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 something quite extraordinary happened to me while I was sitting beside a trail pass on the Toiyabe Forest/ Yosemite Park boundary—wind-swept alpine terrain at around ten thousand feet. To this day, I don’t know how to even categorize whatever this thing was, much less come up with some kind of logical explanation. I wrote a cursory 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 letter, hence the current narrative.) As for the veracity of what follows: I freely acknowledge that this late-telling is suspect. Old memories are notoriously unreliable; relying on them to reconstruct experiences from the distant past is fraught with pitfalls. To make matters worse, the entire episode recounted here is nigh-on impossible to describe in a straightforward manner. Factor in this being in essence a third-hand rendering and, voilá—“fiction stranger than truth.” All the same, this is an earnest attempt to accurately portray something seen, heard, and felt.
IT WAS AROUND THREE O’CLOCK in the afternoon. 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 thoughts adrift. Puffy clouds had piled up while I wasn’t paying attention and now it looked like rain was in the offing—maybe a thunderstorm. I’d been clearing waterbars and tossing loose stones off the trail for several hours straight and was happy to take a short break before walking the almost five miles back to Piute cabin.
With no warning, a deep rumble broke the silence. My head snapped up. 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 thunderlike sound went on for several long seconds longer. Subtly different than typical thunder, it had a dense, “heavy” quality. What…? 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, 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, three or four, possibly 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 difficult 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 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 and around dusk, when temperatures are dropping fast, stress builds up within a lake’s frozen surface. In an interval of time lasting just minutes, hairline fractures 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 phenomenon bearing some resemblance to what I heard at Dorothy Lake Pass: the violent sounds made by extreme winds. While climbing mountains, on several occasions I’ve had to negotiate knife-edged ridgelines during wind-storms. 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 still air. Air so calm one could hold up a lit match, with the maelstrom a few feet away. I’ve experienced roaring tempests with eighty-mile-an-hour gusts from this unparalleled vantage. You hear the big gusts coming. And when one hits it makes a gut-wrenching, ripping sound like a cotton sheet being torn to shreds.
Finally, imagine the haunting, Theremin-like, warble of a musical saw.
Now, keep all this in mind.
Back to the pass. What I heard/felt could be described as an amalgam of these three unrelated elements: hurricane wind, cracking lake-ice, and musical saw-warble. This weird sound potpourri followed in the rumbling’s wake. (I can’t recall now if there was a gap between them.) But they were two separate things; one did not blend seamlessly into the other. The new soundscape was not particularly 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 those extreme wind-gusts. The dominant element, though, was something reminiscent to the frozen-lake music I heard: the high-pitched whale-song-played-backwards moans, but now including strains of that singular quality associated with the musical saw and Theremin. It was one thing that approached. Then I was in it. Mesmerized, I listened and watched for some kind of physical sign. It seemed to swirl about, to meander around, but then it passed on and was gone. All over. Done. Silence was restored. I reentered a newly revised World-as-it-is. Back in my skin I heard three words inside my head, enunciated in a decidedly matter-of-fact tone: “That…was strange.” Nothing for it but to finish off my way-past-its-prime bagel and try to process what had just gone down. I failed to come up with anything plausible. Maybe there was slippage along a fault, very near the surface. But no sooner had the thought crossed my mind than 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: while I still don’t even know how to characterize it, I’m convinced that what happened to me back in 1988 had to have been a curious effect with some unidentified cause. There’s a nice, clean scientific explanation for this going on forty-year-old what-dun-it—I simply have no idea what it might be. It took stumbling on an old letter in a folder 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 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 just 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)
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