to this mode that some are uncomfortable sitting with, but to me it only makes sense. It is patience not procrastination. But it does lack that heroic air of macho certainty, where you declare your goal in advance, which involves conquering some sort of summit your ‘friends’ have all heard of and will be properly impressed by, and succeed through dogged perseverance, irrespective of unfolding conditions or the apparent consent of the vanquished.
Here on the easterly roll of the blunt, glacial rounded Crest I need to make the final call whether to just head down canyon like usual, the path of least resistance, the simple direct, pedestrian route, or to climb Geeks ridge, sister of the McGeneral ridge I traveled up this morning, to allow for trying the pump and glide technique in another location, skinning directly to the ridgetop then ripping skins to glide traverse for miles, skating laterally on the uniform moraine side hill, staying high as I go, to cover as much horizontal as I can, for my long return home.
Normally when I do this tour it’s a month and a half later in the season and the afternoon snow is warm and tacky enough so I can kick and glide freeheel skinless down the mostly level canyon bottom for the seven miles home, but the snow is still frozen slick today, and the shuffling without skins would be laborious, requiring even more strenuous poling (harder on my bum wrist). And going that way down the long flat canyon with skins on would be a literal drag, with absolutely no glide along the way, no free mileage, having to work for every inch of the journey. So the idea of just climbing a mile and a half and five hundred vert to the ridge top, so I can glide and shuffle with skins off for three plus miles is quite appealing. And being back up out of the green tunnel, in the high views.
That would mean dropping off the crest down to Upper General Creek here, instead of following the crest north half a mile to descend Rattlesnake Ridge. The slope below me is steep and rocky, with a cliff band to maneuver through. It looks daunting in the sense that I can’t actually see it, rolling out of sight over the convexity and reappearing a few hundred feet below. I know this face pretty well from summer use though, and am not too worried. I like it when it looks like that, when I can’t quite see the slope because it’s getting steep, as long as I’m confident it goes, if it’s white I’m good. No mandatory air, has been a rule of mine since I was in my twenties, and took up telemark skiing to up the challenge, without having to huck air off cliffs, like the circus performers you see stunt skiing for dollars and likes on the interwebs.
This is one of the few reasonable routes down off the Crest here in the summer. I move slowly across to the edge of the open ridgetop, scanning the neighboring trees and outcrops, waiting for recognition to click, to hit my line just right.
The snow is firm in the shade here, but at least it’s supportive, not breakable. I snap off little hop turns, letting the steepness work for me, carrying momentum while straining to quickly read the terrain and transpose my sense of this face in the summer, to skis. I work left above a looming void, with just a bit too much terrain shielded from view below, the math not quite checking out between horizontal and vertical axis, judging the presence of a cliff by the lacuna. It’s what you can’t see that will get you.
I recall in the summer having to work down steeply, trending left to a ledge that then leads you back right a ways, along down and across the cliff face, and I follow this course now, in a fluid flash, like a darting chickadee. The Sierra is so generous with such ledges, switching cleanly through forbidding terrain. The single passable path through otherwise impassible terrain is a mountaineering ideal, and skiing this makes me feel like Mother Earth’s extra special, clever golden star boy.
I traverse smartly to the crest of the low terminal moraine where it crosses the canyon. This recessional moraine at the top of the shallow upper canyon, would have been left behind as the last glacial epoch tapered away, maybe one of the last waves to cross the Crest here, from the glacial fountain feeding over from west slope Rockbound Valley. I follow the path of these trailblazing rivers of ice, which were in turn just interpreting the lay of the current underlying bedrock geomorphology, itself a choppy churning slow-mo sea of stone.
I grin, sailing amongst the pointy tips of shed-sized boulders just breaking the surface, following my nose down to the creek. I’m glad to see and hear open water moving through windows in the snow pack, flowing again already. The creek runs dry up here by early summer most years, but I sense that it generally flows for most of the winter, buried or not. The five inches of rain we got in October was probably enough to get it going again, and then the record December snowfall sealed it in.
I plunked down and ate a few more bites of pbj and gnawed at my apple core, while putting my skins back on, chewing while I’m choring, for efficiency. From the crest I could see that I would be lined up nice here to climb the gentle draw to Duck lake, perched up on the ridge across the valley, above me. And I set right to it, excited to be trying a new route. The draw became less distinct as the slope leveled off nearing the ridgetop, and I got pulled left and then had to correct right, unsure of just where I was without a fall line to guide me. I hemmed and hawed and zigged and zagged and popped out right on the lake shore like I knew just what I was doing. Funny how often accurate route finding out here looks and feels like confused wandering, in the moment. I relish the trust I have built, between my self and this place, to allow myself to be lead.
I shuffle off across the snow covered surface of the shallow little lake, which always feels like getting away with something, cheating gravity, skimming across the smooth level surface of the liquid lake that lies still beneath the snow and ice, with no pesky vegetation to dodge. Then I jogged up to the saddle on the divide between there and neighboring Meeks Creek, and then on up that medial moraine ridge to it’s highpoint at nearly 8000’. I think to stop and look back over my shoulder, across the ridgetop plateau I just crossed, where the forestbound tarns, Duck and Lost lakes, are ducked, lost to sight. Further creative high tide glacial action, it would seem, carved out these high spring fed lake basins. Beyond lies shallow upper General Creek and the final five hundred foot ridge that is the actual crest proper, which I crossed today, coming and going. Behind that, looming across the conspicuous void of Rockbound Valley, is the distant Crystal Range, on the skyline like a mirage, or a stage prop. That naked range, and the yawning void, hold a large place in my waking dream-scape, representing a pure alpine ideal, an essential, existential reality, beyond mere worldly concerns.
As if. But the idea is still real. There is such a place. It exists. On some other planet, away from small minded, human gift hoarding. I apologize every day, for my kind, sometimes every page, not out of negativity or despondency, but out of authenticity. No recitation of performative fairytales necessary here. No tippy toeing around fragile feefees. It sucks but it’s real. You don’t navigate in consequential terrain by feigning positivity. You do hard things by examining what makes them hard.
Geeks Elbow, a favorite ski line of mine falls away to the south. And there is a ski track from a few days ago, going down and coming up. Huh? I had been seeing ski tracks on this ridge, quite a bit closer to the lake, earlier this season and last, so I’m not too too surprised. And I did encounter that ultra runner gal in her ultra light skimo race gear one time at this spot, but she was avoiding challenging descents on her big loop (which incidentally was substantially shorter than today’s outing), and declined my offer to show her this ski run here. I never used to see any tracks at all here except my own, for decades. Does saying that make me sound old and bitter? Old anyway.
These ski tracks are narrow like mine though, not fashionably fat clown shoes like the cool kids use now. (I find out later that it was my ultra buddy I told about this line, haha). I shrug and rip skins, in the same spot here I have so many times, but I’m not skiing that run today, I’m just traversing down the ridge, pointed homeward. Its three thirty, only a couple more hours of daylight. I may have seventeen hundred feet of vert below me, but this run is all about the five miles of horizontal, between here and home.
I make a couple turns, faking down into the south, letting gravity tease me, but then make a hard left and traverse away, off about my business. I relish the late day push, cruising, all the parts humming along, clean burning, in the flow state, focused and all the way live. I have pretty much been in that mode since I left the floor of Rockbound hours ago. I have no idea where all that energy even comes from, deep inside my scrawny frame. It’s greater than the sum of the parts. Life is so generous like that.
I glide and slide down the hardened ridge top, picking through the outcrops, working either side of the ridge, looking for little spots to make a sun softened turn or three, then zipping back to the ridge, forced by protruding bushes back onto the north side of the ridge. All these little moves are familiar from years of working this ridge, but I’ve never worked it like this, coming back from Rockbound. It’s like a consummation, actualizing my practice. After nearly four decades of traipsing around here, even as my outright strength, speed and range flag, I am delighted to find myself still expanding on my knowledge and technique, making fresh points of contact and interconnection, finding new ways by linking old ways, pressing my game forward, progressively and creatively, drawn on by the terrain and conditions.
I cross around north below the Candelabra Tree, which is now a toppled snag, trying to glide where I can, while maintaining vert. I need to be high enough to hit the midslope moraine crest at the base of the dramatic faulting at the other end of the Geeks crest. I wrap back to the ridgetop, make a few turns on the sunny side, which is going into shadow but has less punchy, more solid snow from previous melt freeze cycles, so I’m able to hop them around and skid turns with ease. Gotta work what fun I can into this ‘run’. I skate along the ridge top through the zone that burned years back, then wrap around to the north side again to contend with the craggy outcrop and boulders that spill off the easterly high point of the ridge.
In the past I’ve done a quick boot up to the high point, but the snow is punchy, not conducive to booting, or to skiing back down this exposure so I just keep working around, not fighting it, gliding around until I could see where I was for sure, as the slope rounded the east face of the fault scarp where the ridge drops. As usual, I may have ‘used a little too much force’, I’m ‘conservative’ like that, which is to say, I am plenty high enough, and need to descend a couplefew hundred feet to get to the bottom of the faulting and pick up the moraine ridge leading home. I hack my way down the breakable crust, ferreting out smooth open patches where I can link awkward jump turns, clearing my skis of the crust to change make the transition midair, then landing splayed to recover, before seeking out another spot to hazard a turn. Still beats walking (up to the point where the crust becomes orthopedic anyway).
I eventually zip out onto the level moraine crest and glide to a halt, where I stop and free my heels for the still skinless shuffle down canyon, another chapter of my journey successfully completed, and right on into the next. The afternoon sun has clocked around and is shining back in on this ridge, which is cocked a little more west of north than it would seem. I admire the play of the long light streaming low across the eye level crowns of the big craggy russet boled Red Firs, and gracefully poised Sugar Pines, below me on the steep walled glacial moraine.
These low elevation moraines, from the most recent receding waves of glaciation, stand closer to the angle of repose, because they have had less time to slump and collapse, less floods and earthquakes to ride out. Here, where the strike/slip faulting crosses the ridge you can likewise see how the older higher levels of moraine have been offset to a greater degree horizontaly than those lower, more recent ones. I helped my buddy who is a geologist for the USGS map that mechanism in action right here.
My skin track from six weeks ago is still visible in spots, as it hasn’t snowed since. I can also see some one else’s tracks intermittently on top of mine, also from weeks ago. This ridge is getting more and more traffic, if you can even use that word to describe two ski tracks in a month and a half. But years past it would have been just mine, so that’s twice as many. I love this ridge, and do enjoy sharing it with like minded souls. More power to them. I have to remind myself sometimes.
Our reflexive territorialism is contagious. These tracks could well be a neighbor or someone I know. It’s awesome folks are out exploring and enjoying the wilds, this is how we are meant to be. Up to a point anyway. Beyond that the quality of everyone’s experience, as well as the health of the resource are affected, as we increasingly see. Sharing modestly for the learning and fun is healthy and sustainable, sharing for profit or even just ‘likes’ at exponentially greater internet rates, not so much. Share your pie with a thousand of your ‘friends’ and nobody gets nothing. It’s just a waste of pie.
I follow the moraine crest to the little dip in the ridge at the other end of the faulted zone, and drop down onto the broad ramp that leads gently down the ridge, above Olympic Meadows. This too is a moraine feature, a lower more recent recessional moraine plastered onto the wall of the higher older moraine. This feature is nearly continuous for a good mile and makes such an appealing route that post war loggers used it with little additional excavation necessary. The Comstock era loggers here in the 1860s may have thought surely their God of manifest destiny had excavated the way special just for them (because what Father can resist playing favorites? except a just and loving one, I suppose.)
The moraine ramp set me gently down at the base of the ridge adjacent to the bridge (see? it’s manifest). This spot is a crossroads of sorts, a natural route following the toe of the ridge up and down canyon intersects our route from the bridge to the ridgetop. I also have many personal intersections with this spot, over the last few decades of living here. We called this Lawn Dart camp. A five foot diameter Red Fir here tossed its dead top in the wind, as they are prone to, and it sailed a hundred feet and stuck in the ground tip first, twang! standing vertically ten feet in the air, branches all pointed strait down. It pays to look up before you lay down around here.
It’s a nice opening in the big old trees, and seems like maybe it was a staging area for the post war loggers, though its pretty clean and undisturbed looking. I suppose maybe the loggers were being conscientious since they were working on a billionaire banker’s back forty? It was a real selective operation, taking just big old Red Fir, but not all of them, and not the younger ones which have filled back in. The Sugarpines seem happy with the extra breathing room. I found a thirty inch stump that I could make out the rings on, and counted over five hundred. Counted twice. This thing was a sapling around the time Columbus blundered ashore, opening up a whole big can of worms, the climax of which is mounting still. There are many Red Firs here that are a foot or two bigger still around, likely far older. The stories they could tell.
This is beautiful forest, classic Sierra mixed conifer, and the moraine ramp is like an escalator, easing you up and down the mountain, with fine views of the canopy and the dry meadows in the flat valley floor below. These meadows are likely the bed of glacial lakes, dammed up behind terminal moraines from different eras, that filled with melt water, and eventually with glacial tilled gravel and silt.
These meadows were the site of the biathlon shooting/skiing events in the 1960 Winter Olympics. I love to think of those guys zipping around here in their woolen knickers, on three pins and leather boots sixty years ago, not unlike my own touring rig still, sans knickers. I reckon those guys could appreciate today’s tour, even with my new fangled ski gear. If they could only see me now.
Skis still on, I sit slumped on a log and hang my head, inert. I am so so tired, deep down, bone tired. More tired than I can even remember, right now. Alpenverbraught. Eventually, I fumble some almonds and dried mango into my mouth, having to remind myself periodically to keep chewing. And after fifteen minutes, I’m feeling somewhat revived, and the image of cold beer and a hot tub draws me the rest of the way home.
18 miles, 4100’ vertical feet, 6:42am-5:06 pm
