The High Sierra in Late Spring

Yesterday my wife and I got back from a whirlwind trip over Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park.  We left Sunday at noon from Visalia, taking the Wawona Road just to the beginning of iconic Yosemite Valley.  From there, instead of contesting with the Memorial Day Weekend throngs, we peeled off to the north and enjoyed the relative solitude and truly wild Sierra experience of Tioga Road.  With some stops for views, short hikes and lunch we pulled into the town of Lee Vining at the eastern base of the pass around 6:00 P.M.

I do so love the mountains.  The crystalline sky is so deep and richly blue it's almost purple.  Rushing torrents of melt water leap over cliff faces, race down boulder-strewn creek beds or meander through awakening meadows, greening now at 7,000 feet while those at 9,000 are still tawny.  Lakes such as Tenaya are so clear you can see bottom.   Snow lingers in the high scarps where pikas are emerging from their dens, ever watchful for hungry raptors circling above.  Even the firs are hunched and gnarled from their interminable struggle with wind and chill at Tioga Pass's 9945 foot summit.

In the middle elevations a riot of ferns and vines spring into ephemeral verdancy, where a keen and patient eye may spot a bear gorging on berries.  As the season warms both flora and fauna will creep upward.  Higher on the craggy slopes of the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne a decent pair of binoculars may bring some mountain goats into focus.  Rarely you might spy a mountain lion crouched furtively in the granite or edging ever closer to its intended prey.

To me there is something primally compelling about these untamed expanses.  You can sense it in the people you meet who have come from all over the world to revel in creation as when it first existed.  There was the Indian family with laughing children scaling a boulder at an overlook, or the smiling young Japanese couple who took our picture at Tuolumne Meadow, or the animated group of six travelers from France recounting their adventures of the day before over breakfast at a little place in Lee Vining.      

If its national parks are not "America's Best Idea," as Ken Burns has said, they are certainly one of them.  I definitely feel spiritually refreshed amid such wonder, and grateful these places of peace have been set aside for preservation, not only so their natural inhabitants can live according to their natures, but that we humans may also reclaim some of our own.