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Overview
This book presents a natural history of the Sierra Nevada that brings the land, the people, and the surrounding communities to life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610914758 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 04/09/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 339 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Tim Palmer is the author of twelve books about rivers and the American land. He is the recipient of the National Outdoor Book Award, the Director's Award from the National Park Service, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the organization, American Rivers.
Read an Excerpt
The Sierra Nevada
A Mountain Journey
By Tim Palmer
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Tim PalmerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-475-8
CHAPTER 1
The Storm
THE STORM DOES NOT SEEM DANGEROUS. The wind has quit, and the temperature holds steady at twenty-four. But beyond any doubt and regardless of any wishful hopes or sunshine yearnings, I'm being buried in foot upon foot of snow, and I'm beginning to ask myself, What am I doing here?
This is not the howling blizzard of Montana tales but a peaceful, silent whiteout, big flakes like in crayon drawings from the second grade, billions of flakes animating the air. It is alive. Within a few hundred feet of me, the earth and sky are indistinguishable; they become one.
The snow piles higher, day and night. Snow buries boulders pushed here by glaciers, buries trunks of fallen sugar pine that resemble the path a whale-sized mole might make. The storm inters streams that are not dead, and they carve treacherous tunnels that can cave in and drench a winter traveler. Wind slices across the high ridges, and though I can't see it from here, a blur of snow flies almost horizontally into the maw of the canyons beyond. Yet some snow clings to the leeward side of the ridges and builds cornices—overhanging drifts that will break with the sound of a dynamite blast and trigger avalanches of incredible violence, the bane of wilderness skiers.
It was snow that impressed one of the first non-Indians who saw these mountains. The missionary Pedro Font wrote from the mouth of the Sacramento River, "About forty leagues off, we saw a great snow-covered range [una gran sierra nevada] which seemed to me to run from south-southeast to north-northwest." The Franciscan was only describing what he saw, but the name stuck. The year was 1776; while a society in Philadelphia produced the Declaration of Independence, the Sierra Nevada remained unexplored by white people.
Now, more than 200 years after the first writer took note of the area, I will see what is here and what has happened to the place. I'll discover why the Sierra is important to many people. How does this range affect people, and how do they affect it? What will happen to this extraordinary part of the earth that reaches so successfully toward the heavens? Here is a land loved by some, enjoyed by many, but still unknown or barely known to most people. I am here to learn about these mountains and about our care and management of them.
The storm is a good place to start; it offers beginnings of many kinds. When the white reservoir melts, we have water for the abundance of Sierra life and even for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities. According to Larry Price, in Mountains and Man, 48 percent of the runoff in California is from the Sierra Nevada. Snow wears the uplifted range to the sculptured forms that we prize and travel thousands of miles to see. Snowstorms created the glaciers that carved Yosemite Valley, the unlikely sides of Unicorn Peak, and many of the eroded places now filled by 1,500 lakes. Sixty small glaciers remain, and today's storm recharges them.
With the softest snow came the creation of hard-rock canyons—meltwater rampaged downward and eroded the chasms of the Feather, the Kern, and thirteen other major rivers in between. Much of the fertile sediment, thousands of feet deep in California's Central Valley, was washed from the Sierra by water. The runoff slowly transports the mountains and the continent to the sea.
I sit in my van at the end of the plowed section of the Ebbetts Pass road—Highway 4. The storm began last night, and just now the snow topped the running board: two feet. I think it might let up soon, but I may be surprised. Late winter storms in mid-March surprised even Snowshoe Thompson, the intrepid mailman who skied across the Sierra and back for twenty years beginning in 1856.
One hundred feet beyond my rusty-colored van, the world disappears in an atmosphere of solid white, but for most Californians, this storm is merely rain. I imagine it: soaking wet and stacked for hundreds of miles out across the sea, the clouds transfer water from ocean to land, blowing in and spattering their soggy load on the beaches. Above the oak-veneered hills of the Coast Ranges, green with the juicy grass of March, the clouds climb and the rain pounds harder, greasing the bare dirt. East of the hills in the seventy-mile-wide Central Valley, the rain eases to a steady gray curtain.
At the 1,000-foot level in the foothills, the rain beats on scrubby oaks and ceanothus, on toyon and chamise, collectively called chaparral—tough, low cover that survives the summer heat of that furnacelike land because the roots and stems drink their fill now. The gray green digger pine is the forerunner of what some people have called the greatest conifer forest in the world, which the rain enters at 3,000 feet—the elevation where, to me, the foothills end and the mountains begin. Drops glisten from cedar, ponderosa pine, then sequoia, and the forest responds to the climate by thickening into a scented belt of green that continues nonstop for thirty miles to the spot where I watch.
For each 300 feet of climb, the clouds grow one degree colder (if it were not raining or snowing, the temperature would drop one degree for each 200 feet). Today, 5,000 feet is the divider: here spring turns to winter when rain turns to snow. Where the fir begins to replace the ponderosa pine, snow clings to limbs but melts when it hits the carpet of needles or the pavement of hardened lava. A little higher, the snow melts only to slush. But up here at the end of the road, the storm yields nothing but snow, nothing but white.
Where I sit, the storm realizes its greatest potential. Two more inches in an hour. The snow loads the needles of the lodgepole pine and bends young trees to the ground. Some will never recover and will grow with bizarre U-shaped contortions in their trunks. Animals take refuge in the air pockets made by the doubled-over lodgepoles. At high elevations, the hemlock are weighted until lower branches sag and touch the ground; upper branches shed their load by drooping to dump clumps of snow, making tiny craters under the trees. Juniper cope with the snow differently: they support the weight on muscular limbs that tremble not at all. Fir trees are pointed and shed snow like steep roofs.
Today's weather is a starting place. It is vital to the Sierra and to all who live here—vital to most people who live in California because of the water they will receive. Beyond being vital, the storm is beautiful and mesmerizing. John Muir sat out storms like this. Without a van. "The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy."
Inspired by the Old Man, I decide to go for a walk. I leave the skis but untie the snowshoes from their resting place against the ceiling. Skis in two feet of fresh snow are just snowshoes anyway, except on steep hills, which today I will avoid.
I head east on the road, which I recognize not by looking down at the ground but by looking up at an avenue of sky cleared of trees. After a while I veer to the right through the woods and follow a draw that seems to parallel the road. It's a simple plan, not likely to get me lost. This ravine drops to Lake Alpine.
The snowshoes push a wake of powder flakes to the sides, and with each step I sink deeply. Fresh snow can be 90 percent air, sometimes more. Even while I walk, fresh snow piles up on my shoulders and cap. The world is flattened in white; with no sunlight and no shadows, I see no depth, no bumps, no gullies, even though they are plentiful. Never level, the land surprises me by dropping away unexpectedly or rushing up to meet my snowshoes too soon. This unevenness would cause lurching descents on skis, but at my turtle pace on snowshoes it doesn't matter. Not a track do I see; every other living thing has burrowed in. Red fir encircle me, snow clinging to their rough armor of reddish bark. The countless trunks fade into a nothingness of white. It's a small world, showing nothing of the larger view.
Only in my mind's eye do I see beyond this storm-filled beginning. I imagine this scene repeated from Lassen Peak south, across the peaks and meadows, south to the highest mountains, then coasting down out of the storm to Tehachapi Pass, where the southernmost Sierra join the Coast Ranges or vanish into desert. The Sierra's northern latitude is that of Denver and Philadelphia; the southern latitude is that of Albuquerque and Cape Hatteras. Ebbetts, one of ten major passes in the Sierra, is less than halfway, north to south. Here Jedediah Smith made the first white man's trip over the mountains in 1827. The great fur trapper and explorer had been banished from California by the Spanish at San Gabriel, but after leaving the mission, he sneaked off to the north. Twice he tried to cross the Sierra—once at the Kings River and once at the American River—then with two men he followed this route up the North Fork of the Stanislaus and crossed the snow-covered heights that he called Mount Joseph. Two horses and a mule died. Through his career of ten years, Smith's outward search was for beaver to trap, but he wrote that his pursuit was "the love of novelty common to mall."
As the range became better known, Carson Pass was opened, named for Kit Carson. Because it is lower, Donner Pass became the favorite and remains so today, carrying Interstate 80—the only four-lane highway over the mountains.
Storms like today's are what made the passes difficult. Because settlers pushed from Missouri to California in one season, they hit the eastern escarpment of the Sierra in the fall and faced deadly risks of being snowbound while they crossed. Some, of course, didn't make it, the Donner party being the most celebrated of the luckless.
I stop to tighten the straps on my snowshoes. At Lake Alpine, which is frozen, I emerge from the woods, turn right, and enter a maze of buried boulders that are mounds of white, some ten feet high. I hear a faraway rumble. Is it far away? I stop walking, stop moving, stop breathing. The rumble is gone, and the only noises are snowflakes and my heartbeat, accelerated by the sound of the avalanche.
Just down the mountain from here is a place called Tamarack (the local name for the lodgepole pine; real tamarack do not grow in the Sierra). Tamarack holds the North American record for snowfall in a single month: thirty-two and a half feet in January 1911. In a typical winter, thirty-seven feet falls there, though the Sierra record is seventy-three and a half feet in 1906–7. In the United States, only the Olympic Mountains and the North Cascades receive more snow than this range.
If this storm turns out like the one in 1983, I'm in trouble, snowshoes or not, kerosene heater or not. Up to fifteen feet fell, drifting to thirty feet, closing Interstate 80 for days. Thousands of westbound trucks were halted in Reno. Avalanches were among history's worst in the Sierra. At Alpine Meadows ski area near Lake Tahoe, a woman was buried five days in a smashed building. Searchers found her miraculously alive, though badly frostbitten.
That was extreme weather, but in this range, the extreme is commonplace. At 14,494 feet, Mount Whitney is the highest peak in the country outside Alaska, but it is only sixty miles from Death Valley—the lowest depth at 280 feet below sea level. (Note: When I find different elevations listed for a peak, which happens often, I use U.S. Geological Survey figures.) North to south, the Sierra is the longest continuous range in America. (The Appalachians run for 2,000 miles, the Rockies for 3,000, and the Cascades for 700, though these ranges are not continuous but are composites of smaller ranges with gaps in between.) Sequoia trees—one is thirty-six and a half feet in diameter at its base—are larger in volume than any other living things on earth. Kings Canyon is the deepest canyon in forty-nine states—8,240 feet at one point. From its headwaters to Pine Flat Reservoir, the Kings River has the greatest undammed vertical drop in America. Lake Tahoe—1,685 feet deep—is one of the two largest mountain lakes. Tahoe and Mono Lake are two of America's oldest lakes. America's southernmost glaciers are in the Sierra. Yosemite Falls is the seventh highest in the world, Feather Falls is the sixth highest in forty-nine states, and El Capitan is called the largest granite monolith anywhere.
The preservation and use of the Sierra are also extreme. The first time that the federal government set aside parkland for its scenic and natural values was at Yosemite. Later it became our third major national park; Sequoia was the second. The largest state water system takes its supplies from the Sierra, and the largest project of the federal Bureau of Reclamation dammed Sierra rivers for farms and cities. Millions of homes were built with fir, cedar, and pine from these mountains. Yosemite is one of the most popular national parks and has the most overnight visitors. Lake Tahoe is one of the most visited lakes in the West, and the southeastern Sierra is one of the most used recreation regions on the continent. Two dozen ski areas draw millions of visitors, climbers prize Sierra granite as the finest rock climbing in the world, and many river runners regard the Tuolumne as the best whitewater in the West.
The Sierra stage has been set for controversy for a hundred years. Milestone after milestone in the conservation movement occurred here: the establishment of national forests, the federal reservation of Yosemite as a state park, the designation of Sequoia and Yosemite as national parks, the debate over damming the Tuolumne River and flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley, the establishment of Kings Canyon National Park, the efforts to designate wilderness areas, and debates over dams on the San Joaquin, Feather, Stanislaus, American, Tuolumne, Merced, Kings, and Yuba—on virtually all the rivers. And there is more: conflicts over road improvements at Tioga Pass, highway plans that would have transected the southern Sierra, the Mineral King ski resort proposed by Walt Disney and subsequent plans at Horseshoe Meadows and Peppermint, the export of water from Mono Lake, logging and in particular clearcutting, the grazing of cattle and sheep to the detriment of wildlife, the urbanization of Tahoe and Mammoth. There is interesting history in all of this, but more than history—the debates continue. In fact, they rage.
What of the mountains today? I will keep one eye on the past and watch for connections that are mostly ignored as our civilization roars on, but history is not my main interest. I'm looking for events that are happening now, for a community that is alive. I'm looking for people, for landscapes, for adventures, and for the tension and balance inherent in a culture that tries to use these mountains in ways that are apparently exclusive of each other. Are they?
The trees thin out and I can see a universe of white. On other days, I would see the Dardanelles and maybe Iceberg Peak, but today my image of the mountains is limited.
There are many popular images of the Sierra: John Muir's vision, "So glorious a morning"; the view of Half Dome and the tent cities at Yosemite's campgrounds; the skiers' headwall runs at Squaw Valley and the sunny bowls at Mammoth; the beaches and casinos at Tahoe; the sign "Chains Required" on Interstate 80; the whitewater splashing you in the face on the American River's South Fork and the Kern's North Fork; the sequoia with the hole cut through it for a road, the view from Lone Pine to Mount Whitney, elegant at sunrise. And more images: a logger's paradise, a gold miner's bonanza, a mountain cowboy's vacationland. These images are not false—most of them exist or used to exist—but some of them have led to false impressions. That sequoia tree with the hole cut through it fell over in 1969, killed by what people had done to it. Many people think that the Sierra Nevada does not extend north of Donner Pass, but it does. Some people think that the Sierra is made wholly of granite, which is a myth born of Ansel Adam's photographs and weekends in Yosemite; in reality, many square miles are covered with volcanic and metamorphic rocks. People think the mountains are staid and static, but they are growing and changing at one of their fastest rates ever.
Professionals have images as well: a park ranger's ultimate challenge (Yosemite), a resource planner's nightmare (twelve thousand letters expressing divergent opinions about just one plan for only one of eight national forests), a wildlife biologist's triumph (the reintroduction of bighorn sheep), a fisheries biologist's determination (to oppose destructive hydroelectric dams), and on and on.
The images are only narrow glimpses of what is really here. Behind each image lies a world of contradictions, manipulations, history, and a larger setting that frames the scene and often causes it to look very different. And most interesting: behind each image are people who have changed the place to look the way it does, or people who have prevented changes because they prefer the Sierra the way it is.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Sierra Nevada by Tim Palmer. Copyright © 1988 Tim Palmer. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
PrefaceChapter 1. The Storm
Chapter 2. The North
Chapter 3. The Deep Blue Lake
Chapter 4. Rivers
Chapter 5. Yosemite
Chapter 6. The Sunrise Mountains
Chapter 7. Escape
Chapter 8. The South
Chapter 9. The Celebration
Epilogue and Update
Acknowledgments
A Sierra Nevada Almanac
Conservation Organizations
Sources
Index