Scribbles of the Sierra

6/12 Recently I've been too cold to write. Motor coordination is one of the simple functions we sophisticated mammals cherish. But like a true primate, I have forsaken feeling in my fingers and toes for the sacrifice of being uncivilized places. Ancient bowls and cirques of blue water lie below sheer treeless cliffs, and wide wide mountain passes stretch for miles like a giant's vertebrate. Deep canyons are dug between domineering shoulders of cliff. And still all is quiet. Even in the landscape of heaven all is quiet, because it is veiled in four feet of snow. How could I have predicted my June in California would be on the fringe of the Arctic circle? Everyday we navigate slopes with steel spikes on our shoes and ice axes in hand. Below the snow chutes, deep below in the canyon is death, and that is really what we are conquering here.

6/13 All this snow can be very defeating. Imagine running a race on a road where a truckful of pushpins was spilled. The sheets of white are deceptively beautiful but are ready to pull down my feet. Suddenly, hiking is very complicated. Sunscreen is necessary to prevent the underside of a nose from being burned. Sunglasses are necessary to keep retinas from being burned. An ice axe is necessary to arrest a body plummeting frictionlessly across a chute of ice. Spikes and chains are necessary for traction on the bottom of shoes. And many extra pair of socks are needed for cold wet feet. But what is most necessary is control of the secret to satisfaction- that the universe is what we make it.

6/14 First we woke in snow. What we saw was fields of ice and bright blue lakes, stilled in time. Then we walked through snow. For nine hours we dug our feet into the still holds in walls of ice and rock, and slid across fields of white. We forded streams of snowmelt, and navigated by compass, because for fourteen miles we saw only 100 feet of dirt trail. Everything else was bright and luminous, cutting into our our eyes like flakes of glass. We climbed Pinchot pass and then Mather pass, for which I should of taped a suicide note to the ice axe in my right hand that explained how glorious it would be to fall 1500 feet down an ice chute into a frozen lake to a death in John Muir's backyard. Needless to say, it scared me shitless. To kick steps into snow soft as vanilla pudding on a cliff face. On and on we walked through the white stuff, until we rounded the western wall of a canyon. The sun was shining proud and gloriously on the high rocky switchbacks, and the water of a million pounds of snow poured down through the shining rocks. We followed the trail inches of water, and I splashed and splashed and almost cried at the bliss of having ground beneath my feet. I drank water- cascading down the ridge- like it was lemonade. And we descended below 10,000 feet and I could hear the chimes of victory in my head.

6/15 A potato bomb is the process in which a hiker pours dehydrated mashed potatoes into a pot of food, often sodium-laced chinese noodles, to thicken the consistency from soup to porridge. Glissading is the process in which a hiker slides feet first down a slope of snow or ice, often forty-five degrees or steeper, grappling the terrain with an ice axe and hoping not to lose the delicate bond to Earth. Both will tear up your ass.

Photos from the goat farm

6/10

We are beyond the reach of humans now, and at the doorstep of heaven. Sheer cliffs catch the last light of the sun and leave the deep valleys in shadow. The thundering fall of water beneath sheets of ice echoes from below. Everything around me is white or brown- stacks of snow and rock dominate a landscape of giant proportions, without a sight of plant or animal. 11,600 feet in the glacial cirque below Mt. Whitney is a glimpse of the desert and the arctic, and the waiting room to another world. Tomorrow the six of us- Milkshake, Cliffhanger, Uncle Tom, Furniture, Rally and I- now huddled in rocks, will rise with the dawn to stand on America's highest point.

6/9

The party shirt appeared from behind the trees. Bojangles unleashed 160 ounces of malt liquor from his pack. That is enough for 40 ounces for the each of the four of us on this desolate glacial lake. At an alpine 11,500 feet above sea level, we are cold, but our friendship is warm.

6/8

Today I drank snowmelt, dug poopholes in the slope of a 10,000 foot peak with an ice axe, and wiped with a pamphlet sized declaration of independence. Even the best laid plots of mankind return to dust.

6/7

I don't eat pancakes anymore, but butter sandwiches laced with syrup.

6/6

Long valleys of sand and sharp brush are behind this point. Ahead are high giants who have reigned since glacial ages, still crowned with snow. It seems like more than lifetimes ago that I was scavenging a horse trough for water in the blue and brown cliffs 40 miles north of the Mexican border. Now the world has gone around its axis, and here I am on top looking down. 700 miles!

6/2

Imagine walking in the desert for eighteen miles. You are 6,000 feet closer to the sun than your cronies at home. The loose and lifeless sand moves under your feet like a conveyor belt, such that you are never fully moving forwards. No plants grow higher than your knees and are all waving sharp dry fingers. Joshua trees might offer a silhouette of shade as the sun's rays penetrate their thorny crowns, and as the sun shifts the shadow will divorce the ground. The world is white and grey and gleaming all around, like thousands of quartz mirrors smashed on the bottom of this cosmic oven. Everything is bright, caught in invisible fire. The air is hot, hot and dry, and long ago your hands became leather. In the beginning it was only a cosmetic tan and now it is following you, trying to eat your skin. Your shirt is a suit of salt, and everything is still hot and dry and bright and still. Every step sinks into the sand and little ridges form, quickly tickled by wind. Ants scramble up and over the ridges,watching their horizon grow and shrink with awe, as you walk through these lingering mountains.

6/1

Eventually the universe will have sort of spiraled into chaos. Part of the interesting nature of nature is that it organizes itself. But the great grandfather of life, Energy, has a more devious direction for the universe. Eventually all the seams will come apart.

5/31

This morning we left the goat farm and trounced back to the transient home we seek in nature. It is difficult leaving certain companionship and right angled rooms behind for wide-open and windy mountains lined with fading footprints. It is difficult to leave behind duck eggs and goat milk. But the less we have is the less we have to worry about. To ween ourselves away from our former home in a rusting camper, Rally and I made our beds tonight under crude lean-to by a stream, which is a lonely triangle of a truck frame and barn siding.