TRUE GRIT
‘It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body…’ ~ Edward Abbey
We were a bearded, scraggly, and smelly bunch, shouldering a case of Bud Light and a sixer of Mammoth Paranoid Pale Ale and pointing our feet downhill toward the creekside hot springs, when a voice stopped us.
‘Where did you guys come from?’
We turned to see a man, his wife, and two small children, clearly wondering what wilderness we had emerged from, what forest had turned us into a parade of hairy mammals each with the hygiene habits of the Piltdown Man.
As we detailed our weeklong wanderings around Alger, Davis, Thousand Island, and Nydiver lakes, across the many streams and up the many ridges and peaks in the area north of Mammoth, the couple answered with the story of their own trip.
It took a moment, but our dimwitted minds soon registered that this couple had just ventured into the woods with their two children (who were both younger than seven) at their side.
As the conversation ended, one of my fellow backpackers blurted out ‘maybe there is hope for civilization yet.’
After a pregnant pause, the dad of the two kids answered, ‘Maybe.’
Before long we were cooking in the hot springs, drinking cheap beer, renewing lifelong friendships that had been forged in the High Sierra.
The August backpacking trip was one of countless I have shared with some of my closest childhood friends. Between trips to Big Sur, 18,000-foot volcanoes in Mexico, and the most rugged corners of the High Sierra, I was lucky enough to grow up spending a portion of most summers wandering through the woods with a pack strapped to my back.
Throughout all of those trips, one stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. It cemented an eternal love for the High Sierra, simplicity, and the spiritual high that walking day after day can bring.
My dad, in an act that today still boggles my mind, decided to take me and approximately 15 of my 15-year-old friends on a 20-day backpacking trip through the remote heart of the Southern Sierra. How my dad pulled this off, herding a horde of delinquent teens over 12,000-foot pass after 12,000-foot pass, across more than 120 miles of trail, is something I still cannot comprehend. I’m sure today there is some law against this, or some multi-million-dollar insurance plan required.
But since that summer, a few of us from that same group have reunited, shouldered large packs, and tried each year to keep the summer tradition alive. It’s something I look forward to each year for the grueling hikes, pure high altitude air, and the nightly nostalgia served up alongside freeze-dried dinners.
Each summer we track the progression of life — marriages, divorces, children, new jobs, books read. In the eternally shifting ebb and flow of life, our summer sojourns in the Sierra are spent reconnecting with the pre-computerized rhythms of the ingrained nature of our hunter-gatherer past, when walking and fishing was an existential imperative and not a recreational sideshow.
This summer was no different. It was filled with high-altitude nights watching shooting stars streak across the sky waiting for sleep to come. Laughing out loud, not at some inane Facebook status update, but at the scribblings of a fellow Sierra peakbagger in a tattered summit registry. Listening to the demonic yips and screams of coyotes hunting through the high-altitude night.
The wilderness has something to teach us all — perseverance, simplicity, friendship, self-reliance. You can’t find that thumbing the controls of a video game. You won’t find it on Twitter or Facebook. It’s earned by aching quads and ragged breaths at 13,000 feet, straining the last few steps to an airy peak.
Knowing that a couple young kids were out there running through the woods, initiating a lifelong love affair with the mountains, was the perfect punctuation to our Sierra pilgrimage. The wilderness is many things to many people — the source of clean drinking water or critical habitat for wildlife. But perhaps most importantly, it is a refuge for the soul we so often surrender to a brave new wired world.
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