The High Sierra: A Love Story

by Kim Stanley Robinson

We felt again the touch of deep time, of the humans who came before. These mountains are haunted, they were emptied by a genocide. We walk on sacred ground. And listen: that is true wherever you are as you read this, if you are anywhere in the United States, or anywhere in the Americas. Don’t think otherwise. Remember. Ten thousand years.

Muir wrote, “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot defend themselves or run away.… Through all the eventful centuries since Christ’s time, and long before that, God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand storms; but he cannot save them from sawmills and fools; this is left to the American people.”

Land Above the Trees, by Ann Zwinger and Beatrice Willard, does this very beautifully. Their detailed explanations of what they call sky islands—a great illustration of science as devotion—helped me to understand the Sierra’s fellfields better, after which I saw them better too. That’s how seeing works.

basic principles: 1. You don’t need to reproduce your house. In summer and fall in the Sierra, you don’t need much gear to be comfortable. So: don’t take what you don’t need. 2. Incidental dampness is not fundamental wetness, and incidental dampness doesn’t matter. This is a distinction the 1950s designers didn’t acknowledge: you don’t have to stay as absolutely dry as you typically do at home, in order to remain both warm and comfortable. Realizing that makes a lot of gear unnecessary. Condensation on the inside of your tarp? Not a problem. The only thing you really need to worry about is fundamental wetness, which ultimately comes down to your sleeping bag being too wet to work, so that you will perhaps freeze your butt. That you want to avoid. 3. For every item, all of them, take the lightest version that will still function for its purpose. 4. Try for dual use, meaning more than one function for the stuff you take with you—as in puns, where the crux word means two things and makes you laugh. Why are pirates so bad at playing cards? Because they’re standing on the deck! In a similar way, there are some items with two functions. Note this began all the way back with Clarence King and Richard Cotter, who used their sleeping blankets to make their backpacks. These days, walking poles can be your tent poles at night; backpack cushioning can serve as your pillow; your tarp can serve as a rain cape by day; your down vest is a mobile part of your sleeping bag; your empty backp...

My favorite Gossamer Gear pack weighs ten ounces,

Your tarp and backpack are two of what Terry used to call the four big-ticket items. The other two are sleeping bag and ground pad.

When I combine Thorlo trekking socks with Salomon hiking shoes, I’m good to go.

Western Mountaineering is my favorite for down gear, Gossamer Gear for backpacks, Mountain Laurel for tarps. Ground pads from Therm-a-Rest. Socks from Thorlo, boots from Salomon. But for all these items, other companies are also making very good gear (Zpacks, Big Agnes, etc.), as are individual makers who set up online and do great work.

Through the first half of the ’90s I was writing my Mars trilogy, and everything I saw and felt in the Sierra got translated into that project, sometimes quite directly. Indeed the process of terraforming Mars, as described in my novel, was really a matter of turning the Red Planet into something more like the high Sierra. Then in the second half of the ’90s I went to Antarctica, seeing it as a kind of Martian analogue; but here again the Sierra served as my psychogeological benchmark, adding perceptions to my Antarctic experience and my Antarctic novel, and to much of my other fiction from that time.

As I completed this book a fire threatened the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park: later it was determined that around 3,600 giant sequoias had died. Twenty percent of all the giant sequoias on Earth have died by fire in the last two years.

backpacking in the Sierra Nevada has been an immersion in a particular wilderness. It’s been a deep joy, impossible to express in full, but nevertheless real. I can bear witness to the experience of wilderness as a space of human joy. We were gamboling up there like kids in a meadow. Yes—seeing those young bighorn sheep fooling around that day in 2008 gave me the clearest image I’ve ever had of the feeling of being up there. I recognized what they were doing, and that made me laugh. Run in circles, pop suddenly into the air, collapse in a tangle—get up and do it again! It’s not virtuous; it’s not useful. But I’ve enjoyed it. And it taught me things. I’m grateful it struck me so young and so hard.