Sterling Terrain V02 - Flipbook - Page 35
Sterling College | 33
The High Sierra
The High Sierra rise abruptly from the Great Basin like a vast mountain sky
world, an immense, continuous, snow-caked, jagged horizon line of glacially
excavated granite thrust fourteen thousand feet up from the hot valley flats
below. The Sierra Nevada are the Great Wall of California. To the west is the
ocean-washed Pacific Slope, home to Valley Oak, Coast Redwood, Golden
Grizzly, Rainbow Trout, Yokut, Miwok, one of the richest landscapes on planet
earth. To the east is the sunbaked Great Basin Desert, home to Sagebrush,
Rabbitbrush, Pinyon Pine, Ancient Bristlecone, and Mono Piute, one of the
most stark landscapes on earth. For ten million years the wall of the Sierra has kept these two worlds separate, and still does, with the mountains
forming an ecological and cultural meeting place for a staggering diversity
of ecosystems and peoples. This is the largest contiguous mountain range in
the lower forty-eight and includes the highest mountain peak (Mount Whitney). This is home to the highest lake in the continent (Tulainyo) and the largest singular living things on planet earth (Giant Sequoias). These mountains
include a wider variety of the earth’s terrestrial biomes than any other place
in North America, by a longshot, and the most significant sweeps of massive granite anywhere for many thousands of miles around. Nearly the entire
range is federally designated wilderness, including numerous national parks
and national forests. In short, the range is both an ecological and a geological
mecca, not to mention a wilderness backpacking paradise.
Walking the Watershed
This summer we set out to traverse this great range following the course of
the legendary Tuolumne River, from the big water and montane forests of the
west slope to the snowfields and alpine meadows of the headwaters. This is
no small feat; the route is entirely uphill, from 4000’ to over 12,000’. So we
took our time, two weeks, basecamping and studying ecology and geomorphology along the way, honing our expedition skills in the hot summer sun,
in the dry, chapping wind, in the driving rain, the alpine cold, and in a snowstorm so radical it snowed uphill. We laughed and cried, blistered and healed,
slept outside, swam in cold water every day, learned the trees and the flowers, the birds and storms, and came out stronger, happier, and healthier than
before. We followed up on our Tuolumne River watershed trip with another
two weeks in the hinterlands of northern Yosemite, a region of the park that
is seldom traveled, where we stayed above 10,000’ the entire time, focusing on alpine ecology and glacial geomorphology. Here we ascended steep
north-facing snowfields with ice axes in hand, traversed remote off trail high
passes, and climbed as many high, lonesome peaks as we could.