High Country
We can’t see the Sierras from Dry Creek, but we look to the mountains as a gauge of our winters and future summers from our higher ground. The last storm brought nearly an inch of rainfall in Greasy at 2,000-3,000 feet and left in a little snow on the Kaweahs and the Great Western Divide.
The base of the elephant on Alta Peak is skirted by the Panther Gap Trail beginning at Wolverton, running above and parallel with the High Sierra Trail that begins at Crescent Meadow in Giant Forest, both headed across Buck Creek Canyon towards Bearpaw Meadow and Kaweah Gap (10,700').
Alta Peak 11,204') (elephant, barely visible in this photo) far left to right, Triple Divide Peak (12,634'), Lion Rock, Mt. Stewart (12,025'), Black Spur (North of Kaweah Gap), Lawson Peak, Eagle Scout Peak (12,000'), Kaweah Queen (13,282'), Black Kaweah (13,583'), Red Kaweah (13,720'), Lippincott Mountain, and Mt.Kaweah (13,802'). Sawtooth Peak (12,343') lies farther to the south, east of Mineral King.
Sawtooth through Remy Gap
Coincidently, I just received "The Sunny Top of California" by Norman Shaefer, my high school roommate my freshman year at boarding school. This is a wonderful collection of hands-on, Sierra Nevada Poems in the Snyderesque tradition:
ON THE BLACK DIVIDE
Wind and melting snow,
crumbling spurs.
Boulders scattered like rubbish,
Charybdis: dark, alone.
Plants and animals biding their time,
follow the retreating ice.
Pines march up morraines
warmed by the sun.
Pearl white cumuli
boil overhead.
I climb toward cloudland
everything a/tilt.
Bouldering and mountaineering,
my body groes stronger.
Sleeping by streams,
my mind opens and clears.
Those years of higher learning
at boarding school and college:
better to have spent them here
reading the mountains like a book.
- © 2010 Norman Schaefer
La Alameda Press
9636 Guadalupe Trail NW
Albuquerque, NM 87114
http://www.laalamedapress.com
$14 plus S&H. 108 pp.
Comments
John, my wife and I love the books, thanks for a great show at the preserve. It was good to see you read poetry right through the wind and rain and like a true cowboy, you told us how you appreciated the rain.
Posted by: Andrew Glazier | November 12, 2010 9:26 AM
Thanks, Andrew - quoting Amy Hale, quoting and old cowman,
'I'll take a rain or a calf, anytime.'
And long as I'm here, I need to thank Matthew Rangel for helping me get the peaks right, and in the right order, in the photos above.
Posted by: John Dofflemyer | November 12, 2010 2:04 PM