Hiking over the Edge

Mark Liebenow

When we try to pick out anything by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

—John Muir

1. It’s the beginning of intentionally getting lost. All the geological and

botanical facts about the valley, and all the books written by people who have lived in Yosemite over the centuries, are like dried raisins and nuts. They’re interesting to chew as trail food, but I can’t use their experiences to get close to nature. I have to use my own eyes and feet. It’s the beginning steps of my journey, moving beyond the facts I’ve read and experiencing the wild unknown.

The wilderness is not just the beautiful, inspiring scenery I thought it was. It’s also not the heart of chaos that Joseph Conrad wrote about, where wild creatures are waiting behind trees to spring out and kill me, although thoughts like this come to mind when I’m hiking by myself and something large goes crashing through the forest. It’s also not the Christ revelation of God that others would have it be, as preachers across the nation proclaimed in the early 1800s, and as German artists like Caspar David Friedrich painted in the late 1800s, with crucifixes and ethereal cathedrals appearing in the mountains of their European landscapes, as if nature had no spirituality of its own.

Early Christian leaders like Justin Martyr and Athanasius had to deal with questions about nature from those who believed the Gnostic teachings that said the spirit was good, while the senses and all matter, including nature and apple pie, were evil. Justin and Athanasius believed that creation was good because it came from God, so it was proper to use our senses to enjoy its beauty. It was in Yosemite that John Muir found his Creator, and in nature that Hildegard of Bingen saw her mystical revelations. It was only after he settled into his hermitage in the Kentucky woods that Thomas Merton finally relaxed into the grace of faith.

It’s not that I want to see spirituality in the trees like the pantheists, or decode messages left by Druidic elves in stones piled under gnarled oak trees on the talus behind Yosemite Village, although I entertain this possibility with an impish fantasy. I want to appreciate the wonders of nature on the grand scale so evident here, and watch the ordinary movements of nature back home in the city, seeing in them the sparks of creation that continue to flame, thrust, and find expression in everything that lives. I want the experience of the Native Americans who regarded the coyote and bear as kin, who heard wisdom in the running streams, and saw the Great Spirit walking by in thunderstorms. I want to reclaim the sense of enchantment I used to feel as a child, and touch the primordial powers spoken about in the myths that guided primitive cultures. I seek the mystery beneath the surface of the unkempt wilderness because I need to know that the chaos of my life is rooted in something solid underneath. I want to experience the whole of life, the holy now, with all of its tasty side dishes.

2. Early one morning in may, I step aboard a Greyhound bus in Oakland.  A Mexican nun clothed in white and a bald monk from Thailand wrapped in a saffron robe have already settled in. It seems we are all on journeys seeking what we have yet to find. When John Muir first made this trip in 1868, he walked the two hundred miles from Oakland across California and followed the river in. I don’t have that kind of time, and the walk is no longer that scenic. The miles of colorful wildflowers that once flourished in the great Central Valley and so impressed Muir have been parceled into huge single-crop farms. Yet the eight-hour bus ride will force me to slow down and move at nature’s more leisurely, sauntering pace. The time will also help me set aside the thoughts of deadlines at work that continue to rush through my head like a freight train without brakes.

This trip, instead of packing the car with something to handle every weather condition that might arise, I’m carrying only what is definitely needed—tent, sleeping bag, and backpack of gear. There is nothing for just in case, and nothing that will distract me from paying attention to the valley, not even guidebooks. I want to move from the pleasant and predictable middle earth where I live to where I wake up each day excited about the unknown that will happen.

Arriving in the afternoon, I find Yosemite dissolving. What was frozen over winter is turning into mush—the meadows, ice-caked mounds of leaves, and deer tracks preserved in hardened mud. Heavy rains are melting the snowpack in prodigious amounts and streams are rushing down the canyons. Cascades pour over canyon walls every quarter mile, and waterfalls roar as they shoot a hundred feet into space before crashing down on the boulders four thousand feet below, sending hikers scrambling for safety. New creeks form every hour and run over the trails, soaking me up to my knees in icy water as I hike around to see the wild displays. Rivers and creeks surge over their banks and push into low-lying areas, expanding ponds into small lakes and leaving trees surrounded by water, wondering where on earth the earth went. Redwing blackbirds trill “ok-ka-lay” over the newly sodden meadows, perhaps reviving ancestral memories from a thousand years ago when this was a wetter place. Mist climbs slowly like koala bears through the branches of trees clinging to the steep valley walls. Rain finds an opening under my hat and drips down my back, but as I slop and slog along the muddy paths, I smell the light, sweet scent of dogwood blossoms and think that this isn’t so bad.

New leaves are responding to nature’s drive, too, and push through the hard, brown plugs on the end of branches. The yellow-green tips of alders, mountain hemlocks, and willows lighten winter’s subdued brown and gray motif. Seeds buried last year in the fall begin to rise from the earth. As another shower tapers off, the rain turns to fog above seven thousand feet and rings the valley in a halo of white. The dark, flat clouds that have dropped so much water move over the horizon, leaving scattered cumuli behind.

3. After a long Winter, and with all the melting snow from April, the valley’s tiny chloroplast engines cough into high gear. Shoots and tendrils push through the dark earth from some blind clue to unfurl in the air, creating a springtime carpet of tender green that radiates with the sun’s warmth. Plants rise with moustaches of dirt, fling swatches of colors out like Salvador Dali with happy brushes. Even pine trees look fresh in their new shades of green. The small flowers on Western Azalea spot the landscape with thousands of white dots. On the far side of Leidig Meadow, near an intense patch of blue lupine, three purple irises stand regal on long stalks. In the wetter areas, I bend down and see the new leaves of milkweed plants all balled up like tiny geodesic domes ready to pop and unfold. A mile above me, Yosemite Falls thunders as if a sudden influx of water is going over the top, or a bundle of logs or a gaggle of boulders, yet nothing comes down but more water.

I wait for Yosemite to show me what it wants, finding it hard to set my plans aside and stop hiking so fast in my drive to see everything. I’m still full of questions, still wandering around wondering why the river scene at Happy Isles moves me more than the meadow at Mirror Lake, and still trying to perceive the valley’s different personalities.

On a bend of the Merced River near Rixon’s Pinnacle with a view up the river, North Dome and Half Dome reflect on the smooth water. I sit in the quiet of the glen wondering when something is going to happen, some insight, some breakthrough. The Merced River surges by in a continuous flow as it goes on to the farmlands of the Central Valley. In Mesopotamia, life was seen as a journey down a river, moving from life to death. In India, water comes from God’s temple in the mountains and flows through Benares in the Ganges River, carrying the dead home. I toss a leaf onto the river for my expectations and watch them float away.

The Sierra Nevada surround the valley protectively. For the ancient Greeks and Chinese, the tops of mountains were the places where the pantheon of gods and the immortals lived. The Japanese honored their gods by hiking up mountains and paying their respects to the nature spirits along the way. In the Alps, people for a long time didn’t know whether the mountains were filled with dragons or were the artwork of an Almighty Designer. It’s not recorded what the mountains thought of them. The taiga forests in Siberia hold fears of vicious wild beasts. In the traditions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, mountain peaks like Horeb, Carmel, Moriah, and later the Sangre de Christo Mountains of New Mexico were places of epiphany where humans met God and lives were transformed. I toss a stick into the water with my questions, and the river carries them away.

The Ahwahnechee loved this valley and believed that holy beings lived in the mountains, spirits like Tissiack whose home was in Half Dome and who was responsible for bringing the rains that filled the rivers and nurtured the fish and oak trees crucial to the tribe’s survival. Into the river, I toss a stone that sinks to the bottom. Like it, I’m not leaving here until I taste life’s marrow. A mallard paddles just fast enough on the moving river to hold its position, eating bugs that float down to it on the surface of the water, and I realize that the river not only carries away what has died, it also brings life to those who wait.

Along these banks there’s a deep sense of peace, yet it coexists with terror. No matter how sedate the river may appear, it’s as wild as the other creatures of the valley. Strong currents run underneath the surface. If I were to jump in, its snowmelt cold would induce hypothermia within minutes and, with a little more volume, this calm-looking river would sweep me to my death. People have drowned when it’s looked quiet like this, trying to wade across. Someone did last year, and Sadie Schaeffer, who’s buried in the pioneer cemetery, died doing that more than a hundred years ago just a short ways downriver towards El Capitan. Nature doesn’t stop and make exceptions for people who get in its way.

People die tragically all the time in the valley. Every year climbers are seriously injured and some of them die. But this is a risk that climbers know about ahead of time and accept. Sometimes I think that only the naked fool is alive, the one who dances away at the top of a waterfall while the storm rages about, with lightning flashing through the sky and thunder booming and rattling its presence through the bones of every living thing. Yet how long can the fool last before being zapped in the course of nature’s events or blown into oblivion by a lightning strike? Maybe how long doesn’t matter because the goal is to connect to the Spirit of life. People like the fool and the rock climbers understand this and risk all they have for a chance to participate in the adventure. They accept death as part of life, and this frees them to balance on the edge between calculated risk and logic-defying actions as they seek visions of the meaning that lies beyond and within. They are the ones who are alive.

Thinking about this on the way to Degnan’s store to replenish hiking supplies, I hear the sound of beaver tails slapping a river. At a table outside, a wild discussion in sign language is flying between four people. What is it like not being able to hear nature? For me, the auditory experience of Yosemite is important—the roaring of waterfalls, creeks trickling over rocks, birds and squirrels chirping away, and the wind brushing past and twisting millions of sugar-pine needles, making them hum. The shriek of a Steller’s jay, though, is one sound that wouldn’t be missed. The sound I value the most is Yosemite’s quietness, its lack of noise. It’s a refuge from life in the city, where every sound crowds in upon the next, demanding to be heard. The resulting din numbs my ear and trains me not to listen to what’s going on around me. After arriving in the valley, it takes a day or two for my hearing to calm before I can hear the valley’s softer sounds.

A world of quiet is what the deaf always hear. This shifts Yosemite to being a land of the other senses. The deaf do not hear the edges of words that provide clues to understanding the message beneath what is said. They do not hear the emotion in a robin’s song or waterfalls echoing off the valley walls. Without hearing, they have to pay more attention to what is visually going on around them because there are no auditory clues to tell them that a bird is singing nearby or someone is walking behind them. They become attuned to tiny movements in the trees that turn out to be birds, movements perhaps invisible to those who rely on their hearing to help interpret the environment. They see subtle shadings to colors that everyone but artists miss. And if the eyes of animals and simple organisms can pick up wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye, then who’s to say that the sharpening of sight in the deaf doesn’t also widen the range of light they see?

Also heightened is an appreciation of touch. No, I think it’s more than this. It’s a need to touch in order to learn, a desire to know how things feel. Those who walk around barefooted know what the earth feels like, while I, who wear shoes, know what my shoes feel like. The Ahwahnechee were wise to this. If I valued my touch more, I would learn how to tell grasses apart and identify the makeup of soil by the grit. I would be running up to trees and feeling their bark, learning through my hands that this tree not only has rough skin while another is as smooth as a beloved’s cheek, but perhaps why. Smell would become more than icing on the cake of my visual experience. It could become the experience, as when my nose lingers an inch from the trunk of a Jeffrey pine and discovers a vanilla scent, although some people are convinced a pineapple’s hiding in there. Besides looking at their cones, whose points either prick me or don’t, smelling is one of the few ways to tell a Jeffrey pine apart from its close cousin, the Ponderosa, which has no distinctive scent. By tasting some things, and touching, smelling, and looking at everything else, I uncover more dimensions of the natural world and come to appreciate the sensory differences between smooth granite and staghorn lichen, horsetail tips and wet bark chips, green fern moss and the shiny gloss on newly hatched acorns.

The American dipper, known as the ouzel to Muir, and a bird that he loved, encounters its world as one who is deaf, wanting to stay in physical contact with the river by diving, tossing water on its back, swimming with its wings under water, and bouncing up and down in the rapids to take full measure of its buoyancy. Birds are tactile creatures, anyway, flying through streams of air, immersed in the water of the sky’s river and surfing waves of convection that flow over the Sierra Nevada. Climbers hear the rock talk through their bodies, see the stories told in flakes and blocks of granite, perceive its moods and feelings through their legs and knees, and trace the genealogy of the rock’s ancestors with fingertips inserted into the stone’s cracks and veins. The gear piled around their table indicates that these deaf people are climbers, but how do they tell if the climber coming up last is in trouble?

4. One of the aspects I like about Yosemite is that it’s a self-sustaining ecosystem. Everything it needs to survive is here. Every creature in the valley has found a place to exist, not in harmony, perhaps, because everything has to eat, but in balance. There is death happening all around me, but there is also the ongoing renewal of life.

Manzanita bushes illustrate the intricacy of this balance of interdependence. Manzanita has long fascinated me by the way its red branches grow alongside seemingly dead, gray wood. The Ahwahnechee made tea from its berries, and bears ate them in the fall. There are seven varieties of manzanita in Yosemite, each growing at a different elevation. The greenleaf variety lives on the valley floor, often as a companion to Ponderosa pines. The pinemat manzanita is found at a higher elevation and prefers the company of Lodgepole pines. The Ione manzanita has an extremely narrow range, growing only on the few spots that have ancient and acidic clay soil, as in the high Sierra by Carson Pass. In an odd twist of synchronicity, there also happens to be seven species of warblers in Yosemite. Each lives in its own particular territory and eats its own kind of food.

The oak tree provides a detailed example of how closely life in the valley is interconnected, not just as checks and balances, but also as support. At the root level live fungi and termites. Beetles eat the fungi. Moles eat the termites. Lizards eat the beetles, and gopher snakes eat the moles. They might eat the lizards, too, if they are hungry enough. Acorn woodpeckers and squirrels eat the acorns. In the trunk and branches live insects. Red-shafted flickers and Steller’s jays eat them, while owls and hawks eat the squirrels, birds, and snakes. Mistletoe lives off the tree, and fleas and ticks nibble on the birds and squirrels.

At sunset, after a day of walking around listening to chickadees, waterfalls, and creeks, enjoying the rich, earthy musk of wet land and damp leaves, I lean back against a tree and watch Sentinel Rock’s face change from yellow to red, trying not to think of all the animal and insect activity going on behind, below, and above me. Birds close out the day by singing their evening songs. Before my wife, Evelyn, died, she sang Compline, the evening office, in Grace Cathedral, slipping her shoes off so she would feel grounded. She also slowed the pace of her singing and waited for the echo in the rafters to respond before she sang the next line.

As evening settles over the mountains, climbers and hikers return home from their adventures, light fires in their campsites around the valley like votives in a sanctuary, and offer thanks for what today has been. Sometimes I long for night to come because then I have to stop hiking. During the day, the continual discovery of new sights and sounds impels me to keep moving and squeeze in another short hike so  I won’t miss any stunning scenery or pivotal encounters with nature, even though blisters develop on my feet and my city legs cramp, not used to walking up and down mountains all day. Without darkness I’d probably keep hiking until I fell asleep on the trail, waking up to find a coyote sitting next to me, watching with curiosity. Tonight’s no different as I stiffly get up from my tree, and with a slight limp, join the line of weary, happy people trudging back across the meadow to camp.

In the middle of the night, the roof of my tent lights up as if a forest fire is sweeping through the valley. I throw the tent flaps open and look outside. No fire is visible, but the ferns are glowing and odd shadows are slipping through the forest. I bundle up, head for the meadow, and discover that the full moon is lighting up the entire valley, making it look like the negative of a photograph by Ansel Adams. Everything is reversed, familiar, yet different, as if I had been set down twenty-five miles away in Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite’s twin valley. The moon’s light illuminates every ridge of stone, every rocky point and arch, while the crevices between them stay hidden in the dark.

During the day every part of the valley wall is lit up in bright sunlight and its distinctions are flattened out. In moonlight like this, the complexity of the rock can be seen. The walls become massive 3-D swirls of emotions, the anguish and tensions of aeons ago that were caught in this pose when the hot magma suddenly cooled after being in the warm, dark belly of Mother Earth. The black-and-white scratchboard prints of the mountains done by Jane Gyer, a valley artist, have the same feeling in them, of the earth in flux and being shoved against rocks of different minerals and densities, of melting together, breaking down and reforming. Yet with all of this physical turmoil, the joy of creation is also here, the ecstasy of the Creator discovering new possibilities and shouting, “Yes!”

A cool, barren moonscape, the valley has been recast by the moon’s light into gray and black tones, and the sheath of physical reality dissolves. Water in Yosemite Falls stops falling midair. Oak trees crouch and tell stories of archaic days to the young ferns at their feet. Mountain lions, bears, and owls prowl the edges of the meadows, keeping to the shadows. This is their prime hunting time, and the thought unsettles me. I stay put for as long as I can handle the growing tension, not knowing if they will lunge and bite my thigh or the back of my neck, unable to distinguish me from deer. When I head back to camp, I talk out loud so that they know I’m here. I still fear the terror of the prime- val that lingers in the genes of animals, of savagery barely held in check by passing familiarity with humans.

5. In the morning I gird up my belt and mental loins and leave camp at 5:30 am, aiming to hike the North Rim Trail and immerse myself in the highlands, a twelve-hour, twenty-mile trip that will climb to an elevation of 8,500 feet. I leave camp in the dark so the journey will start out as cool as possible. Temperatures are expected to rise to the eighties in the valley, which is as high as I want it to go on any hike. At the trailhead, I discover that it’s too dark to see which way the trail is going and return to my tent for a flashlight. Back on the trail, my nose begins to hurt. One of the nose rests on my glasses has fallen off and the metal frame is poking me. I head back to my tent, checking the ground with the flashlight.

Inside the tent, I carefully examine the top of everything, hoping the nose rest has simply fallen off. It hasn’t. I look around where I assembled my backpack, and in my backpack, then everywhere else. The light in the sky begins to get brighter. Now I’m throwing things around the tent hoping to knock the pad loose and to the floor, trying not to curse or make any noise because I don’t want to wake the climbers in the tent next door. Still nothing. I sit for a moment to calm down, then clear one corner of the tent and systematically look through each item as I move it from one side to the other. Still nothing. I either have to start the hike now or give it up for the day because there won’t be enough daylight to complete it. Maybe something can function as a replacement. I find a Band-Aid, cut around the soft pad so that the sticky part will hold it to the frame of the glasses, and start off on the hike for a third time. Now it’s light enough that I no longer need the flashlight and I leave it behind.

An hour along the trail that winds up the steep canyon wall, my shirt begins moving to the beat of my heart. This can’t be a good thing. I stop to rest on a bend with an overview of the valley, bracing myself against a tree so I don’t tumble down the wall. Sitting here, I feel a stirring that I don’t recognize, something that finds expression in this outdoor setting, something that feels whole. Taking out my notepad to write about this awareness, there in its pages, is my nose rest. The day is instantly brighter. But forgotten is what I was going to write and I simply jot down, “Something important happened on the bend.”

The valley floor is visible between my feet, and the buildings and trees look so tiny, two thousand feet away, that I feel like reaching down and moving them around as if they were children’s toys. I begin to have additional silly thoughts, but remembering that wisdom often begins with folly, I follow them to see where they lead. “What is the meaning of these trees?” “Why are they here?” Then the revelation comes, after years of searching. The trees are not the question. They were never the question. They are the answer, and I am humbled by my blindness to the obvious. The trees are here because they are part of an evolutionary process. The questions I’ve really been asking are, “Why am I here?” and “Why do I feel so at home in nature?” I just do. One day I may understand more. Yet I may not, and that will be okay because I’m beginning to understand that life is to be lived like an adventure, experiencing everything I can on the journey, with mystery and heart-shaking challenges stirred in to keep me humble.

Because of the early start, and with the cool air keeping me from overheating, I make it to the rim of the valley in two hours and feel in decent shape. If I don’t feel good at this point, I need to stop because there will be no turning back further on. There is no other trail down, no shortcut home. One hundred yards upstream from the Upper Fall, the trail crosses Yosemite Creek on a thick-hewn brown wooden bridge. A small valley cradles the creek in a scene of loosely spaced green trees, and the gray granite stonework of the trail leading out of the basin is detailed and exquisite. Hiking up the steep canyon toward the ridge on the other side, I stop at Yosemite Point and look down at the top of the Lost Arrow. It doesn’t quite come up to the edge, its top having eroded away over the centuries, and no climbers are doing a Tyrolean traverse to it today.

Once over the ridge, the trail slopes down toward Lehamite Creek near the top of Indian Canyon. The Ahwahnechee made the shafts of their arrows from the mock orange bush in this area. The second year’s growth grew straight, with a lightweight center that allowed arrows to fly great distances. Indian Canyon is how the natives made it to the rim of the valley, hence its name. It’s also how Muir and the early settlers first hiked up. There was no Yosemite Falls Trail then.

On the rolling trail between Lehamite and Royal Arch creeks, after hours of strenuous hiking, I slide into a steady saunter through the idyllic shade beneath white firs and Jeffrey pines, warming up on the gentle ascents and cooling down on descents that are gradual. The mid-sixty-degree temperature is perfect. I’m cruising over the trail, throwing my legs ahead of me, swinging my arms, and pushing off with my toes, exhilarated by the aerobic exercise. After ten minutes of flowing along the trail, I begin to wonder why I haven’t seen any other hikers. This makes me think that wild animals are prowling around and I shouldn’t be hiking here alone. I feel a presence and slow down. Then I stop, and look around to see what is causing this sensation.

This area is completely in the shade and under a thick canopy of trees, spacious with no brush underneath. Overhead a roof of illuminated green leaves is providing a diffused light on the trunks of hundreds of trees standing like pillars holding up a great roof. It’s a natural sanctuary. On the far side is a great stone wall and the chancel. I’m standing in the narthex looking in. It has a spacious feel, filled with cool, forest smells and the hushed sounds of a protected glen.

After ten minutes, the urge to resume hiking begins. I don’t want to leave this cathedral of the wild, but I’m five hours along on the hike with at least seven hours to go, and I don’t even know if I’m physically able to finish a trip this demanding. The margin for error seems slim, especially if I twist an ankle or wander off on a wrong trail. Reluctantly, I leave.

Approaching North Dome, I emerge from the cool protection of the trees onto the bare rock of Indian Ridge, into the hot bright sun and the thin air of 7,500 feet. I climb down the unstable spur trail and walk out on top of imposing North Dome. The entire valley opens up around me. North Dome sits on the middle bend of the Y shape of the valley. Tenaya Canyon comes in on the left. The Merced Canyon is across the way, and the main Yosemite Valley stretches off to the right.

I look for trails I’ve hiked and notice how well they follow the contours of the terrain. This was one of Muir’s favorite places to sit and reflect. Under my shoes I feel the massive power that pushed this dome thou- sands of feet through the earth’s layers and into the sky, and imagine Muir standing beside me, looking fondly at his glaciers in the distance. I imagine the Ahwahnechee standing here, too, watching their beloved eagles soar over the land, as well as all the hikers who have stood here over the years and felt the glory of nature rise up and pierce their hearts with wonder.

Although glaciers took away the softer rock from the sides of North Dome, the dome doesn’t seem less because of it. The stripping away of the excess revealed its strengths, its muscles and sinews, which may be why I feel so alive in the park. It’s as if there were a glacier at the El Portal entrance to the valley that scrapes off everyday concerns when I enter, leaving me feeling naked and exposed. This renews an idea that started when I was watching the deaf group yesterday, one that I probably wouldn’t do if I thought about it. Taking off my clothes, I sit cross-legged on the summit, close my eyes and let the sun warm my skin, feeling the spirituality of the place. There are no sounds except the wind guiding my thoughts. I am Lizard, baking on the rock, touching the warm stone with the skin of my legs until I am the same temperature. I am Bird, flying high in the breeze, sweeping over North Dome and down into the valley, up to Glacier Point and banking left on the current flowing over Half Dome, feeling the texture of the air as it flows over my wings, breathing it into the hollow of my bones. I let my senses flow.

Then grit kicked up by the wind gets in my mouth, a cloud moving in front of the sun turns the air cold, and the thought that a mother mountain lion is training her cub to attack a human sitting alone makes me turn around. The feeling of connection ends.

As I’m putting my clothes back on, the luscious scent of an unknown flower floats by. I hop down the left side of the dome seeking its source, wishing I had pulled my pants up, or at least tied my shoes. The side of North Dome is scattered with pebbles and there is nothing to save me if I trip on a shoelace or slip on a piece of gravel. I stop moving and try to steady my balance in the stiff wind. Muir once slipped on Mt. Watkins, a little further back in this canyon, hit his head and knocked himself out. When he came to, only a few small bushes were holding his body from rolling over a thousand-foot drop. There are no bushes here for me to grab, no rocky ledge or tree that would stop a rolling body. I’m on a rounded dome that is on the edge of a canyon wall. Yet since I’m this far forward, I hold my pause a moment longer and look for a way down to Washington Column. It’s a long, rocky slide. More importantly, I see no way of scrambling back up a thousand feet of smooth granite.

Backing away from the edge carefully, I finish dressing and begin the climb up the long, steep grade of Indian Ridge that rises a thousand feet higher than North Dome. Under a pine tree near the top of the ridge, I take a much-needed break to catch my breath, hiding from the sun in the tree’s shade and taking my backpack off. The welcome breeze cools the wet shirt on my heated back.

I continue up a more gradual incline, make a side trip to the Indian Arch, and start on a long downslope until I reach Snow Creek and the cool air of the forest. This section of the river looks like the Fallingwater design of Frank Lloyd Wright, with large, rectangular stone slabs running horizontally across. Under the deep green shade of the mature forest, I pull my shoes off and submerge abused, hot feet in the house’s sparkling cascade, eating a belated lunch on its veranda. John Muir took only flour and tea on his jaunts through the mountains as he connected with the spirit of the land, sleeping on pine boughs he cut down. He wouldn’t do that anymore, knowing that if millions of hikers did that each year, the forests would be destroyed. Sunlight filters through the trees onto boulders the size of houses lining the brown riverbank, the water having worn away the softer earth between.

On the far side of the dark forest, the silvery, glacier-polished eastern wall of Tenaya Canyon rises up in front of me and a shining wave of heat blasts me in the face. The afternoon sun is using the opposite wall, from Half Dome past Clouds Rest, as a reflector oven that is baking my side of the valley. I begin hiking down the switchbacks into Tenaya Canyon, wiping away the sweat running into my eyes, swishing flies that want to buzz inside my nose, and trying to use my awe of the earth’s geology, exposed in swirls of stone six thousand feet high and miles wide, to distract from the trauma my body is going through. A couple of times I lose focus, forget where I am, and trip on loose rocks and tree roots growing over the steep trail and almost stumble over the edge. I make one quick stop to place Band-Aids over blisters that are forming on the tips of my toes from the hours of downward hiking. Near the end, I concentrate on moving as quickly as possible to reach the valley floor behind Mirror Lake before it gets dark. I vow never to hike this trail again. Yet the views have left me mute with awe, and there’s no other way to see them, so I’ll probably come back.

Three hours later, after jogging by Mirror Lake on the flat valley trail at dusk, I viscerally know why I love nature so much. In twilight like this, as well as in the half-light of dawn, the eternity of the rocks and the presence of a unifying force can be felt. I also feel this when storms clear and sunlight dances with the departing clouds, and when fog lingers in the crevices of the valley walls. These scenes move into my heart like the corner of a piece of paper put to a pool of ink, drawing the feared darkness of the wilderness into the light where its mystery adds richness to life. I realized today that when I go into the mountains to hike, I take my struggles with me, and what I encounter on the trail helps loosen their knots.

Image © Pascal Bullan