The Love Letter

Six weeks in the Sierra high country

The trail disappeared beneath snow. Shielding my eyes with an arm, I squinted through the whiteout to pick a path toward the invisible pass. The Sierra’s white granite blurred with the sky. I looked down at my feet sunk six inches deep in the previous night’s snow. Somewhere beyond us, Matterhorn Peak’s granite flanks were gathering more snow. We were nearing the first of two 10,000-foot passes we needed to cross to get out.

Behind me, my wife and climbing partner, Becca, cradled her injured hand. The cold had forced us to remove the splint and sling we’d used to protect the healing wound. Five days earlier, while descending from Clyde Minaret, shifting talus had sent Becca somersaulting, and a sharp stone blade had slashed her thumb, severing an artery and chipping the bone. We’d been able to get her out to an emergency room, but neither of us wanted to quit this journey, so we’d come back up to the high country. We’d keep walking even if we couldn’t climb.

Six months earlier, as Becca and I spread out the topo maps covering the High Sierra, we’d imagined this moment very differently. Our seven-week climbing trip would conclude with a victory lap up Positive Vibrations on one of the range’s finest hunks of granite, the Incredible Hulk. We daydreamed of bonfires, friends, and a few bottles of beer. It would be sunny, of course. Instead, we were running for home through a storm. We no longer carried climbing gear. We were emaciated and mentally frayed.

After a two-day downpour turned to snow, we’d decided to make a run for it and immediately walked into a wall of white. We could have retreated back to tree line—that would have been the conservative call—but there didn’t seem to be anything conservative about this storm. Our lightweight gear was meant for summer squalls. In 2004, we’d been 10 miles north of this point in the same week of October when an unforecasted storm rolled through, leaving three feet of snow, stranding dozens of hikers and killing several climbers on El Cap. It closed the high country for the remainder of the winter. This storm had the same feeling. Both had been preceded by a heat wave, then a day or two of unsettled weather. Now, it was 25 degrees and snowing an inch an hour. Becca and I had been walking for 42 days. We knew it was time to bail.

In the flat light, I stabbed with a ski pole to interrupt an otherwise untouched snow slope. I needed depth to see.

Why? That was the question I fielded the most before we left. This was an ambitious, stubborn, inefficient approach to climbing. We’d walk almost the entire length of the High Sierra, from southern Sequoia National Park 300 miles north through Yosemite. We’d begin at Angel Wings on the range’s west side, strike north and east across the crest, and rumble all the way to the Hulk, carrying climbing gear the entire way, ticking as many unclimbed faces and rarely repeated classics as we could. We’d rely on friends to hike in at various points along the way to resupply us with Becca’s individually packaged, home-cooked backpacking meals. For every two days of hiking, we would be lucky to get in a day of climbing. It sounded less like a climbing trip than a never-ending approach. Why?

To the people who asked, I’d given several answers. I’d say I wanted to prove that you didn’t have to travel to Pakistan or Baffin Island to have a truly profound adventure, that it existed in our backyard ranges. That it was possible to take a climbing road trip—without a road. In reflective moments, I’d point out that Becca and I both had profound connections to this range. Our shared path had solidified on skin tracks snaking through Tahoe old growth and in the Eastside’s stark, granite-rimmed canyons. We married here. Now we live in Seattle and own a small but time-intensive media business. Both in our early 30s, we wanted to start a family. While children don’t bring an end to adventures, we were both keenly aware that this kind of trip would be impossible with young children.

Then there was the fact that men I had admired had done this trip in a similar fashion—John Muir, for one, whose mountaineering and research trips led him up and down the Sierra Crest peaks in the early 1870s. Packing little more than a loaf or two of bread and a heavy jacket, Muir would leave his home in Yosemite to explore the glaciers surrounding Mt. Lyell and the Sawtooths. Along the way, he ticked off the first ascent of 13,156-foot Mt. Ritter, where he, strung out and committed on a vertical wall, discovered the “preternatural clearness” that climbers recognize from long runouts. Fifty years later, David Brower, the father of the modern conservation movement and a consummate climber, had followed a course similar to ours. Over 10 weeks in 1934, Brower and cohorts climbed 64 peaks and concluded their trip with a moonlight ascent of Matterhorn Peak.

These men’s careers have served as a road map of sorts for my own. Before they became towering figures in conservation, they were climbers, then writers who used their experiences in these mountains to inspire others to explore. The methods for conveying adventure have changed a bit in modern times, so on this trip our close friend, photographer, and climber Mikey Schaefer would hike in from time to time to film and shoot photos. Our efforts would yield a small film, a climbing movie that was more about the process of why we climb, rather than the act itself. I wanted to give my own vision of the power of landscape, to write a love letter to a mountain range, to climbing, to my wife and partner.