Back in the fall of 2009, a friend of mine was getting married in San Diego. Somehow I talked his old roommate and my close friend, Daniel, into flying up to Reno, just to drive back down to San Diego. After our last one-day epic marathon drive from Truckee to San Diego down the east side in December, he didn’t need too much convincing.
Sitting in the pick-up parking lot at Reno International, I look up from my iPod to see Daniel swaggering down the sidewalk, wearing a yellow adventure-racing pack stuffed to the gills, a full-sized pillow as big as the pack strapped to it. I shake my head, laughing, and spin the keys in the ignition. We have three days before we need to be back in San Diego; Daniel is in the rehearsal dinner. I ‘m doing something I had a hard time doing – traveling without a plan. Sure, I’d looked up places I wanted to see: Convict Lake, Rock Creek, the ancient bristlecone pines. But where we were going to sleep each night? That’s up to where the wind blows us, an uncertainty I’m not altogether comfortable with.
“Cheese-burg-er” sang a chickadee early on a Saturday morning last June, placing me in the mountains before my eyes open or my brain whirs to life.
My eyelids flutter, my eyes coming into focus on a murky pre-dawn sky stenciled with tree limbs through the skylight of my car – my watch hanging next to me says 5:30.
As I tentatively push down my 0 degree sleeping bag, mild temperatures wash across my braced body – no colder than any other summer morning camping in the Sierra – a surprise given the recent weather and my day’s plans.
Today I’m not hiking or biking, not touring around taking photos; it’s June and I’m going skiing.
“… they (Aborigines) deeply dislike visitors, whom they call minga, or ants, clambering all over it (Uluru, or Ayers Rock). Personally, I don’t blame them. It is a sacred site to them. I think it should be for everyone, frankly,” Bill Bryson, In a Sunburned Country.
Here’s the thing. Minga aren’t exclusive to Uluru, or Australia for that matter.
Video by Steven Bumgardner, Yosemite Nature Notes*
As the weather warms and the snow starts to (slowly) melt, I’m excited at the idea of access to the high country, the opening of mountain passes (hopefully), and all that the Sierra have to offer in the summer.
But I wince at the thought of the summer crowds, like so many others who seek solitude in the unparalleled wilderness that stretches from Tehachapi Pass to the Cascades.
I dream of what it would be like to stride up to a granite lip, an empty and roadless Yosemite Valley below me. Or to clamber to the top of the Carson Spur, a wild Lake Tahoe splayed out in front of me.
Heck, I’d even take the ability to camp in Yosemite, without reserving a site six months to the minute in advance, a problem that’s getting worse with the introduction of opportunistic scalpers, as reported in the Sacramento Bee.
Solitude still exists if you know where to look – or at least I’ve found a few places where a campground isn’t so crowded that I couldn’t wedge between to leviathan-like RVs and pass out for the night, a rock ledge far enough away from the lake already surrounded by other backpacker’s tents.
But here’s where the problem gets uncomfortable under scrutiny. I’ve neatly glanced over any mention of where these half-forgotten or seldom discovered places are, when I’ve seethed at those who would hoard public places for themselves, as if they had more right to a campground or mountain top than I did. The idea of sharing was well-debated at the Brooks Range Blog.
Sure, it’s easy to feel a (false) sense of superiority over the waves of unwashed masses lapping at the walls of Yosemite Valley when deciding on who’s worthy of all this natural wonder.
I’ve sat smugly on the rock wall at Olmsted Point, watching travel-frazzled families buzz about, taking pictures without actually looking at the mountains, the trees, or the increasingly-rare pika gathering grass on the rocks below.
Just a little time on the other side of the coin quickly cures you of any sense of entitlement. Meeting other Dharma-Bums-meet-dirtbags on their own pilgrimages quickly humbles, in fact, because there’s always someone who hikes farther, climbs higher or skis bigger lines.
So do we salve ourselves with platitudes, telling ourselves the more people exposed to these places, the more who will fight to preserve them?
Or do we restrict access more, bringing conservation back to it’s elitist origins, when rich white men wanted game to hunt for sport, and so prevented the poor from hunting for subsistence?
I know when I sweep my eyes across the High Sierra, I can’t stomach that. Like a child in a museum facing a Van Gogh, I want to trace my fingers over each brush stroke, every fold and ridge.
Maybe in the end they’re not Minga. We all are, whether clambering up Uluru, hanging from the cables on the side of Half Dome or anywhere else.
Sierra Outsider 