This is the part you don't try to ride your horse across.
(Sorry, very busy lately.)
Another near-derelict sign from Badlands (and I mean the BIG BADLANDS) National Park.
Badlands was different. It was the smallest Park we visited, and by far the least crowded – in fact, it felt largely abandoned, both by visitors and the NPS. The visitor facilities are small and relatively undeveloped, the trails are few, and even the park's signage looks like it was put up in 1950 and promptly forgotten.
We had intended to stay in a cabin, one of a cluster of cabins that form the only accomodations in the park aside from a small motel and a campground; but our changing arrival dates meant that we ended up in the motel instead. It was passable. (Not that we had any choice.) The motel was actually just outside the park entrance, and another mile or so was the small town of Interior, S.D., and another mile or so beyond that, the Pine Ridge Reservation. The NPS has a unique arrangement with the Reservation; park entrance fees are split 50/50 between them.
After touring what we could before the light failed, we headed to the restaurant at the Cedar Pass Lodge, the only place to eat in the Park, and ate standard fat-laden stodgy mid-American fare served to us by chunky Sioux youths. Chewing my greasy hamburger, I contemplated the sixties-era decor of the restaurant while the radio blared unintelligible thrash metal at the mostly middle-aged white patrons, and thought this is indeed a land of strange contrasts.
I'll try again tomorrow.
We probably wouldn't have stopped at Mount Rushmore. The whole idea of the place strikes me as sort of creepy, a cheesy melding of patriotic fervor, idolatry, and quasi-religious zeal. It strikes me, in fact, as profoundly un-American, as far as my definition of "American" goes; democratic republics, especially ours, should have no need to put up gigantic Ramses-like statuary to their leaders, no matter how great they might have been.
You could make a lovely mountain into a great paperweight, but can you make it into a wild, natural mountain again? I don't think you have the know-how for that... Maybe it's not too late to put an elevator under this whole shrine of democracy — press a button and the whole monument disappears. And once a week — say, every Sunday from nine to eleven — you press the button again and those four heads come up again with the music going full blast. The guys who got an astronaut on the moon should be able to to this much for us Indians...
I really wish they'd left the mountain alone... but then again, it's not my job to drum up tourism for South Dakota.**
* Quoted in "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse".
** The freakishness of Mount Rushmore pales in comparison to what's being done to Thunderhead Mountain, a few miles to the southwest – in "response" to Rushmore, another mountain in the Sioux's revered Black Hills is being carved up into a gargantuan "likeness" of Crazy Horse, who fought desperately to... well, keep things like that from happening to the Black Hills. But nobody really knows what Crazy Horse looked like, so the huge visage will just be a bland, soulless stereotypical "Indian" face, that probably won't look anything like him anyway. Has the tool yet been invented that could measure the angular momentum of Crazy Horse as he spins in his grave?
Opposite, there is an aperture, the "Spirit Gate", to welcome in the Cavalry dead:
(I think there's supposed to be a small waterfall down at the bottom, but no water was moving that day.)
The panels themselves provide lists of Indians killed in the battle – small lists – and provide some perspective on the battle from the points of view of the different tribes involved. Combined with the presentation given by the park ranger, they give a more complex background to the battle than I had been aware of. I knew about the Sioux and the Cheyenne, of course; the one-minute capsule summary of Little Bighorn (arrogant Custer Sitting Bull vision soldiers falling upside down Crazy Horse encircles) focusses on them as the antagonists to the 7th Cavalry (tragically doomed or suicidally arrogant, depending on decade).
I didn't realize that some Arapaho had been allied with the Sioux and Cheyenne; and it never really sank in until then that a small number of Crow and Arikara scouts had fought on Custer's side. The Crow, especially, had no love for the Sioux, because the Crow considered the Sioux to be encroaching on their lands (the Crow's lands including, in fact, that very place, along the Little Bighorn). But the Crow couldn't muster the resources or fighters that the Sioux could, and decided to throw their lot in with the whites. On June 26th, 1876, that must have seemed like a bad decision – but then again, here we are, 131 years later, and it is Crow land again – at least, the Crow can say it is their land as much as any Indian tribe can say reservation land is theirs, and it certainly isn't the Sioux's land anymore.
The next morning, the haze had lifted a little, and we drove southeast through the rolling brown plains, past Crow Agency, and up to the Little Bighorn National Monument, just east of I-90. We drove up and flashed our parks pass to the charming young Crow woman sitting at the entry station. The Monument is spread along Battle and Greasy Grass Ridges; just past the parking lot is the portion of the Custer National Cemetery that was used for interring soldiers who died after 1900; this portion is neat and orthogonal, with mown and watered grass, like a mini-Arlington. On the other side of the visitor center is the 7th Cavalry Memorial, a fenced-off portion of prairie on the slopes of Last Stand Hill, surmounted by a tall granite marker inscribed with the names of the soldiers killed in 1876. Just to the north of the granite marker and slightly lower down the hill is a much newer Indian memorial.
We stopped and listened to a ranger – another Crow Indian – give a detailed presentation about the conditions leading up to the battle, the principal participants, and the course of events on the day of the battle.
A path winds down towards the Little Bighorn, and passes by eroding white marble stones – cenotaphs, technically, I suppose, because they mark the spot where soldiers' remains were found, but the remains themselves were moved up to the top of the hill, and buried under the big granite marker. Most of the white markers are clustered up near the top of the hill, but some are quite a ways down it. In a few places, there are red granite markers, the same size and shape as the white marble; these mark where Cheyenne and Sioux are known to have fallen.
Yes, it looks like just another toxic waste dump, but it's really a natural marvel: it's Roaring Mountain. In the 1880's, when it got is name, it was quite the active geothermal feature, covered in fumaroles from top to bottom; but it has quieted down considerably since then. I think we detected a few wisps of steam, but no roaring; not even a robust hiss.
While Yellowstone as a whole is quite the hotbed of geothermal activity, the activity in any one place (except for Old Faithful) is more hit-or-miss; certainly it doesn't accomodate itself to today's busy, on-the-go vacationing tourist. You can blow right through the park without noticing any activity at all, which makes it easy to forget how volatile the place is. The hot springs can become geysers, and then subside in activity again; or they can blow themselves up in spectacular fashion.*
By now, it was time to move along, so we drove down the thousand feet from the top of Golden Gate canyon past Mammoth, then dropped another thousand feet on the way to the park entrance. From there, we and the road followed the Yellowstone River as it wound its way out of mountains; at Livingston we left the Rockies behind for good, and we descended through the undulating and smoke-overcast plains.
*(Good general reference for Yellowstone volcanic and geothermal activity here, forgot to mention it last time.)
It's the 1000-foot deep Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, displaying the reason for the park's name, the distinctly yellowish rock.
The canyon is impressive, but it's obvious that much the rock isn't very hard; it erodes away easily, and at one point we noticed a viewpoint that had been moved because its old location had become unstable.
Just at the limit of the view up the canyon, you can see a hint of something more impressive; travelling up to the next viewpoint reveals it:
It's the distinctively asymmetric Lower Falls, the biggest-volume waterfall in the Rocky Mountains, just a touch over 300 feet high. The Yellowstone River cuts its way through the yellow rock.
The rock is welded tuff and rhyolite, both products of violent, or even explosive, volcanism. That Yellowstone was the product of volcanism was obvious to the earliest close observers of the region – a large plateau of volcanic rocks, that happened to sit right on top of the surrounding sedimentary and metamorphic Rocky Mountains, and if you weren't paying attention, just looked like more mountains. But the ability to make fine distinctions between different sorts of similar volcanic rocks, and to associate those rocks with kinds of eruptive events, was pretty limited until about 60 years ago, and the Yellowstone plateau was generally thought to be a huge mass of not-particularly-distinctive overlapping ancient lava flows, probably the outflow of the Absaroka Mountains to the north and east.
It wasn't until the early 1960's and the advent of good rock-dating techniques that geologists noticed that the rocks of the central plateaus are far, far younger than the volcanic rocks that make up the surrounding mountains. The Absarokas and neighboring highlands to their northwest and south are about 50 million years old; but the central plateaus are between 650,000 and 2 million years old. About the same time, geologists began to realize the significance of all the welded tuffs in the central plateau area – almost without exception, they are produced by extremely violent, explosive eruptions. The vast layers of tuff implied massive and cataclysmic eruptive events, dwarfing any during historic time. The 35-mile-wide rolling upland in the middle of the mountains wasn't the product of flows from surrounding volcanoes filling up the valleys between them – it was the result of the original volcanoes being blasted out of existence and replaced by incandescent ash, which cooled, mostly, into the present landscape.
Further investigation revealed that the welded tuffs fell into three distinct age groups: 650,000 years ago; 1.3 million years ago; and about 2 million years ago, each age group associated with a specific caldera within the overall plateau region. Other rhyolite and basalt flows in the caldera are intermediate in age, and geologists have inferred from them a pattern to the cycles of eruption: thick flows of rhyolites, followed by a caldera-forming explosive eruption with its accompanying ash and tuff, followed by flows of rhyolites and basalts, followed by relative quiet. Based on that, it's assumed that when Yellowstone becomes volcanically active again, it will start with lava flows, rather than blowing up all at once.
Looking at a topographic map of the region, a noticable large-scale feature of the Yellowstone area is the lack of mountains to the southwest of the plateaus – the land slopes down evenly to the Snake River plain, which forms a distinctive low-lying region surrounded by mountains. The plain is also full of volcanic rocks. Further investigations indicated that hugely destructive eruptive events occurred across what is now the plain, receding further into the past as you travel to the south and west of Yellowstone. Yellowstone appears to be the current location of a stationary mantle hot spot that is, in effect, cutting a big trench across the North American Plate as the plate above it moves to the south and west, leaving low volcanic plains behind. The older history of the hot spot is in dispute; some geologists have tried to link it to the massive Columbia flood basalts, which dumped vast – vast! – quantities of volcanic rock across much of the Northwest.
Okay. Okay. I can do this... I can – post something – just hold on, ease into it...
How about... some pictures! That's it! I'll throw up some pictures!!
Here's another shot of Grand Prismatic Spring. Notice all the bleached treetrunks in the background, a legacy of the 1988 fires.
Speaking (again) of the 1988 fires, here's another area that burned, right around Wraith Falls (the shiny thing in the middle.) Notice that the larger trees are often dead, but there is a lot of undergrowth coming in as well.
This shows the old-dead-growth vs. green-new-growth better:
And finally, your reward for sitting through all that: a bison.
This one was about 20 or 30 yards off the road, just grazing. Moved its tail a few times, but that was about it.
After a fine breakfast in the big white dining room, we filled the car with outrageously expensive gasoline and headed to the hot springs. Mammoth Hot Springs emerge from a long, sloping hillside. As with most of the hot springs and geysers in the park, minerals precipitate out of the water as it cools, and form thick terraces. Unlike, say, Grand Prismatic Pool, only small areas of Mammoth are active at present, and those areas that aren't have started to crumble away. I must say I was a teeny bit disappointed at the overall lack of hot springiness on display here.
At the top of this big pile, some active springs are slowly engulfing additional land, making life unpleasant for the local trees.
A few of the springs are active enough to produce the usual large pools of scalding hot water.
Here's the largest one currently, which overflows from the top of the whole set of terraces. The view off to the northeast shows ridges fading into the haze and the army of skeleton trees marching downslope.
Speaking of fire: our trip coincided with the 18th anniversary of the 1988 fire season, The Yellowstone Fires, when it seemed like (or at least media reports made it seem like) the whole park would go up in flames. About a third of the total park acreage did go up in flames, along with 400,000 acres outside the park.
The scope of the destruction roused public officials and media into one of their favorite pastimes, searching for scapegoats. The Park Service's "Natural Burn" fire policy – and the managers who pursued it – were the primary targets.
The Park Service adopted the new policy in the early '70's. Contra the old Smokey the Bear prevent-forest-fires-at-all-costs policy, it stipulated that naturally-caused fires, as long as they didn't threaten people, property, or look like they were going to burn past the park boundaries, should be left to burn themselves out. The policy resulted from the realization that western forests evolved in dry, fire-prone climates; supressing fire reduces the sprouting of young trees, and allows the buildup of dangerous amounts of highly flammable debris. By the '60's, western forest managers realized that they were effectively sitting on a time bomb, and the park service adopted the "natural burn" policy as a way of trying to slowly defuse that bomb.
Anyway, back to the search for scapegoats:
Two Wyoming senators demanded that National Park Superintendent William Mott be fired. Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel told Good Morning America on July 23, 1988, "We're not going to let Yellowstone be damaged by this." The news media was one of the worst critics... The Billings Gazette questioned why Yellowstone Park Superintendent Robert Barbee "rode a dead policy into hell." The Richmond News Leader wrote, "If you want to see the world's largest charcoal grill, just visit Yellowstone. Be sure to say, 'Thank you, environmentalists!'" The Wall Street Journal wrote, "Yellowstone Burns as Park Managers Play Politics."
As a result of such vociferous and ill-informed criticism, the Park Service suspended its natural burn policy throughout the west in 1989, though there was never any evidence that the policy was incorrect, or implemented incorrectly, or even that vigorous fire suppression in 1988 would have made any difference in the severity of the Yellowstone fires. (It reintroduced the policy in the early '90's.)
I worked with a number of fire ecologists at the time. It was pretty clear to us that the park would, in general, bounce back relatively quickly after the fires, but we were still surprised by just how rapidly regeneration took place.
The park's a pretty green place nowadays, but the effects of the fires are still very evident if you know what to look for – the many dead tree trunks in the background at Old Faithful or the Grand Prismatic Spring, for instance. In this satellite view of the park, the areas burned in 1988 are still easily seen as the orange-toned areas (compare to this map).
Or not.
Anyway, leaving the hot springs behind, we drove northward as the sun dropped to the horizon, past recovering forests and meadows, with the occasional geyser or hot spring thrown in. I seem to remember actual wildlife along this stretch as well, a few elk strategically placed along the road. In twilight, we crossed the open meadow of Gardner's Hole, passed between two mountains, and unexpectedly (because we hadn't bothered to look at the map) began the long and rapid descent down Golden Gate Canyon.
By the time we passed the mammoth hot springs that give Mammoth Hot Springs its name, it was pretty dark, and there was little to see. At the bottom of the descent, there was the Park Service town of Mammoth, dominated by the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel. We were to stay in a cabin; our experience in Yosemite with the Curry Village tent cabins had made us a bit gun-shy. Checked in, we took our little map of the cabins and drove down the road, until we found ours; a sturdy wooden thing, painted white, with big double-hung screened windows, decent beds with decent sheets, an overhead fan, a clothes closet, a sink with running hot and cold water, towels, and bear-shaped soap.
The baths were down a little ways, but well-kept. And the best thing of all, it wasn't crowded, and the people there were quiet. It felt like a little Chautauqua village; Curry felt like a Civil War army camp inhabited by noisy slobs.
We settled in, but needed food; after all, we hadn't eaten since Jackson (Feb. 18). We walked in the cool evening up to the big dining hall, staffed by a set of exotic Xanterra youths, kindred to those that catered to us in Bryce; but the restaurant was too crowded, and pretty expensive. Instead, we slipped into the bar, and got the very nice bartender man to serve us a pile of appetizers and local microbrewed beer in lieu of dinner. It was good, very good indeed.
Walking uphill from the previous steaming pool, we came to the biggest hot spring in the park, the Grand Prismatic Spring. I have to say, I was a bit disappointed by this one – this was a feature I'd been anticipating for a long time, but you can only get a partial idea of the range of colors it contains from the ground (and in this picture), but to really appreciate its prism-ness, you need an aerial view. (Or one from space).
This is what you can see from ground level. The overflow from the spring travels in thin sheets across the ground, so the only place it's safe to walk is along a raised boardwalk.
The mineral-rich water deposits thin layers of crust as it cools. The crust is pretty fragile, which is another reason the NPS wants you to stay on the boardwalk.
These little terraces are home to dense mats of microbes.
The vivid blue of the center of the pool is just the blue of clear, deep water; but the brilliant oranges and reds of the periphery are the photosynthetic pigments of vast multitudes of thermophilic archaebacteria (what we old-timers used to call 'cyanobacteria', or just plain old 'blue-green algae').
The steam is not that apparent, but all the water flowing into the river here is very, very hot.
These pictures were taken at the Midway Geyser Basin, about five miles downstream from Old Faithful. Here, the geysers are not the main attraction, but several large thermal pools, very hot and intensely colored.
It's not obvious from the image, but the water in this pool is bubbling, like a big cauldron. On the far side, the water overlaps the edge of the pool, and flows down into the Firehole.
Driving north, the clouds disappeared, the sun began sinking, and we played tag with the Continental Divide several times, crossing to the east, then back to the west, then to the east again, driving through the monotonous lodgepole forest. Dropping slightly, we come down into a basin with large areas clear of trees. In the middle of this is Old Faithful Lodge, an impressive pile of National Park Gothic. Old Faithful, the "town" (hey, it has a post office!) is arranged in a semicircle around Old Faithful, the geyser. It is quiet as we drive up. There is a clock, of sorts, in the Lodge, that shows the estimated time to the next eruption. We have about half an hour to go... the viewing platform is empty when we arrive, but it begins to fill up with people.
We could hike around to some of the other geysers in the area, some of which are spitting fitfully, but we stay put and get ice cream. Eventually, the geyser does that thing that it does:
And after about a minute or two, it gradually dies down.
O.K., back in the car!
Tiring of taking picture after picture of the same mountains from the same spot, we packed up and moved on, driving around Jackson Lake, enlarged considerably by a dam built in 1916.
When my younger self passed through Jackson Hole those many years ago, it struck me as somehow odd that a National Park would have a big, man-made, terrain-altering structure like a dam in it. In my youthful naivete, I had this fuzzy idea that the government had simply decreed the existence of the park, and all such parks, and that somehow they had been delivered down though time preserved in their primordial state. The idea that humans had lived there and altered the land seemed nonsensical. People lived and farmed here? But it's a National Park!
Even as the Hayden Surveys of the 1870's were mapping and popularizing the mountains near the headwaters of the Snake River, the population of settlers and farmers was steadily increasing on the Snake River plains. Farming needs water, and in the West that means irrigation. By 1900, the Federal Government had instituted a project to build sufficient irrigation capacity to supply the upper Snake River plain (basically, eastern Idaho). Dams and irrigation canals began appearing at lower elevations, and eventually worked their way up to Jackson Hole. Each of the lakes in Jackson Hole was evaluated for suitability, and Jackson Lake was the most promising.
Jackson Hole was by no means pristine and untouched. Though the seasonal bands of Shoshone – never numerous to begin with – had been killed or moved away, settlers had moved into Jackson Hole and been busy digging irrigation ditches and diversion canals. The Jackson Lake dam was bigger in scope but not different in kind from the activity that was already occurring.
In 1929 the National Park was formed, but at that time it was much smaller, encompassing just the high peaks and the lakes immediately adjacent. Jackson Hole was still farming territory, but John Rockefeller's Snake River Land Company was stealthily buying up homesteads throughout the valley, with the intent of eventually giving the land to the federal government to add to the park. Rockefeller's activity became public, setting off a vigorous local controversy. Opponents of an expanded park managed to stall action until 1943, when Roosevelt created the Jackson Hole National Monument by fiat. In 1950, congress merged the park and the national monument.
Leaving the lake and the Tetons behind, we drove into lodgepole pine forests along the Rockefeller Parkway, slowly gaining altitude as we climbed onto the Yellowstone plateau.
Given its prominence, it's not surprising that people tend to think that Grand Teton is the highest peak in Wyoming – it's not, that distinction belongs to Gannett Peak, a remote and visually undistinguished peak deep in the Wind River mountains. Since Grand Teton is so well-known, distinctive, and easy to get to, it's a much more popular target for climbing.
(What follows is entirely cribbed from the two sources listed at the end.)
Who first climbed Grand Teton? It turns out that there isn't a simple answer to that question. The first attempt that anybody bothered claiming occurred in 1872, when the Hayden Survey travelled up the Snake River to its headwaters, and N. P. Langford (quoted below) and James Stevenson left their companions behind and returned many hours later, saying they had summited Grand Teton.
They also reported a structure that has come to be known as "The Enclosure". Located on the summit of a side peak (13,280 ft.), it consists of "granite slabs ... placed on end, forming a breastwork about three feet high, enclosing a space six or seven feet in diameter; and while on the surrounding rocks there is not a particle of dust or sand, the bottom of the enclosure is covered with a bed of minute particles of granite not larger than the grains of common sand, that the elements have worn off from these vertical blocks until it is nearly a foot in depth. This attrition must have been going on for hundreds and, perhaps, thousands of years, and it is the opinion of Mr. Langford that centuries have elapsed since the granite slabs were placed in the position in which they were found." [1]
Not much more is known about the Enclosure now than when it was first found; it is presumed to be a vision quest site, though there are apparently no records of any of the tribes in the region using it. Whether any Indians ever climbed the 600 feet up from the saddle to the true peak is also unknown.
Interestingly enough, Langford's wording of this find casts doubt on their claim to have climbed to the highest point. The beginning of the bit quoted above is "The top of the Teton, and for 300 feet below, is composed entirely of blocks of granite, piled up promiscuously, and weighing from 20 to 500 pounds. On the apex these granite slabs have been placed on end..." but the Enclosure is not the top, not at all. Langford and Stevenson had no photographic equipment with them, so they had no real evidence that they ever proceeded beyond the Enclosure.
Despite that, Langford and Stevenson's claim was accepted for decades, until William Owen, a state employee, spent many summers trying and failing to reach the summit. In so doing, he became convinced that there was no way that Langford and Stevenson could have reached it either, not without more climbing equipment than they had with them. Eventually, he teamed up with Franklin Spaulding, and on another attempt in 1898 the two of them "began probing the band of cliffs blocking access to the summit several hundred feet above. Spalding found a narrow ledge dangling over a 3,000-foot precipice just wide enough for a person to wiggle and squeeze along on his stomach. The thin ledge led to a vertical chimney that took him above the cliffs. He could have walked on up to the top, but later said, "I did not wish to go ahead of my party, and so I climbed back down the chimney and hallooed to Owen to come.""[2] Above the cliffs it was easy, and Owens and Spaulding reached the summit quickly. They found no evidence of a prior ascent: "Not a stone was turned over, no cairn or monument erected, nor could we find any bottle or can of any description containing the customary record of ascent".
Owens was a bit of a hothead, and immediately began denouncing Langford and Stevenson as liars to anyone who would listen. Stevenson had died in the intervening years, but Langford was in no mood to put up with Owens' charges.
Things got nasty quickly; lawyers got involved, affidavits were presented, the affidavits proved to be forgeries, damning documents were hidden, allegations of bribery tossed about. Spaulding, with perhaps a wee bit more pride and condescension than you might expect from an Episcopalian minister, wrote a plague-on-both-your-houses letter to Langford: "I think if you will permit me to say so, you are at fault, as is Mr. Owen, in exaggerating the difficulties of the ascent. If you did not reach the top when you started out to do so, you are a mighty poor mountain climber in my humble judgement; and I cannot understand why Mr. Owen failed so many times before he succeeded."[2]
Eventually, Owen persuaded the Wyoming state legislature to pass a resolution declaring that his party was the first to climb the mountain, and in 1929, a bronze commemorative plaque so stating was bolted to the summit.
Sometime in 1977, it was stolen, and hasn't been seen since.
The Enclosure is atop the bump just to the right of the main peak of Grand Teton. (I think).
[1]A Place Called Jackson Hole.
[2]The Grand Question.
A nice distinctive feature of the Tetons is having a big flat open area to appreciate them from.
The Tetons themselves are formed from very old Precambrian gneiss, with a few granite plutons and many diabase dikes running through them. During the Paleozoic, these rocks were overlain by many thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks. Many cycles of deposition and erosion followed, but the next really interesting event (aside from the huge Yellowstone eruptions) was the emergence of the Teton fault about 9 million years ago.
The Teton fault runs north-south along the eastern foot of the currently-existing mountains. Rocks west of the fault pushed upwards, rocks east of the fault simultaneously dropped downwards. Volcanic ash, glacial deposits, and river sediment filled in the cavity that resulted from the downfaulting of the valley floor, filling it to the current depth and leaving it generally flat. The thousands of feet of sedimentary rock covering the rising mountains eroded away completely, except for a small cap of sandstone on Mt. Moran (the flattish peak to the right). The equivalent layer of sandstone is about 24,000 feet below the surface of Jackson Hole, implying a total movement along the fault of about 30,000 feet, at an average rate of displacement of 4 inches per hundred years.
The sediments of the valley floor tend to drain water very quickly, so relatively little water is available for surface plants. This results in grassy, generally open plains, with trees mostly occurring on the denser soils of old glacial moraines. (Or so I've read.)
The Tetons are nothing if not craggy – unusually so, really – for the Rocky Mountains. The disconnect between the peaks' name and cold, stony reality was noted back in 1905:
I think that the man who gave them this name must have seen them from a great distance; for as we approach them, the graceful curvilinear lines which obtained for them this delicate appellation appear angular and ragged. From our present point of view the name seems a misnomer. If there were twelve of them instead of three, they might better be called the "Titans," to illustrate their relation to the surrounding country. He indeed must have been of a most susceptible nature, and, I would fain believe, long a dweller amid these solitudes, who could trace in these cold and barren peaks any resemblance to the gentle bosom of woman.
I first saw the Tetons in my mid-teens, and though I'd lived in the mountain West by then, I was unprepared for their cragginess and in your face! base-to-peak rise of about 7000 feet – it was the first time I can remember being truly awestruck by something. They were so high, and right there – foothills be damned. perhaps I'm just easier to impress than some (or most).
One thing I like about the highest peaks of the Tetons as subjects for photographs is the way they change shape as you travel up the length of Jackson Hole. Near the southern end, you get the more standard view, but as you travel northwards the peaks become more tightly grouped, and more precipitous.
These three peaks (Teewinot, Grand Teton, Mt. Owens) are the same as in the top image, but have quite a different character when seen from the north.
As afternoon wore on, clouds and haze started to reduce the quality of the view. We drove on; we needed to get to Mammoth Hot Springs before stopping, and I didn't want a repeat of the Sequoia experience.
[1] "The Discovery of Yellowstone Park: Journal of the Washburn Expedition to the Yellowstone and Firehole Rivers in the Year 1870", 1905.
Contemplating the route back, we were tired. Tired of the trip, the car, the driving; we cut one day out of the return, forsaking Devils Tower and the Black Hills. We had been driving so long that the car needed an oil change; a mechanic at the local Oil-O-Change-O franchise uttered dire warnings that our accessory belt was crack'd and burnt; but the trusty Saturn dealer looked at it, laughed, and said it would get us home.
We and I-84 followed the Columbia upstream, under a high smoky haze. We drove eastward, over the Blues and down into the Snake River Plain, and ended the day at a generic motel in a little town outside of Twin Falls. The only interesting thing about the town – a surprising number of Carnicerias and Botanicas. In rural Idaho?
The next morning, it appeared we had outrun the smoke and haze that had been dogging us for most of the past week, and we continued following the Snake upstream. Eventually, we left the plain and started the climb towards Jackson Hole, passing through beautiful aspen and conifer forests, watching rafters on the Snake heading the opposite direction. We arrived at Jackson (crowded!) looking for a quick lunch. We ended up in a small shop, getting sandwiches and drinks from a multiply-pierced girl behind a counter. Tea? Some sort of herbal monstrosity. No thanks, just water.
Eating, I noticed some interesting literature on the wall, concerning an organization that tried to enable the working people of Jackson – the schoolteachers, shop workers, etc. – to actually buy homes and live in Jackson, a town suffering from severe Portlandization. My reading was disrupted by a thin middle-aged man, dressed like a teenaged ski bum, embarking on a loud cellphone conversation, the crux of which was all about his going to Burning Man next week, and how wild that would be, etc. His monologue drowned out all other conversation until he left the shop. I watched him cross the street, and drive off in a Jeep Cherokee (I was hoping for a big Range Rover or similar).
Fed, we drove north into the sagebrushy flats of Jackson Hole on what would prove to be the last truly clear day of the whole trip. Soon, the Tetons came into view.
Somewhere between Escalon and Manteca the car's odometer rolled over 100000.
Being out in the wilds was off the agenda for the next five or six days, so we relaxed the anti-bear rules, and snacked on whatever trail food we had left over. I downed one of the Starbucks Frappucino drinks we had bought several days before, when we weren't sure if we could find caffeinated beverages in whatever remote Sierra valley the next dawn would find us in. Gads, like drinking melted coffee-flavored ice cream. Ick.
The smog was thick enough that it blocked out the coast ranges pretty much all the way up the valley. Eventually Mount Shasta appeared, but only as a whitish smudge just above the horizon that would have been mistaken for a cloud, except that it didn't move.
We arrived at Redding. We spent many minutes roundly cursing Redding's layout of interstate exits and access roads, but the daughter finally got her long-delayed Red Robin dinner. (Apparently there's some famous bridge or other in town, but we were too annoyed by the effort it took to find the damn restaurant to bother doing any exploring.)
The next day, up past Shasta, through the Klamaths, the Siskiyous, down into the Willamette valley at Eugene. The air is a little cleaner here, but the coast ranges are stil bearly visible, and as the valley widens the mountains recede into the gunk. (One of the defining characteristics of the trip, so far, is that aside from the very first day, there have always been mountains visible around us, somewhere.)
When we get to the Portland outskirts, neither the Cascades nor Mount Hood are visible at all; we search for them in vain on the eastern horizon – normally, they are clearly visible – as we sit in a big traffic jam just south of the Wilsonville bridge.
We have family business in Portland, so no parks, or wilderness, or pictures. But Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Badlands are still to come.
Given their appearance, it's not surprising that they are made out of the same hard, monolithic granite as El Capitan itself.
The Cathedral Rocks form one side of a small subsidiary creek drainage. The sides and mouth of this valley have been sliced off by glaciers, leaving behind the classic example of a "hanging valley". Bridalveil Creek runs down the valley, and falls about 600 feet over the cliffs at its end. It's a fairly pathetic trickle in August, though.
The prominent knob to the right of the falls is the Leaning Tower. A more impressive picture of it (it really is "leaning") is here. I didn't know anything more about it than that, but poking around on the Internet I discovered that a fairly well-known rock-climbing guy, Todd Skinner, was killed in a fall while climbing it a few months after we were there. (Given the dangerous nature of the sport, it's interesting that most of the fatalities in Yosemite last year were hikers venturing off-trail in the wrong places, rather than rock climbers.)
One last glimpse of El Capitan as we headed down towards the heat and smog of the Central Valley. Stockton, here we come!
After another bear-free but unpleasant night in Curry Village, we loaded up the car and headed west. We passed both Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls:
The valley floor was calm, but wind at the higher elevations swept the plume of the upper falls back and forth across the rock face.
Further down the road, we noticed a bunch of people standing in a meadow, all looking upwards towards a point somewhere above us. I pulled over, and walked out to see what they were looking at.
(Parenthetical photographic note: This picture epitomizes the Yosemite Picture Problem in that it is both clichéd and inadequate. Clichéd, because probably every single person who has ever stood in El Capitan Meadow has taken this exact picture; inadequate, because it does not even come close to imparting the immense size and physical presence of El Capitan. It is so big. For example, If you stood the Sears Tower up next to it, the building would only reach approximately half-way up the rock face.)
One of the watchers volunteered that they were observing some climbers working their way up the rock. With binoculars, we could make them out, packing up their previous night's bivouac on top of El Cap Towers, the knob of rock about halfway up the exposed portion of the cliff, just to the right of the "nose". (I tried to find them in the full-blown version of the image, but couldn't – they're just too small to show up.) Climbing El Capitan generally takes climbers two to five days, though somebody's done it in less than twelve hours. Here is a description of one climb; here's another (with pictures!). We watched for a few minutes, but there isn't a whole lot that's exciting about watching someone break camp, so we moved on.
Geologists have been busy little beavers mapping out the boundaries of the many slightly-differing kinds of igneous rock in the Sierra; this map gives an idea of the complexity of the situation in the Yosemite Valley area. (For the Yes, we are So Geekly! file: we have a jigsaw puzzle of a slightly older version of this map.)
The Park visitor center has some good displays describing the differences between tonalite, diorite, granodiorite, and plain old granite. But to be honest, from a distance they all look pretty much the same – massive, dense, salt-and-pepper rocks – and for the non-geologist what really distinguishes rock formations at Yosemite is less their specific ratio of alkali feldspar to plagioclase, and more how jointed and fractured the cooled plutons became. Once the glaciers got to work on Yosemite, joints and fractures were weak spots that allowed the ice to shear away greater quantities of the less-consolidated rock, leaving the more monolithic formations behind and leading to the spectacular current landscape.
(I discovered, on doing some checking, that El Capitan is in fact made up of honest-to-God granite, contra McPhee, quoted here. He was right about Half Dome and Yosemite Falls, though.)
A good introduction to the geology of the Valley can be found here.
We drove up the Tioga Road, bypassing the Valley entirely, and parked near Tenaya Lake. Shouldering our packs, we crossed Tenaya Creek and began the 1000-foot climb up the side of the canyon. After many switchbacks, the slope eased, and we came to the first of the three Sunrise Lakes right about sunset. There was a campsite already in progress there, so we continued higher, until we came to Middle Sunrise Lake, which we had all to ourselves, a little over 9000 feet up.
We set up camp, built a little fire (using the existing fire ring, of course), and enjoyed the usual spartan backpacking food in these beautiful surroundings. After dinner, we cleaned up carefully, and made sure all food, trash, and other odoriferous items were repacked in a trash bag, and hung from a tree limb...
...well, easier said than done. The usual tree limb guidelines (10+ feet off the ground, supports food bag 4+ feet from the trunk) do not suit many conifers this close to treeline – all the trees in the vicinity had only small, downcurved dead branches that didn't extend 4 feet period, never mind extending far enough beyond to support the weight of our food. The meaning of something we saw at Lower Sunrise – metal cables strung between two trees at about the requisite 10' height – suddenly dawned upon us.
Oh well, too late now. After continued searching in the deepening twilight, we found a tree that seemed to meet the requirements, barely, and we secured our food. The night was cloudless and moonless, and it may just be a trick of my memory that the stars were so numerous and so bright that their light cast faint shadows.
Sometime between one and two a.m., I woke and heard footsteps, heavy, human-like. Kind of late to set up camp, I thought. Then I heard more footsteps. Then muffled growling. I roused my companion. "What do we do?" "I don't know". We were young punk graduate students from Florida; what did we know about dealing with Sierra bears? We cowered in our tent. Eventually they found the food tree, and after about ten minutes of snuffling and growling a loud SNAP! signalled the victory of Bear over Man. We listened as the bears sampled and consumed all our food (satisfied urrmmphs when they found something they liked, sneezes and growls when they found something they didn't).
Sated, they ambled off into the wild as we lay, twin lumps of adrenaline.
The next morning we surveyed the damage – tree branch torn off tree, food bag ripped open, all food gone except instant coffee. In the clearer morning light, we noticed the shredded remains of other food bags in the trees nearby. We drank our breakfast of coffee and headed back down to the car.
(We told a ranger about this later that morning, and they asked, "Why didn't you just make a loud noise, chase the bears away?" which I admit never occurred to us. Live and learn, I suppose.)
"What's the deal here?!" I hear you exclaim. "Did you keep the camera pointed towards the ground the whole time you were in Yosemite?!"
Well, no, but in retrospect we didn't really take a lot of pictures. Two factors caused this: the pathetic inadequacy of our photographic skills and equipment when faced with the stupendous scenery all around us, and the god-awfullness of much of what would have been in the foreground of those pictures. Buildings. Buses. Cars. Asphalt. People.
The previous time that I had been in Yosemite, we spent very little time on the valley floor, choosing instead to drive along the Tioga road straight to Tenaya Lake, and camp overnight among the Sunrise Lakes. As probably 99% of Yosemite visitors never leave the Valley, we saw few people and little obvious human impact, aside from the smoke of prescribed burns.
This time around, we were in that mass of humanity packed in on the valley floor. I guess it's a commonplace to bewail the impact that so many people crammed into the tiny space of a 1 x 7 mile valley, so I'll save the typing and just note that there are way too many people in Yosemite Valley in the summer. I have no idea what can be done about it; perhaps, like Zion, car travel could be restricted in certain months, and everyone forced to walk, bicycle or take the shuttle buses (very convenient, btw.). That would cut down somewhat on cars and car emissions. It would also cut down on the Park's accessibility, and make it harder for many people to visit, which could be construed as being antithetical to the Park Service's mission.
We were surprised to discover that not only are wood campfires allowed in the valley – the smoke from the fires forms a distinct smog layer in the valley as evening comes on – but that the Curry Village store will even sell you a nice bundle of firewood. I understand the appeal of a nice fire in the wilderness, but still...
In some ways, the valley is an advantage – it keeps almost all human crowding in one place, greatly lessening any impact on the rest of the park. Being selfish, though, it's unfortunate that one of my primary impressions of Yosemite from this summer is: asphalt.
Enough of my whinging. The picture is of the Merced near Happy Isles, where we decided it was getting too late to continue hiking towards Vernal Falls. The glow upon the water is the reflection of sunset from the lower flanks of Half Dome.
First, we went for a hike to Lower Yosemite Falls.
After that, we missed a turnoff and ended up hiking a bit further than we intended. Eventually, we wandered back into Yosemite Village, stopping at the Visitor Center and the Ansel Adams Gallery, and looked for some lunch, which we found at some snack shop or other. 
After lunch, we hopped on the shuttle bus and rode a few stops to Yosemite Lodge, then walked across the valley, to a bridge crossing the Merced, a beautiful little spot with sandy beaches, bright clear water, and many, many people. Moira just wanted a place to relax and read, and this was just too crowded, so we walked on to the Sentinel Beach picnic area, where we left Moira under the tall, creaking pines and firs. The rest of us went for a hike partway up the Four Mile Trail, which climbs up from the valley floor to Glacier point. As the trail climbs up, you start to be able to see glimpses of the valley walls between gaps in the pine - oak canopy.
Here's the upper southeast face of El Capitan seen through the leaves.
A few minutes before we reached our agreed-upon turn around point, I heard a sound. Hmm, that's a familiar sound, I thought, ambling forwards. What is it?
"Hey, Dad, a rattlesnake!" Whoops! Yes, it is a rattlesnake[1], about 3 or 4 feet long. It is coiled in a sunny spot on the trail about five feet from my advancing, sneaker-shod feet. We stopped, and the snake beat a slow, rattly retreat. 
It eventually stopped a dozen or so feet farther up the trail. This seemed like a good time to turn around.
The incident was disturbing to me because it meant that I'd lost my rattlesnake reflexes – the act-before-thinking involuntary backwards jump that had served me in good stead through a decade of field work, a reaction that used to be set off just by hearing that sound. Without the verbal warning, I probably would have been within a foot or two before it dawned on me that hey, that snake's telling me to back off, which could have added much more excitement to the Park visit than we had planned for[2].
[1]As far as I know, there's only one rattler species found in the park, the Northern Pacific Rattlesnake (either Crotalus oreganus oreganus or Crotalus viridis oreganus; taxonomists, as ever, unable to agree).
[2]If either of these sites say they have links to extremely graphic photos, believe them.
Eventually, the Asian couple finishes the transaction, and I step up. Papers are exchanged, and I am issued a key and a little map of the Village. Holy cow, there are a lot of tents here.
I made my way back to the car, and drove to the appropriate parking lot. My goodness, a lot of cars here. We found a space in the bumpy gravel large enough for our car, and began maximal bear cleansing procedures[1]. Man, this parking lot is pretty full. We haul sleeping bags and luggage to the tent, and all food to the assigned bear locker. (I should note here that thanks to Moira's foresight, we actually have a cooler that will fit properly within the confines of the bear locker.) We settle in and examine our surroundings.
We are in a rigid tent, the oiled canvas stretched over a wooden frame, with a wooden screen door that locks with a padlock. The whole thing is raised up about 2 feet off the ground, but is only about eight inches away from its neighbor tents. We are second to the end of a long row of canvas, and there are tents behind us, and tents in front of us, row upon row. The effect is that of a Civil War-era army encampment. The canvas walls offer very little privacy; everything that happens in the neighboring tents sounds like it's happening at our very elbows, as, in fact, it is.
"If you tell me you made these reservations knowing that the conditions were like this, I'll divorce you." Moira says.
"Oh, no, of course not."
The group bathrooms are about as rustic, and in less good repair, than those at Sequoia. We lock our tent, and head out in search of a starry night sky, wandering across the parking lot and toward Stoneman Bridge. We sit on the bridge, enjoying moments of darkness frequently interspersed with the glare of oncoming headlights. The headlights, aside from destroying our night vision, also illuminate a thick layer of wood smoke that permeates this end of the valley. Between the two , it's pretty obvious we aren't going to see a lot of stars around here... and I don't want to give up our primo parking space to go wandering off elsewhere in the park. So we content our selves with listening to the river under the bridge, and eventually head back to the tent, to the soft, uncomfortable beds, to listen to people around us talk well into the night. One more night of this.
[1]Anti-bear tempting policy.
As sunset approached, the road rose into the mountains. Once again, we were entering a park a long way from where we were to end up, but at least we knew it in advance this time. Past Wawona. Lots of people just driving like idiots, mashing the accelerator down hills and into turns, then stomping the brakes. Ah, grasshopper, you will never achieve the zen of mountain driving that way. Past Chinquapin. We're getting close... will we make it into the valley before sunset?
...
No, we won't. The sun dipped behind the ridges to the west. But now the road crests and curves eastward, entering the valley. "View coming up!", I announce to the air. The light, alas, is not conducive to pictures, especially those taken through the windshield of a car that doesn't have time to stop. And we don't; after last night, we want to make sure we are settled in for the night as soon as possible. But my warning was well-timed; seconds later, The View appeared. (No, that's not our picture. And it was later in the day when we arrived, post-sunset, the light fading quickly. But I had to come up with some picture for it. While I've got this parenthetical note going, I'll apologize here and now for the pictures we've got of Yosemite, which are ... okay, but not numerous and frankly not that outstanding.)
We continue into the valley, while I try to restrain my general tendency to sightsee while driving. Still – how can you not sightsee? In my whole life, I can only remember three times when a landscape has left me not only physically speechless, but so mentally overwhelmed that I couldn't even form coherent thoughts on first view – when I was a teenager and visited Jackson Hole for the first time; when I was in my twenties and first visited Yosemite; and again a decade later when we made an all-too-brief and thoroughly rain-soaked tourist pilgrimage to Milford Sound. Especially in the latter cases, the only thought my brain could come up with was: That can't be real. The earth has done an impossible thing here.
But maybe that's just me. Years ago, a colleague of mine told me about taking his kids to Zion and the Grand Canyon. "Oh, great, Dad. More big rocks." And then there was the original big-rocks-big-deal guy:
“What,” says he, “is Yosemite but a cañon – a lot of rocks – a hole in the ground – a place dangerous about falling into – a d—d good place to keep away from.” “But think of the waterfalls, Billy – just think of that big stream we crossed the other day, falling half a mile through the air – think of that, and the sound it makes. You can hear it now like the roar of the sea.” Thus I pressed Yosemite upon him like a missionary offering the gospel, but he would have none of it. “I should be afraid to look over so high a wall,” he said. “It would make my head swim. There is nothing worth seeing anywhere, only rocks, and I see plenty of them here. Tourists that spend their money to see rocks and falls are fools, that’s all. You can’t humbug me. I’ve been in this country too long for that.”
Finally, in deep twilight, we stop at Curry Village, deep in the valley, directly beneath Glacier Point, and Half Dome hanging in the air to the east. But no time for all that now, gotta find our tent...
Every so often in our travels,we stumble across some fascinating little factoid to squirrel away like some tasty hazelnut – in the case of Sequoia, it was finding out that the General Sherman Tree, largest tree in the world, etc., etc., had once been christened the "Karl Marx Tree" – and thereby hangs a tale about the founding of Sequoia as the nation's second National Park.
In the late 1850's, the dying currents and eddies of the gold rush found their way into the remote Sierra. Individual white explorers, generally guided by natives, found the giant trees in what is now the park in 1858. (Almost all the natives would be gone by 1865, having emigrated or been killed by disease.)
After the end of the Civil War, settlers came west in large numbers; they seem to have brought with them the idea of naming the trees after people, specifically Union Army generals[1]. The General Grant tree was the first to get a name attached to it, in 1867; the General Sherman tree, in 1879.
In addition to naming the trees, there was a great deal of interest in cutting them down. Logging of the trees increased through the 1870's, eventually spurring people like John Muir to action. Muir began publicizing the threat the trees were under after a visit in 1875; George Stewart, editor of the Visalia local newspaper, began editorializing for preservation of the giant trees in the late 1870's. So, by 1880, the near-default reaction of the settling population – how do we extract something of value from this land? – began to be opposed by a new and novel reaction – we must preserve it for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. This new idea had already inspired the creation of Yellowstone, the first national park in the world, in 1872.
Into the conflict between these two attitudes came a San Franciscan lawyer, socialist, and newspaper publisher named Burnette Haskell. Haskell was strongly influenced by the utopian socialist ideas of Laurence Gronlund, and began trying to put Gronlund's ideas into effect. Under the Federal Timber and Stone Act of 1878, land deemed "unfit for farming" could be sold to U.S. citizens in 160-acre parcels, with the caveat that the land was for individual use only. The area that is now the western and central portions of the Park fell under the Act, and in 1885 Haskell and his associates were able to get 53 adjacent parcels in the Giant Forest. Once legal title was granted, the plan was for the individuals to manage the combined parcels as a cooperative unit. Abuse of the Act in this way was common, so not surprisingly the suspicions of editor George Stewart were aroused. He alerted the authorities about the potential for fraudulent use of the Act, and all the land claims in the Giant Forest area were suspended pending investigation.
Despite the legal uncertainty, in 1886 members of Haskell's group moved to the foothills west of the Giant Forest and set up the Kaweah Co-Operative Commonwealth, generally known as the "Kaweah Colony". The settlement established a sawmill and began building a logging road into the Giant Forest. They set up a school, organized musical and cultural events, established a non-monetary means of exchange, and farmed on land outside of the disputed tract. The logging road to the Giant Forest was a herculean labor, climbing 4000 feet in 18 miles, and maintaining a steady 8 percent grade throughout. At some point during this period, the Colony renamed the General Sherman Tree as the Karl Marx Tree. (It doesn't appear to be recorded anywhere if there was an Engels tree.) The road was complete by 1890, and a portable sawmill was pulled up to the edge of the Giant Forest in preparation for logging.
The activity of the colonists was a stark contrast to the languishing governmental investigation into the status of the land claims. However, George Stewart had been quite active – he had convinced his congressman to introduce legislation that would preserve a portion of the trees (but not the Giant Forest) within a park. The legislation sailed through the House and Senate, and on September 25 1890, Sequoia became the second National Park[2].
One week later, legislation creating Yosemite National Park passed and was signed into law. The Yosemite bill also, just happened, by the way, to triple the size of Sequoia National Park, and create a fourth park, "General Grant National Park", surrounding the General Grant grove northwest of the Giant Forest[3]. All the Kaweah Co-Operative Commonwealth's pending timber claims were suddenly within a national park, and the organizers facing legal action. The Cavalry was sent to patrol the new parks, as it did at Yellowstone, and the colony folded up and disappeared; the sawmills and buildings dismantled, the members drifting away. The Park Service reasserted the "General Sherman" name for the biggest tree in the Giant Forest[4][5]. Haskell apparently "died alone and embittered, addled by drink and drug, in a ramshackle cabin by the ocean on the outskirts of San Francisco."[6] The road to the Giant Forest persisted, for many years the only vehicle-accessible way into the grove, but eventually it was abandoned, and persists only as a little-used trail.
Notes:
[1]Eventually, Robert E. Lee would get one named after him, too.
[2]For the dyed-in-the-wool pedant, you could argue that it was the third National Park; see Mackinac National Park.
[3]The Southern Pacific Railroad is alleged to have helped grease the skids here; the idea being that the SPRR would not look kindly on competing timber interests.
[4]That the General Sherman tree was bigger than the General Grant, and therefore the biggest known sequoia, period, was apparently not established until the 1930's.
[5]There seems to be a persistent idea that the Kaweah Colony named the tree first, and the Park Service, in a 19th century burst of memory-holing, renamed it after General Sherman. The timing doesn't work, though; the colony didn't move into the area until the late 1880's, at least 6 years after Wolverton had already named the tree for Sherman. I think the idea had its genesis in Co-Operative Dreams: A History of the Kaweah Colony by a Mr. Jay O'Connell, probably the only book-length treatment of the whole affair. I haven't read it, though, so I'm not sure.
[6]From The Kaweah Colony: Utopia and Sequoia National Park.
References:
- The History of Kaweah Colony
- The Kaweah Colony: Utopia and Sequoia National Park
- Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks: A Chronology
- Sequoia: History
From Moro Rock we went in search of big trees. After two days of low desert driving, driving, driving, it was a wonderful sensation to be able to walk through an immense cool dappled woodland. Moro Rock is adjacent to the Giant Forest, a large grove growing out of a relatively flattish region at about 7000 feet on the north side of the canyon. I think this is the largest single concentration of sequoias in the park; there's a larger grove on Redwood Mountain in Kings Canyon National Park.
According to the Park Service, these are 2 out of a grand total of 75 groves, almost all of which are confined to the southern end of the Sierra, at altitudes between 5000 and 8000 feet. This region has the most rainfall, relatively mild winters, and an intermediate rate of naturally-occurring fire, which appears to be what the sequoias need. Unfortunately for the sequoias, conditions for them seem to have been deteriorating over the past million years or so, and they do not appear to be reproducing at a rate that will sustain the existing groves. Of course, given the lifespan of the sequoias, the existing groves may not see any noticable change for a very long time (in human terms).
Our hit-and-run approach to the parks didn't allow us as much time as we would have liked, but we were able to take some short hikes through the trees. We went to the General Sherman tree, and were faced with what I refer to as the Big Tree Photo Problem. I gave up on taking a picture. (The Problem: I've never been happy with how my pictures of sequoias and redwoods have turned out, and I think I've finally figured out why. The problem is that I've been trying to take pictures of big trees qua big trees; to document, in effect, "hey, look at this really big tree!". For the most part, though, this doesn't work – the tree is obscured by other trees; it's so large that to get it all in you end up with weird, up-the-trunk photos; it's in amongst other really big trees, so that its essential bigness gets lost, and it just looks like you took a picture of a forest, with some pretty big trees in it, losing the whoa-that's-a-big-tree effect.
Looking at images of the trees that I find appealing, I think the message is: stop trying to take pictures of trees, and take pictures of colors and shapes instead. You'll rarely get the full tree anyway, so don't even try.)
After some brief hikes in the Giant Forest area, we ate whatever spartan lunch we could throw together from the pickings at the previous day's market in Visalia, and drove back to the General Grant Grove for our last bit of tree-hiking. The parking lot photo provides a sense of scale.
On the way to the General Grant tree, we passed one of the saddest things we ran across in a National Park; the Centennial Stump, a sequoia that had been cut down so that a cross-section of the trunk could be sent to the 1876 World Exposition in Philadelphia. The entire rest of the tree, unused and decaying, stretches away along the forest floor. The crowning irony:
This "Centennial Tree" was cut for the 1876 centenary of the United States and was exhibited in Philadelphia. It was roundly derided as a "California Hoax," but, of course, was the remains of yet another sacrificed titan. The fact that its reconstruction for exhibit was so poorly done is the likely reason it could not be accepted by a curious public as having come from a single tree. Even though the end of the Civil War had brought many disillusioned soldiers west in the later 1860s and would see these selfsame veterans name many individual Giant Sequoias for their favorites generals, presidents and others, those men represented too small a segment of the American populace to convince their fellows of the reality of trees of such giant proportions.
Though the climb is only 300 feet, the vertical rise from the canyon floor to the summit is far greater, about 4000 to 4200 feet. This is the view looking southwest, down the Kaweah River canyon towards the Central Valley:
Don't know about you, but our first thought was "Oh my God, look at all that smog." We had no idea that the Central Valley was so polluted, or that the pollution would extend so far into the mountains. (Well, ok, we're only about sixteen miles from the Central Valley here.) I'm pretty sure that in the old days, you would be able to see all the way to the Coast Range from this point.
Most of the vegetation visible in the picture is the chaparral and oak associated with the Sierra foothills, though at the height of Moro Rock we are firmly within the montane forest.
Turning the opposite direction doesn't improve the view much:
Though in this case the smoke obscuring the horizon is from forest fires. They seemed pretty big, but I've been unable to find any news stories for the time period (mid-August) that might identify what fires they were.
The peaks on the horizon are part of the Great Western Divide, a grandiose name for a not-particularly-important ridgeline that separates Kings Canyon and the Kaweah River drainage from the knifeslash of Kern Canyon. Not that the peaks are slouches in any sense – they are all in the 12,000 to 13,000 foot range, high enough to block the view of Mt. Whitney, which would otherwise be near the center of the image (where it would be obscured by smoke anyway).
[1]"The Sierra Nevada is renowned throughout the world for its relatively young and absolutely beautiful granite. There is precious little granite in the Sierra. Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, El Capitan – for the most part the "granite" of the Sierra is granodiorite... [geologists] say granodiorite when they are in church and granite the rest of the week." – John McPhee, Basin and Range.
So anyway, in the morning light, we found ourselves in this place:
This gives an idea of the size of the cabin vs. the size of the expedition vehicle. Inside, the cabin had 2 double beds (with sheets), a desk, a mirror, a closet, an old and scary looking heater, and an old black and white framed photo of something or other of regional interest. The back of the door had the first bear warning, telling us to get all food and strongly-scented items out of the car and into the cabin. The cabin itself seemed pretty flimsy, but I guess the Sequoia bears just aren't that ambitious. Overall, in terms of National Park accomodations on this trip, this place gets the silver medal.
There's another cabin off in the distance on the right side of the picture, to give an idea of how the cabins are spaced. The cabins all share a communal bathroom/showerhouse, which was a lot like the cabins; quite rustic, but clean and well-maintained. All told, this was a nice place, as such things go; the other visitors were quiet and well-behaved (i.e., they kept out of our way).
The previous night, after we had eaten our cold dinner, we laid our sleeping bags on top of the made beds and crawled in without bothering to get out of our travelling clothes. The showers gave us an opportunity to get cleaned up a little.
After cleaning up and breaking camp, we headed back to the heart of Grant Grove Village to try to find some sort of breakfast and coffee.
At the "village", we were faced with what seems to be the universal and ubiquitous breakfast everywhere in Western touristy areas, the all-you-can-eat buffet. This was rarely a good deal for us, because we generally don't want a whole lot of food first thing in the morning – a good pastry and some real coffee is just fine, thank you, no scrambled eggs and bacon in a giant serving trough for us. Some places we stayed allowed us to circumvent the buffet line, but sometimes there was no other choice. Here, there was no other choice. It looked less appealing than usual, because the staff appeared to be in the process of slowly tearing the whole thing down, and by the time we got there the buffet seemed to consist entirely of a few sausage links bathed in their own grease. Nope, not gonna do it. We had enough yogurt and granola bars in the cooler to count as breakfast, but no caffeine (except for two bottles of Starbucks' Frappucino, picked up in the grocery store in Visalia for emergencies). I beseeched one bored-looking kid waiter - could we just have two coffees, pleeeease? "Sure. Whatever." M. and I sat and drank our coffees while we planned the day. The daughter looked on in arch, silent disapproval of her caffeine-addict parents.
Looking at the map in calmer and better-lit circumstances, the whole "Sequoia Natl. Park vs. Sequoia Natl. Forest" issue became clearer. Unbeknownst to me, the trip accomodation planner, the cabins we stayed in aren't in Sequoia anything, they're actually in a tiny sliver of Kings Canyon National Park. Had we been thinking, or had proper maps, we would have taken a different route into the mountains entirely (well, maybe).
Regardless, at the end of the day, we needed to be in Yosemite. That was only about 170 miles away, so we could spend the morning and early afternoon at Sequoia. We plotted, planned, inveigled more coffee. Finally, plans firm, we set off, driving back south towards the main groves of big trees.
About ten miles down the road, it suddenly occurred to us we hadn't checked out, turned in the keys, or paid the bill. Oops! Backtrack time.
We traveled on, through heat and blinding sun, past closed rest areas (Closed? Why?), the slow rise and fall of the road as we crossed one crumbling range of hills after another. Past joshua trees. Past the turnoff to Death Valley, a place we considered adding to the itinerary, but decided mid-August is not the time to go. It's a place I've always wanted to see in person, to stand in the bottom of an active rift valley that is slowly pulling the continent apart.
"Of course, all the valleys in the Great Basin are to a greater or lesser extent competing," he says. "But I'd put it where I said – right here." With a pencil he begins to rough in a double line, a swath, about fifteen miles wide. He sketches it through the axis of Death Valley and up into Nevada, and then north by northwest through Basalt and Coaldale before bending due north through Walker Lake, Fallon, and Lovelock.... The Garlock Fault runs east-west just above Los Angeles, and that could become a side of the new plate; or the spreading center could continue south through the Mojave Desert and the Salton Sea to meet the Pacific Plate in the Gulf of California.... "The Mojave sits in there with discontinued basin-and-range faulting... there has to be a transform fault at the south end of the live, expanding rift. The sea has got to get through somewhere."
– John McPhee, "Basin and Range"
The stretching and spreading of the crust in the Great Basin will eventually split the North American Plate to the extent that the ocean will come in, just as is currently happening in the Great Rift.
Eventually, we came to Barstow, CA., about in time for lunch. We went into a food-court like building that was jam-packed full of people, ordered some chinese food, and then sat at a tiny table, eating, while trying to make sense of the map. How do we get to Sequoia National Park? Our map is nearly useless, treating with dis