It was the summer of 1972. I was camped with my brother and two friends at Marie Lake north of Selden Pass on the John Muir Trail. The day was warm and I set out to climb the Seven Gables. No one else wanted to go, so I was on my own. I had nothing but the shorts and turtleneck shirt I was wearing with a pair of old fashioned hiking boots. Seven Gables is a 13,000 ft elevation peak. We were camped at 10,300 ft. elevation.

As I began my hike around the lake to approach Seven Gables, I was feeling the anticipation of a clear day and an exhilarating ascent. I had to make my way to the end of the lake and drop down about 5oo feet into Sandpiper Lake to reach the base of Seven Gables.

My climb was beautiful, but uneventful. I finally reached the summit and revelled in the view. Silver Pass lay to the north up Bear Creek. Mt. Hooper was west of me and to the south and east lay chains of peaks into the distance. I felt like I could see clear south to Mt. Whitney in the far distance, though I knew this was fantasy. After a long rest and snack, I began my descent, making excellent time. For me in those days, most of the reason to climb was to come back down. I called it summer skiing or

rock hopping. Looking back, I suppose I should be grateful I never broke a leg, or worse, but my enthusiasm was unstoppable.

When I reached Sandpiper lake again and began my ascent up the ridge that held Marie Lake behind it, the day seemed full of energy. The water was clear and cold, the air brisk, the sun warm and it was all contagious. I didn’t realize how far the sun had travelled and I decided to climb the ridge behind my camp site to top the day off. That ridge rose to 11,400 feet, a good 1,000 feet above my camp. When I reached the top, I looked down into camp and could see that my friends had already started a camp fire. I then realized that the sun was preparing to set behind Mt. Hooper and shadow was crawling across Marie Lake.

I looked further up the ridge and saw that it rose further into high peaks behind the lake and above Selden Pass. I could not go that way. I could also not get back down the ridge to the far end of the lake before dark. I had misjudged my time and saw now that I had a serious problem. The only way I would reach camp before dark was down the side of the ridge, which from where I stood seemed a veritable cliff. Without pausing long enough to think myself out of it, I dropped over the edge and began my descent.

This was not exactly rope work, especially since I didn’t have one (or anything else), but there were ledges, drop offs and finger hangs. A miscalculation would have resulted in a serious, if not fatal fall. I hung from White Pine scrub trees to drop onto one foot ledges. I had to jump across cracks to land on sloped granite and scramble down loose rock scree that began to slide with me. I didn’t stop until I walked off onto the first relatively level ground at the base of the cliff. It took me over an hour and was nearly dark, but I was only a short distance now from my camp. My brother and my friends had started to think I had been hurt and were very worried when I finally walked into camp, but I never felt so alive in my life.

For four hundred miles the Sierras are a definite ridge, broad and high, and having the form of a sea wave. Buttresses of dark-hued rock, jutting at intervals from a steep wall, form the abrupt eastern slopes; irregular forests, in scattered growth, huddle together near the snow. The lower slopes are barren spurs, sinking into the sterile flats of the Great Basin.

Long ridges of comparatively gentle outline characterize the western side, but this sloping table is scored from summit to base by a system of parallel transverse canyons, distant from one another often by less than twenty-five miles. They are ordinarily two or three thousand feet deep, falling at times in sheer, smooth-fronted cliffs, great for climbers. Sweeping curves like the hull of a ship, then in rugged, V-shaped gorges, or with irregular, hilly flanks opening at last through gateways of low, rounded foot-hills out upon the horizontal plain of the San Joaquin and Sacramento.

Every canyon carries a river, derived from constant melting of the perpetual snow, which threads its way down the mountain—a feeble remnant of those vast ice streams and torrents that formerly unloaded the summit accumulation of ice and snow while carving the canyons out from solid rock. Nowhere on the continent of America is there more positive evidence of the cutting power of rapid streams than in these very canyons.

Near the center of the range is the perfection of forest. At the south are the finest specimen trees, at the north the densest accumulations of timber. In riding throughout this whole region and watching the same species from the glorious ideal life of the south gradually dwarfed toward the north, until it becomes a mere dwarf; or in climbing from the scattered, drought-scourged pines of the foot-hills up through the zone of finest vegetation to those summit crags, where, struggling against the power of storms and frost, only a few of the bravest trees succeed in clinging to the rocks and to life,—one sees with novel effect the inexorable sway which climatic conditions hold over the kingdom of trees.

Looking down from the summit, the forest is a closely woven sweater, which has fallen over the body of the range, clinging closely to its form, sinking into the deep canons, covering the hill-tops with even velvety folds, and only lost here and there where a bold mass of rock gives it no foothold, or where around the margin of the mountain lakes bits of alpine meadow lie open to the sun.

I am going to be posting a series of articles on the general description of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. This is the first of the series.

View of Mt. Whitney from Lone Pine, CA

The western margin of the continent of North America is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon whose seaward base beat the mild, small breakers of the Pacific. By far the grandest of all these ranges is the Sierra Nevada, a long and massive uplift lying between the arid deserts of the Great Basin and the Californian exuberance of grain-field and orchard; its eastern slope, a defiant wall of rock plunging abruptly down to the plain; the western, a long, grand sweep, well watered and overgrown with cool, stately forests ; its crest a line of sharp, snowy peaks springing into the sky and catching the alpenglow long after the sun has set for all the rest of America.

The Sierras have a structure and a physical character which are individual and unique. The whole Sierra crest was one pile of snow, from whose base crawled out the ice-rivers, wearing their bodies into the rock, sculpturing as they went the forms of valleys, and brightening the surface of their tracks by the friction of stones and sand which were bedded, armor-like, in their under surface. Having made their way down the slope of the Sierra, they met a lowland temperature of sufficient warmth to arrest and waste them. At last, from causes which are too intricate to be discussed at present, they shrank slowly back into the higher summit fastnesses, and there gradually perished, leaving only a crest of snow.

The ice melted, and upon the whole plateau, little by little, a thin layer of soil accumulated, and, replacing the snow, there sprang up a forest of pines, whose shadows fall pleasantly today over rocks which were once torrents of lava and across the burnished pathways of ice. Rivers, pure and sparkling, thread the bottom of these gigantic glacier valleys. The volcanoes are, for the most part, extinct, and the whole theater of this impressive geological drama is now the most glorious and beautiful region of America.

Five distinct periods divide the history of the range. First, the slow gathering of marine sediment within the early ocean during which incalculable

Author Steven Brazis with Jerome and Nicholo Arceo on Mt. Shasta

ages were consumed. Second, in the early Jurassic period this level sea-floor came suddenly to be lifted into the air and crumpled in folds, through whose yawning fissures and ruptured axes outpoured wide zones of granite. Third, the volcanic age of fire and steam. Fourth, the glacial period, when the Sierras were one broad field of snow, with huge dragons of ice crawling down its slopes, and wearing their armor into the rocks. Fifth, the present condition, a playground for campers, backpackers and climbers.

From latitude 35° to latitude 39° 30′ the Sierra lifts a continuous chain, the profile culminating in several groups of peaks separated by deeply depressed curves or sharp notches, the summits varying from eight to fifteen thousand feet, seven to twelve thousand being the common range of passes. Near its southern extremity, in San Bernardino County, the range is cleft to the base with magnificent gateways opening through into the desert. From Walker’s Pass for two hundred miles northward the sky line is more uniformly elevated; the passes averaging nine thousand feet high, the actual summit a chain of peaks from thirteen to fifteen thousand feet. This serrated snow and granite outline of the Sierra Nevada, projected against the cold, clear blue, is the blade of white teeth which suggested its Spanish name.

Northward still the range gradually sinks; high peaks covered with perpetual snow are rarer and

Mt. Shasta from Ski Park Road

rarer. Its summit rolls on in broken, forest-covered ridges, now and then overlooked by a solitary pile of metamorphic or irruptive rock. At length, in Northern California, where it breaks down in a compressed medley of , ridges, and open, level expanses of plain, the axis is maintained by a line of extinct volcanoes standing above the lowland in isolated positions. The most lofty of these. Mount Shasta, is a cone of lava fourteen thousand four hundred and forty feet high, its broad base girdled with noble forests, which give way at eight thousand feet to a cap of glaciers and snow. Beyond this to the northward the extension of the range is quite difficult to definitely assign, for, geologically speaking, the Sierra Nevada system occupies a broad area in Oregon, consisting of several prominent mountain groups, while in a physical sense the chain ceases with Shasta; the Cascades, which are the apparent topographical continuation, being a tertiary structure formed chiefly of lavas which have been outpoured long subsequent to the main upheaval of the Sierra.