Back in 1988 I was a seasonal Forest Service Wilderness ranger, living and working alone deep in the Sierra high country. On the day after Summer Solstice that year I witnessed an event that was both extraordinary and utterly baffling. This happened at a trail pass on the Toiyabe Forest/ Yosemite Park boundary—wind-swept alpine terrain at around ten thousand feet. When it occurred I was taking a short break from work, relaxing by the trail. I wrote a brief description of the incident in my ranger log and then, days later, a more in depth version in a letter to friends. (I recently unearthed a copy of that missive, hence the current narrative.) As for the veracity of what follows: I freely acknowledge that this late telling is suspect; recreating experiences from the distant past is fraught with pitfalls. Old memories are notoriously unreliable. Another hurdle: the whole episode is nigh-on impossible to describe in straightforward terms. Factor in this being in essence a third-hand rendering and, voilá—“fiction stranger than truth.” All the same, this is an earnest attempt at truthfully portraying something seen, heard, and felt.
IT WAS AROUND THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon when it happened. I was lounging on a glacier-polished granite slab right at Dorothy Lake Pass, gnawing on a stale bagel with a light breeze drying my sweaty back. Gazing out over the lake-dotted basin spread below me, my mind a blank slate. Puffy clouds were piling up and it looked like rain was in the offing—maybe a thunder-storm. I’d been clearing water-bars and tossing loose stones off the trail for several hours straight and was happy to take a little break before walking the almost five miles back to Piute cabin.
With no warning, a deep rumble broke the silence. My gaze shifted. It seemed to come from the general vicinity of a craggy peak southeast of where I was sitting and over a mile away. First thought: Thunder? The rumbling intensified, its volume increasing. Second thought: Definitely not thunder…not enough cloud build-up. My mind had been wandering but was now locked in and focused. The thunder-like sound went on for several long seconds longer. Subtly different than typical thunder, it had a dense, “heavy” quality. What the…? Rockfall? Natural rockfall is common in the alpine zone and I again scanned the area the sound seemed to emanate from. I knew that billowing clouds of dust accompany any substantial rockfall but there was no dust-cloud to be seen. And if there were a rockslide, opaque clouds of powdered stone would be visible well before any reverberations reached my ears. Not rockfall. So…what is it?! My mind raced ahead, trying to make some sense of what was going on. Just then I recalled having been told about a military jet that crashed inside the park a few years back (as it happens, just a few miles from where I sat). Perhaps this thunderous rumble was a series of muffled explosions—the sound made by tons of metal and jet fuel colliding with mountain. I searched the skyline, my eyes darting back and forth like a cat’s: nothing.
At this point, perhaps four or five seconds had elapsed.
And that’s when things got strange…very strange indeed. An eerie, unearthly sound took over as the rumbling faded, or passed on. It arrived as if carried by wind. But not so much carried—it was like wind; a wind made of sound, sweeping across the land. Something that I could almost, but not quite, feel against my face. And these new aural emanations weren’t merely travelling through air—they seemed to be coursing through the ground as well, though it’s be hard to say for sure. This was unlike anything I’d ever heard and almost impossible to describe in a way that makes much sense.
Maybe the best way is to go at this thing obliquely, using a descriptive blend of several very different aural phenomena. It’s complicated so please bear with me.
Back in the 1980s, I spent my winters living and working at a cross-country ski lodge high in a canyon on the Sierra Eastside. It had been an abnormally dry autumn and the ground was still mostly snow-free. One sunny afternoon in mid-December I took a long hike upcanyon, passing by a string of small lakes already covered with thick layers of shimmering, silvery-blue ice. The sun was almost down when I turned back. Along the way I got to hear, for the first time, the otherworldly sounds produced by ice-covered lakes. For those who haven’t been around frozen lakes and ponds: Ice expands slightly as it gets colder. Around dusk, when temperatures are dropping fast, stress builds up within a lake’s frozen surface. Over the course of some minutes, hairline cracks form in the ice as a response to tremendous pressures. One after another these cracks shoot off in multiple directions and at great speed. The instantaneous release of tension generates an extraordinary array of weird sounds that travel through the air stereophonically—whip-cracks…pops…muffled booms. Perhaps strangest of all are the modulated whines and low moans that may simultaneously crackle like electricity on a wire. Once, attempting to describe these freakish, high-pitched warping sounds, I came up with this: “It’s like hearing a recording of whale songs, played backwards.”
There’s another aural occurrence bearing some resemblance to what I heard at the pass that day: the violent sounds made by extreme winds. While climbing mountains, on occasion I’ve been forced to negotiate knife-edged ridgelines during severe windstorms. Now, as implausible as this sounds: On the lee side of a knife-edged ridge, just beneath its crest, a full-on gale can be ripping by just overhead while you’re lounging on a ledge in a pocket of calm air. Air so calm one could hold up a lit match, with the roaring maelstrom mere inches away. I’ve experienced tempests with eighty-mile-an-hour gusts from this unparalleled vantage. You hear them coming. And when one hits it makes a gut-wrenching, ripping sound like a cotton sheet being torn to shreds.
Finally, think of the haunting, Theremin-like, warble of a musical saw.
Now, back to the pass. What I heard/felt could be described as an amalgam of three disparate elements: hurricane wind raking rock, cracking lake-ice, and musical saw-warble. This new sound potpourri followed in the rumbling’s wake. (I can’t recall if there was a gap between them.) But the two were separate things; one did not blend seamlessly into the other. This new soundscape was not especially loud but felt…big. Like the rumbling, it seemed to be on the move. It had substance. An almost lifelike quality. There was a hissing, rasping component reminiscent of extreme wind-gusts. But most prominent was something like what I heard in the frozen lake music: the high-pitched, whale-song-played-backwards moanings, which possess a tonal quality produced by musical saws and the Theremin—that distinctive warble. It was one thing that approached. Then I was in it. Mesmerized, I listened and watched for some kind of sign. It seemed to meander around, then passed on, and was gone. Over. Done. Silence was restored, except for the sound of the everlasting breeze. I reentered a newly revised World-as-it-is. Back inside my skin, I heard three very matter-of-fact words inside my head: “That was strange.” Nothing for it but to finish off that way-past-its-prime bagel and try to process what had just happened. I failed to come up with anything sensible. Maybe there was slippage along a fault line, very near the surface…. But as soon as the thought had crossed my mind I realized, Oh yeah, that would be an earthquake. One whose epicenter I’d been sitting right on top of. Surely there would have been some vibration, even if it were a minor quake. Or would there? I’d felt no Earth-shaking.
To be clear, I don’t believe in paranormal phenomena or anything in the supernatural department. Rather, I subscribe to the view that nothing exists “above nature.” This includes each and all physical and mental phenomenon; even those that bleed into spiritual/mystical grey zones. All are natural in the sense of ultimately being subject to some sort of natural law. At the same time, the world is filled with weird and wonderful things that defy rational explanation. Mysteries abound. (And let’s not forget the Unknown and the Unknowable—always there but usually given short shrift.)
Bottom line: I still don’t even know how to characterize it, but I’m convinced that what happened to me way back in 1988 had to have been a curious effect with some unknown-to-me cause. There’s a nice, clean scientific explanation for this going on forty-year-old whatdunit—I simply have no idea what it might be. It took stumbling on an old letter to remind me that this thing even happened; otherwise, I might never have thought about it again. Now it’s time to run the story by a few of my card-carrying, go-to scientist friends. Of course, if I weren’t a proud, Neo-Luddite digital dinosaur I’d do a hearty online search. And this may sound ridiculous, but it doesn’t seem right to entrust something that feels sacred to the cold scrutiny of AI. Or subject it to one of my amateurish, halfhearted googlings. Better to honor the mystery.
©2026 Tim Forsell 27 Feb 2026 (Based on a Jun 1988 letter)
