A Place Apart: Nature

Late in the fall one year, I hiked up steep switchbacks for two hours from the valley floor to Glacier Point in Yosemite. The wilderness was surprisingly quiet and still at 8,000 feet.

A forest of sugar pines was behind me. In front was Half Dome and a view that stretched over the gray granite peaks and domes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains

No one else was here. The summer crowds had gone home months before. A few tiny people walked around on the valley floor far below. Except for a few squirrels and one Steller’s jay, no other creatures were letting their presence be known.

The breeze hummed lightly as it twirled the needles on the pines. There was a hush as the wind flowed over the nearby mountains on its way east. Now and then when the breeze shifted, I caught the sounds of Nevada and Vernal Falls.

The Wilderness is Home

(The top of Yosemite Creek as it goes over the falls.)

This is where it began. In the snow. My journey in Yosemite began in the snow one winter. And I could not believe that such a place could exist.

I grew up in the woods, on the rolling hills and lakes of Wisconsin, reading the words of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Sigurd Olson. When I moved to the Bay Area in California, and the urban landscape of endless buildings and highways, I lost touch with the outdoors. 

Wilderness Questions

When I sit on the side of a mountain and watch clouds journey across the sky, thoughts come to mind that I like to ponder. Some are whimsical, but others, I’m sure, have profound implications.

Skyscrapers have been compared to mountain peaks because they’re both tall and massive. When we first see them, we are gob-smacked with awe and admiration. But if we put them side by side, the buildings begin to seem one-dimensional and uninteresting. We can hike into mountains, and they also have forests, rivers, and alpine meadows. And deer, birds, and coyotes, and bears, moose, and squirrels.