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In the vast Sierra wilderness, far to the southward of the famous Yosemite Valley, there is yet a grander valley of the same kind. It is situated on the South Fork of the Kings River, above the most extensive groves and forests of the giant sequoia, and be3neath the shadows of the highest mountains in the range, where canyons are the deepest and the snow-laden peaks are crowded most closely together. –John Muir, 1891
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A craggy, high-altitude desert of granite and metamorphic rock dominates the country. But dotting the arid landscape of serrated ridgelines and glacial sculpted domes are remnants of the last Ice Age, or at least the last winter; striking sapphire blue lakes, ribboned inlets and outlets become creeks snaking across arctic-like tundra, giving drink to vibrant brushstrokes of meadows and forests, while swatches of green erupt like oases from the volcanic and glacially formed grayness. The contrast softens the hard, rocky vistas and coaxes ecosystems to take up residence amid the harshness of it all.
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With very little effort, one can escape almost everything and everyone associated with civilization.
But the reflection in a clear mountain lake of one highly trained ranger serves as a reminder: What one cannot escape is one’s self.
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In the backcountry, they were on call 24 hours a day as wilderness medics, law enforcement officers, search-and-rescue specialists, and wilderness hosts; interpreters who wore the hats of geologists, naturalists, botanists, wildlife observers, and historians. On good days they were “heroes” called upon to find a lost backpacker, warm a hypothermic hiker, chase away a bear, or save a life. On bad days they picked up trash, tore down illegal campfires, wrote citations, and were called “fucking assholes” simply for doing their job. On the worst days they recovered bodies.
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On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk, times neither day nor night, the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
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. . . that remark was more maudlin than suicidal . . .
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For the 5-foot-10, blond, fair-skinned Lyness, there was magic in these mountains. After a couple of weeks in the high and lonely, all the backcountry rangers experienced a slowing down. Randy called it “decompression,” a transition from the fast pace and crowds of civilization. Once in wilderness, a Zen-like calm heightened their senses exponentially with each passing day. Even skeptical rangers admit that an unmistakable zone comes with time and solitude. Randy had likened the quieting sensation to religion, “a theology not found elsewhere,: he wrote in his logbook while stationed at Charlotte Lake in 1966. He had struggled then to explain these “Sierra moments . . . only experienced when still . . . and surrounded by and conscious of the country.”
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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” -Henry David Thoreau, Walden
“Only this simple everyday living and wilderness wandering seems natural and real, the other world, more like something read, not at all related to reality as I know it.
-Randy Morgenson, Charlotte Lake, 1966
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. . . he was prepared to “protect the people from the park, and the park from the people.” It was his mantra.
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. . . where “the evening alpenglow on the peaks filled me with a feeling of bigness inside,” . . .
“ . . . I know exactly how Henry Thoreau felt when running home after the rain. ‘Grow wild according to your nature, like these brakes and sedges which will never become English hay, let the thunder rumble.’ ”
Indeed, Middle Ray Lake was his Walden Pond; the surrounding peaks, basins, and meadows were his Sand County.
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With some difficult scrambling and climbing, he reached the crux, where water flowed literally from solid rock.
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Wilderness: An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. -Howard Zahniser
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