My brother was visiting. Most years, always in the fall, Steve (my sole sibling; older by three-and-a-half years) would walk in and stay for a few days. When he came to Piute Steve would accompany me on my daily rounds, on foot or on horseback, and was always keen to help out with trail work. ◦◦◦◦◦ About Steve: when my brother was a mere toddler he became infatuated with birds. By eight or nine, he was a budding junior birder and his interests were already expanding into other areas—trees, mammals, insects, sea creatures. Lucky me: I had myself a live-in natural history mentor and by age ten or eleven was following in Steve’s footsteps—literally—when I’d tag along on his early morning birding excursions. These took place mostly on family vacations and it was thanks in part to the many camping trips we took all through our childhood that the two of us ended up enthusiastic birders and wide-ranging naturalists. You just never know how things are going to play out: Steve’s early and almost freakish fixation with the feathered-kind led circuitously to his kid brother becoming a Wilderness ranger. ◦◦◦◦◦ I was often behind in my daily log entries (it was a constant struggle to keep up) and every so often would stage marathon sessions in an effort to catch up on a week or more’s worth of days. I tried to make these post-dated entries read as if they were composed more or less in the present. Sometimes, though, it was obvious that the narrative wasn’t being recorded in the here-and-now. In this one it was clear that I’d pulled my well-worn copy of Mary Hill’s “Geology of the Sierra Nevada” off the bookshelf and done a little research on Miocene volcanism.
14 Oct (Fri) Cold again (20°F) with a high cloud layer. When I got up to go feed the equines the pygmy owl was hooting away. I whistled it up and the little guy immediately came to investigate, perching atop a lodgepole right at the edge of the yard. [Pygmy owls are notorious for responding to even crude imitations of their simple call.] ◦◦◦◦◦ Time for a good long walk. My plan was for us to head back up the Long Lakes trail and clean more waterbreaks but press on further. Had another objective: I wanted to show Steve a unique local geological feature. I’d only visited it once before. (It’s aways off the trail and kinda hard to get to.) We worked to the PCT metal bridge, stashed our shovels, then skirted Walker Meadows visiting old sheepherder camps along the way. Found an old tree carving that I’d somehow missed—a neat one, probably early 1900s, in clear sight of the trail. ◦◦◦◦◦ Right when we hit Kennedy Creek it began to snow. (More like sleety-slushy rain at first.) Leaving the trail, we clambered up the hillside to the north and along the way ran into a stunning grandfather juniper I’d never seen: only fifty feet tall but with a truly massive trunk, much of it without bark and deeply furrowed—an honest ten feet in diameter from one aspect. It was symmetrical and pleasing to the eye; undoubtedly well over a thousand years old. And I don’t toss that figure out lightly. We were both overcome with admiration for this patriarch—one of the most impressive trees I’ve seen in Piute Country. ◦◦◦◦◦ Headed straight upslope from there (not far from the route I’ve taken on horseback to get to Ski Lake). In my customary kinda sneaky fashion under such circumstances, I planned our route so that we’d step around a corner and arrive right on top of the feature in question. When we were getting close I said, “Let’s head over here—there’s a good viewpoint and we can rest a bit before the final climb.” Steve, moving slow because of the altitude, wasn’t all that thrilled about climbing higher in the falling snow. We stood there for a minute or two while I waited for him to notice the curious geology but he was mostly focused on the deteriorating weather, not on our immediate surroundings. ◦◦◦◦◦ I finally spilled the beans: “Umm, actually…this is it.” We were standing on an outcrop of the crumbly brown volcanic rock that blankets much of the Sonora Pass region. There’s a technical term for it: “lahar”—an Indonesian word for hot volcanic rock mixed with water, mud, and other material that flows; sometimes at tremendous speeds. According to my book it’s part of the Relief Peak Formation, which blankets thousands of square miles of the northern Sierra region. It consists of andesitic mudflows that occurred sporadically over the course of some millions of years during the Miocene Epoch. But look here: the andesite-breccia (breccia = broken rock) on the slope we were standing on is studded with rounded granite boulders and cobbles, all sizes. The biggest ones are six feet across. Several of these are perched atop slender columns of breccia—the boulders acting like umbrellas to preserve the material holding them up. And there are a couple of small bluffs here exposing in cross-section a sort of mega-conglomerate made up of these cobbles mixed up with both volcanic and metamorphic rocks. The really striking thing is that the granite boulders are all rounded and polished—something that can only have been achieved by extensive tumbling in the bed of a good sized river. Steve, of course, is interested in geology and I wanted him to try and interpret this scene like I’d done a few years back. (When I met that geologist, Jack Quade, at Dorothy Lake this year he confirmed my theory.) ◦◦◦◦◦ It took a little prompting but Steve eventually figured out the puzzle: we were standing on remnants of an ancient river bed that had been inundated by one of the mudflows during the long period of volcanism in the Sierra that covered this country with the brown, fine-grained volcanic rock that’s so prominent hereabouts. The lava-based slurry, full of angular chunks of parent rock, had coursed downslope into a flowing river and picked up the giant cobbles in its bed. The addition of water no doubt provided further lubrication. This one minute remnant, perched on an obscure mountainside on the Sierra crest, overlying granitic bedrock, has survived repeated glaciations and is the chance vestige of a time long past. Those huge granite cobbles were tumbled during flood times by a long-gone river that flowed millions of years ago, well before the Sierra was uplifted! There are Pleistocene-era glacial erratics all over the West Walker country. Right behind the cabin is a large hunk of Cathedral Peak Granite, carried some miles, now lying on a small flat-topped bluff of far older marine sediments—truly ancient metamorphosed sedimentary rock tilted 90° off the horizontal (its bedded layers still evident). I’ve mused over this particular rock many times—how it’s sat there, slowly dissolving, for the last ten thousand years or so without moving an inch. But the boulders on the hillside where we were standing, that look like any other granite boulders at a casual glance: they’ve been resting in place for a long time, too. But dig: these rocks, long buried in mud and just now coming to light, have been there for something like a thousand times longer than the erratics. ◦◦◦◦◦ Here we have further proof of the limitations of the human brain. We simply lack the cognitive equipment to perceive things on this time scale; when we try, red lights start blinking and you have to back off lest over-heated neurons start going off like popcorn. Intellectually, I can imagine the polished river cobbles above Kennedy Canyon being much much older than glacial erratics. (They look pretty much the same, after all.) But I fail to comprehend. Fail miserably. ◦◦◦◦◦ And so, I find myself blown away, yet again, by nature’s productions. And see all too clearly that my own existence is exceedingly brief. Big picture-wise, humans are in the same boat as bugs and flowers—here today, gone tomorrow. The sun rises and sets over and over, endlessly, and as individuals our place in this world is essentially irrelevant. Me: I’ll be gone altogether too soon, my passing unnoticed. Glaciers will come again to rearrange this ever-changing landscape. Mountain ranges will rise and crumble. Ephemeral is the rule. And so it goes, Amen. ◦◦◦◦◦ Steve and I walked home slow, back on human-time. Took several little detours to visit places I’ve not looked into yet. Stopped off where we’d found a dead pygmy owl this morning so’s I could lop off its head using my Swiss Army knife. We’d found it lying right beside the PCT near the waterfall; pretty much decomposed and desiccated. (I’ll boil up the head to make a lovely little skull specimen.) In the vernacular of So Cal, I grossed-out my fastidious brother by pretending to lick the blade of my knife clean after the beheading, ha ha. (He was plenty disgusted following that little joke when I non-jokingly licked my fingers and swiped the blade with them before wiping both blade and fingers on my filthy pants.) ◦◦◦◦◦ From Walker Meadows we went cross-country, rejoining the trail near Long Lakes. At this point Steve knew where he was and wanted to walk back at his own pace so I left him and marched the last couple miles home alone. Later, we took a short stroll up-meadow with kitties for sunset views. ◦◦◦◦◦ After dinner, I read Steve a couple of stories from my old climbing magazines, including a hilarious one by this well-known Everest climber who invited his Sherpa guide to the States as a house guest and all the comical situations that ensued.
→ 12 miles → 2 lbs trash → humbling sights
