CHAPTER 1
Into the Mountains
There it is again, a faint, but distinct buzz. Every time my ski-tip snaps down over a bump in the snow it makes a high-pitched buzzing sound. I remove my right ski and examine it. Wooden cross-country skis will break if stressed too much. They will break just behind the tip, where the ski is thin and supple, and just as in a fine stringed musical instrument, a buzz coming from the wood means a crack. I do not see any crack or break, this is a relief for the wind is howling across Horseshoe Meadow and to stop and make a repair would be difficult.
We ski on into the blowing snow of the whiteout. After half an hour skiing head-down-into-the-wind, we reach the old cow camp log cabin at the meadow's upper end. A forest of large one-to-four-foot diameter lodgepole pine trees and glacial moraines shelter the cabin. The wind can't get to us here, but it whistles through trees on the ridge tops above. Murt Stewart, Dave Sharp and I take a break.
We had spent the night before at the old sawmill snow survey cabin three miles below Horseshoe Meadow. This cabin is built on the site of an old sawmill that supplied timbers to the Cerro Gordo silver mines in the 1870s. Made of corrugated metal, the cabin is not picturesque in itself; its beauty is the view out the front door. It lies at 9,400 feet in elevation, perched in the cove of Cottonwood Creek, high on the Sierra Nevada's eastern escarpment. The escarpment in this area rises 6,000 to 11,000 feet from the Owens Valley floor in a horizontal distance of three to five miles; over 2,000 vertical feet for each horizontal mile. My two snow survey partners Murt Stewart and Dave Sharp and I ascended this escarpment the day before, hiking and skiing up from the Owens Valley.
Looking out the sawmill cabin's door is a striking view of the Great Basin, with Telescope Peak above Death Valley prominent on the skyline. Range after range can be seen, like purple waves disappearing into the distance. On most days the view from the cabin door shows a myriad of these ranges extending well over 150 miles to the east out into Nevada: waves and crests, each wave fainter and more purple as the distance increases until the earth's curvature meets the sky. The colors are remarkable.
In her classic book, The Land of Little Rain, written in 1902, Mary Austin describes this land as the "land of lost borders." It is the southern Great Basin, and indeed, there are no natural borders out there. The land is dry and hauntingly beautiful with desolate basins and ranges; entire valleys of dunes and alkaline lake playas cover many thousand square miles between the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California and the Wasatch Mountains in Utah. The eye and mind cannot grasp the vastness. It has changed little since 1902. The names fit the geography: Saline Valley, Searles Dry Lake, Devil's Playground, Bad Water, Furnace Creek, Soda Dry Lake, Sarcobatis Flats, Death Valley. The basins and ranges go on and on and on until they merge into the horizon.
But up here in the Sierra Nevada, it is another world: a world of snow, forests, and meadows, shining peaks, deep glacial-cut valleys, clear icy streams and rivers with golden trout in them. And even now in winter, wildlife is out and about. Here there are visual boundaries and they are stunningly beautiful. The outlines of the 14,000-foot peaks are clear and crisp. Visual edges divide the land into cliffs and meadows, streams, forests and lakes.
This particular day started out with a beautiful blue sky and sparkling snow, but a line of lenticular wave clouds just east of the Sierra's crest indicated a storm front was approaching. These clouds are often accompanied by 60 to 150 mile-an-hour jet-stream winds that buffet and scour the peaks and passes.
We skied up from the old sawmill cabin to Horseshoe Meadow in calm conditions shortly after dawn; our skis were running well with a thin layer of green hard wax on their bases. Few things are more satisfying than a well-waxed ski for traveling in the mountains. There have been huge technological advances in materials for making skis in the last 40 years. Yet for this work of skiing for weeks on end, some surveyors still prefer wood skis. They glide well, hold their wax, are very light, climb well, edge well, have high tips for breaking trail through deep snow, and don't require big stiff boots. They are wonderful for telemarking down through powder or, later on in the spring, skating or striding across meadows.
By using climbing wax on skis we are not continually putting on and taking off climbing skins. In rolling terrain, or when cresting a 12,000-foot pass in high winds, we can keep going, push on over the crest and descend into the trees away from the vicious winds.
I could go on and on concerning the virtue of wood skis and climbing wax, but in this case Murt Stewart and Dave Sharp are the only sets of human ears for likely more than 3,000 square miles, and Murt is the Asnes wood ski sales representative for the west coast: it would be like the preacher talking to the choir here. I don't think Murt has ever even sold any Asnes skis except to himself, but he gets a good deal on them. Dave skies on wooden Bonna 2400 mountain skis and has for years. I have a huge quiver of wood skis at home, acquired at yard sales. My wife is disgusted when I bring home a newly-purchased pair (costing around 10 or 20 dollars.) "You couldn't wear out all the ones you have if you live to be 200!" she will say. I'll admit, I do have an addiction. Wood skis are too beautiful to pass up; they are so pleasing to the eye, so practical; they are pieces of art. Each pair has its own soul, the life and soul taken from the hickory, ash or birch trees they were made from. Their design is the work of some ancient technological genius and artist.
Today Dave, Murt and I are headed to Big Whitney Meadow over Cottonwood Pass to measure the water in the snowpack in an area of the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains referred to as the Kern Plateau.
The name Cottonwood Pass conjures up visions of beautiful, colorful cottonwood trees with leaves fluttering in a breeze; this is not so. Cottonwood Pass is named for the cottonwood trees at the mouth of its canyon 9,000-feet lower down in the Owens Valley. The pass itself is an 11,200-foot vortex, where we often need to wear our down parkas, wind parkas, wind pants, gloves, and anything else we have to keep warm, due to the vicious jet-stream winds that can funnel through the pass. This pass provides good access to the Southern Sierra's wilderness and backcountry areas.
The Kern Plateau encompasses much of the Kern River's watershed. It is more than 1,000 square miles of alpine, subalpine and forested terrain. As with the name Cottonwood Pass, the name Kern Plateau is also misleading, for there is no "plateau" as most people might picture it. The Kern Plateau is a land of 14,000-foot peaks and deep cut glacial valleys.
Splitting this "plateau" or watershed in half is a 3,000-foot-deep gorge called Kern Canyon. If its depth is measured from the surrounding peaks, which loom over the canyon, the gorge is over 7,000 feet deep, as deep as any canyon in North America. This cleft was cut by a massive glacier during the Pleistocene epoch, and runs almost perfectly straight north and south for 40 miles following the Kern Fault Line. This classic, glacially-cut gorge is large enough to be seen from space and so straight and deep we occasionally see military jets flying at treetop level down in the bottom of the canyon ... upside down. The pilots are foolish and young, of the "right stuff" metal, doing something dangerous and illegal. No radar could ever detect them in such a deep cleft, so they do it just because they can. We call this "youth." We were all there once, and with a little envy, we excuse them for such escapades.
The Kern Canyon separates two main parallel ranges in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. The easternmost range features many peaks over 14,000 feet in elevation along the Sierra's crest, including Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States at 14,495 feet. The second range, 10 to 15 miles to the west across Kern Canyon, is almost as high. Called the Great Western Divide, it has just as many spectacular peaks, lake basins and sub-ranges. The few passes leading into this upper Kern Plateau area are all rugged and high. Forester's Pass, the highest pass on the Pacific Crest Trail, at 13,200 feet, exits this area to the north. The Kern Plateau is big rugged country, so big and inaccessible we will measure snow here for years without seeing other skiers or even other ski tracks.
On these survey trips, which are 10 to 14 days in length, we measure the density and the water content of the snowpack at 22 specific "snow courses," and often cover 100 or more miles on skis each month from January to May. Forty to 60 percent of the water in California comes from the Sierra's snowpack. As with many rich agricultural valleys throughout the world, snowmelt from nearby mountains provides water for irrigation. In the southern Central Valley of California water is gold. As mentioned in the introduction, three of the counties we measure snowmelt water for, Kings, Kern and Tulare counties, taken together, grow more produce than any one country in the entire world.
At the old Horseshoe Meadow cow camp cabin, I re-examine my right ski. I flex it and allow it to snap back. No buzzing sound comes from the ski and there is no visible crack. It seems okay, but I am concerned: a broken ski can be a major problem.
Murt leads off breaking trail towards Cottonwood Pass. The lodgepole pine forest above the cabin gives way to foxtail pine at the upper elevations. We're sheltered from the wind in the dense forest and slide along the headwaters of Cottonwood Creek in a real winter wonderland. The chickaree squirrels are out, bouncing from limb to limb and scolding us as we pass. Pine marten tracks in the fresh snow indicate a chickaree hunter is on the prowl. We call them pine martens, but they are actually the American marten, cousins to the European pine marten. The chickaree squirrel (Douglas squirrel) is an athletic bundle of energy, a little gymnast. The jumps they make from tree to tree are remarkably long. These little guys need to know what jumps they can make in their territory to elude the larger, but equally gymnastic American marten, which dines on the little chickaree. The chickaree practices his longest jumps when the snow is deep and powdery; if he doesn't make his mark he simply falls into the soft powder. By the number of marten tracks in the snow, the chickarees need to have their wits about them today. Martens are in the weasel family, a family of energetic, persistent predators that include the weasels, martens, fishers, river otters, and wolverines. These American martens are ever on the move. A chickaree for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner or a midnight snack is what martens were built for, what their dreams must be made of; no deep snoring sleep for the little chickaree squirrel.
The name chickaree is fitting for their "Oui-ro, qui-ro qui, qui, qui, qui, qui, qui-ro" scolding call is loud, persistent and often just over one's head. They don't like anything in their territory and sound off with their scolding to deer, coyotes, mountain lions, owls, hawks, bears, snow surveyors and of course martens. Their scolding is a warning call to other chickarees but it also "gives away" the presence and position of other things moving through the forest. Chickarees are little newspapers, little loud shouters. Native Americans used them to locate larger game. If you are sitting somewhere eating lunch and you hear the chickaree some distance away, giving his scolding call, you can bet there is something else moving through the forest nearby.
Climbing the last 1500 feet to reach Cottonwood Pass's east side is often best negotiated up an avalanche path that is a tangle of willows in the summer or on low-snow years. Today, due to an average snowpack, it is a beautiful white rolling open slash in the mountain side. There is little avalanche danger where we stand since it hasn't snowed for two weeks and the weather has been calm and mild, but the spindrift snow blowing over the pass today is a concern. It could build quickly on the lee side in this wind and the surface layer could become unstable.
We decide to ascend the avalanche path's north side among large gnarled foxtail pines. These are remarkable trees, closely related to the bristlecone pine, the oldest known living thing on earth. Some trees here on Cottonwood Pass must be over 2000 years old.
Just under the pass we are forced to traverse an area that often avalanches. We could ski a mile north and climb another 400 feet in elevation to a notch above the main pass that never slides, but today we assess the situation and feel it is safe. There is little spindrift where we must traverse and the underlying snow is stable. We put on parkas, wind pants, and overmitts and cinch our parka hoods tight in the lee of a cliff. I am breaking trail and look back at Murt and Dave. Murt is wearing two colorful but well-blackened oven mitts for gloves. I cock my head in a questioning manner. "Quaint," I say.
He shrugs, "I forgot my gloves so I borrowed these from the Sawmill Cabin."
Well, why not. I suppose oven mitts for skiing high in the mountains the next two weeks will work just fine.
The wind has not deposited appreciable snow where we stand, but 50 feet south is a large snow "pillow". Spindrift two feet thick, has accumulated in the past few hours in a steep area under the pass. This needs to be avoided for it looks unstable and could avalanche if we were to traverse across it. Where we are standing is protected from the wind so no loose pillow has formed.
I edge out on the steep side slope and traverse above the spindrift snow pillow until I am on more level snow at the pass. For safety reasons, Dave and Murt wait in their protected spot and watch my traverse. When they see I am in a safe place they follow one by one. As we turn the corner out from behind the cliff face that has protected us from the wind, a 60 mile-per-hour blast hits us head on. With the wind chill it must be well below zero degrees Fahrenheit. We have a snow course at the pass, but it would be difficult to measure in this wind. We'll measure it in two weeks on the way back out.
Dave leads off, heading west down the narrow meadow forming the pass's notch. I am aware my right ski may have a crack and try to ski so as not to over-flex the tip. After fifteen minutes with heads down and skiing into the wind we are just above the sheltering trees when again my right ski tip buzzes as it breaks through the rock-hard wind slab snow. Damn, I was just beginning to think the buzzing had been my imagination. We reach the sheltering trees, and after a few hundred yards the wind slab turns to powder. Again, I take off the right ski and flex it. There is no sign of a crack, no buzzing when I bend it and let it snap back; okay, I think, be coy with me.
We head down a north-facing slope from the pass in powder among foxtail pines. These trees are well-spaced, like a slalom course set up in the middle of nowhere. My mind skis the slope a good hundred feet ahead, it unconsciously analyzes the snow surface and sets up turns to avoid obstacles such as low limbs and any patches of hard wind slab snow. The mind is good at this; it almost always chooses a good line to ski. Occasionally, I will consciously override my mind's auto-navigation and make a turn in a different place, and it will often get me in trouble.
