Breathe The Mountains: First Day of The Rae Lakes Loop

After Mount Whitney, Andrew and I headed north to Onion Valley in Sequoia National Park near Independence, California. We planned a four-day loop around the scenic Rae Lakes within the alpine forests and mountain passes, a loop that would include a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail. Coming at the loop from Kearsarge Pass, it would be just about 50 miles of hiking. This post is from the first day of the trip.

Descending to the valley

The snow-covered peaks were already hidden, swallowed up by the swirling clouds and flakes.

 We had come down from that storm. As Andrew and I trudged down from the snowy 12,000-foot Kearsarge Pass in the Sierras, the deep drifts gave way to intermittent patches; gnarled scrub-pine grew up into towering groves of sequoias emerging from the mists below us. Snowmelt from on high ran through the rocks, splashed down into rich blankets of moss, thundered over cliffs in an ivory train of falls. The muddy earth sloshed over my boots.

I came to an edge of a lookout above the falls and I just had to stop.

Mine was the infantile appreciation of someone seeing something much greater, magnetic and beautiful. The beauty was life.

Twin sequoias of equal height stood like sentries before the trail, guarding the entry to a larger grove. The trees in that private valley grew up straight and sure of themselves with ancient strength. Frogs gulped to one another and wind rustled in the branches. A shift in the breeze might part the mists and suddenly reveal a rocky spine of one of the peaks overhead rimmed by an orange glow as it reflected the late-day light. As for other human beings, there was neither sight nor sound.

Gnarled tree on Kearsarge Pass

How could I express the thrill of seeing this, the stupefying awe and say it with something more meaningful than, “Holy shit, that’s beautiful?”

These are the moments of appreciation that I feel inside my cells, soaked in an animal instinct that recognizes the importance of a place. The feeling requires me to look beyond my immediate goals and meditate on how my life is connected to the life around me, which provides not only air and sustenance, but a spiritual nourishment as well.

Oneness with Nature is not the term I would use to describe the experience because I know that I could have stood on the ledge forever and only understood a tiny fraction of the valley in front of me. No, the valley was not there for my benefit. My passage through it was of little consequence.

This is right, I thought. I don’t even have to prove it. 

It wasn’t an opinion; the feeling was as fundamental as the need to eat, at the same time it was fantastic, unknowable and overwhelming. The valley was indisputable — truth and beauty rolled into one.

Like someone at the door of a cathedral, I felt some need to humble myself. There would be strength, not weakness, in that humility because it meant coming to terms with my small stature amongst the immensity around me.

While some might identify this feeling as proof that there is a human need to connect to a singular Almighty, I prefer to let nature stand for itself. Why limit the mystery of the life around me by viewing it through the lens of religion, which has already told me that the purpose of everything is to serve God — if not humans.

I can accept that biology has hardwired us to appreciate valleys like this because they remind us of places where we once expected to find food, shelter and mates. Knowing this does not diminish my ability to appreciate beauty when I see it or suppress my desire to express my appreciation.

Though such feeling may be profound, it is also temporary. It saddened me a little to think that soon enough I would forget exactly what the valley meant to me, and that I would have to direct my attention to more immediate, less transcendental concerns (getting dry socks on, finding a place off the trail where I could dig a hole and crap.)

Writing and photos can only grab a slice of how it feels to be in a place. It is a useful exercise, but does not capture the experience of standing in that place with boots on the rocks, staring at it all with my own eyes. Hence, there is the need to journey out again and reconnect.

The very elusiveness of that feeling is what gave it its emotional power. I would not be here long so I didn’t have the luxury of taking it for granted.

Not a bad model for living life itself:

Look out. Breathe in. Keep moving.

View from camp West of Kearsarge