Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [117]
Frank meanwhile was an easy presence, cruising the tight aisles of the rustic store peering at things, comfortable with all their talk of gear and food and trailhead firewood. Charlie was pleased to see that although he was still very quiet, a tiny little smile was creasing his features as he looked at displays of beef jerky and cigarette lighters and postcards. He looked relaxed. He knew this place.
Out in the parking lot, the mountains to east and west hemmed in the evening sky, and told them they were already in the Sierras—or, to be more precise, in the space the Sierras defined, which very much included Owens Valley. To the east, the dry White Mountains were dusty orange in the sunset; to the west, the huge escarpment of the Sierra loomed over them like a stupendous serrated wall. Together the two ranges created a sense of the valley as a great roofless room.
The room could have been an exhibit in a museum, illustrating what California had looked like a century before. Around then, Los Angeles had stolen the valley’s water, as described in the movie Chinatown and elsewhere. Ironically, this had done the place a tremendous favor, by forestalling subsequent development and making it a sort of time capsule.
They drove the two cars out to the trailhead. The great escarpment fell directly from the crest of the Sierra to the floor of Owens Valley, the whole plunge of ten thousand feet right there before them—one of the biggest escarpments on the face of the planet. It formed a very complex wall, with major undulations, twists and turns, peaks and dips, buttressing ridges, and gigantic outlier masses. Every low point in the crest made for a potential pass into the back country, and many not-so-low points had also been used as cross-country passes. One of the games that Charlie’s group of friends had fallen into over the years was that of trying to cross the crest in as many places as they could. This year they were going in over Taboose Pass, “before we get too old for it,” as they said to Frank.
Taboose was one of what Troy had named the Four Bad Passes (Frank smiled to hear this). They were bad because their trailheads were all on the floor of Owens Valley, and thus about five thousand feet above sea level, while the passes on the crest, usually about ten miles away from the trailheads, were all well over eleven thousand feet high. Thus six thousand vertical feet, usually hiked on the first day, when their packs were heaviest. They had once ascended Baxter Pass, and once come down Shepherd’s Pass; only Sawmill and Taboose remained, and this year they were going to do Taboose, said to be the hardest of them all. 5,300 feet to 11,360, in seven miles.
They drove to a little car campground by Taboose Creek and found it empty, which increased their good cheer. The creek itself was almost completely dry—a bad sign, as it drained one of the larger east-side canyons. There was no snow at all to be seen up on the crest of the range, nor over on the White Mountains. Frank stuck his hand in the creek and nodded to himself. “Glacier blood,” he said.
“They’ll have to rename them the Brown Mountains,” Troy said. He was full of news of the drought that had been afflicting most of the Sierra for the last few years—a drought that was worse the farther north one went. Troy went into the Sierras a lot, and had seen the damage himself. “You won’t believe it,” he told Charlie ominously.
They partied through the sunset around a picnic table crowded with gear and beer and munchies. One of the range’s characteristic lenticular clouds formed like a spaceship over the crest and turned pale orange and pink as the evening lengthened.