A dear friend of my wife’s lives just outside San Bernardino California with her husband and son and through some last minute planning we altered our course so we could spend a night with them in the San Bernardino National Forest. The drive up the mountain was harrowing and the wife saw certain death around every curve. This is how a real man drives when towing an RV up a 6000 foot mountain. It’s called being in command!
I got impatient locals riding my tail, making sure their horns don’t need maintenance and the wife yelling to slow down and grip the damn steering wheel. Switchback after switchback after switchback, I am averaging about 25 MPH and got her on a feedback loop about the steering wheel. I thought this was supposed to be a vacation. But, hey, if that’s all she’s got, I’m golden.
The guy at the park was stunned when I told him the road we took to get there and the lady with him in the little hut said she was glad we made it. Gotta love that GPS. Can somebody tell them not everybody drives a Honda? The nice man in the hut gave me directions for an alternate route down. People in California are friendly when they’re not driving. The park was nice, the company even nicer and all in all it was a fine evening. Nobody died. It’s called being in command!
People have lived in the Yosemite Valley for at least 3000 years and there is evidence to suggest that it has been visited for perhaps 8000 years. In 1851 the United States Government established a battalion of soldiers to repress the indigenous people living in the valley. These people called themselves Ahwahneechee and they numbered about 200. For some strange reason they resisted giving up their homes to the new arrivals and as consequence were considered violent. The force sent to remove them was known as the Mariposa Battalion and now about 5 million people visit this valley every year.
About a million years ago glaciers formed on these mountains, with snow believed to have reached a depth of 4000 feet. The snow cut this valley as it moved downhill and when at last it retreated, it had cut away many streambeds, leaving some of the most impressive waterfalls on earth. Yosemite waterfall drops almost 2400 feet in three separate cascades.
I began to learn about John Muir in a copy of the Ken Burns film (that boy makes good flicker shows) on the National Parks that our daughter gave us and that we have been watching as we traveled across country. Muir is largely responsible for the transformation of Yosemite into a National Park and all around interesting man. Here is one thing he said about this part of the world.
“Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.”
I have nothing to add.
These guys get it.
During the year long planning phase for this trip, Yosemite and Big Trees were really the only things I really tried to insist on, at least as much as a married man can insist on anything. The Mariposa Grove in Yosemite was closed (just my luck) so its time to head north to Calaveras State Park and clap eyes on some Giant Sequoias.
Native peoples that called themselves Miwok populated this section of the Sierra Nevadas. They came to this area about 1000 years ago and were living here when in 1851 a guy named Augustus T. Dowd was chasing a wounded bear and stumbled on a tree whose size he could not believe. Returning to his mining camp, his buddies gave him a hard time about making stuff up until he convinced them to come and see for themselves.
The world had to know about this and the only way to prove the existence of such a tree was to cut it down, strip its bark and reconstruct it for paying customers. It took five men 22 days to cut down what is now known as the “Discovery Tree”. When felled it was 1200 years old. Almost 170 years later this is what remains.
We have all seen the pictures of these trees with cars driving through them and dwarfing small cabins, but the scale of these trees is, I think, impossible to convey with a simple photograph. 150 million years ago these types of trees covered the globe, but now they only survive in small groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Their future is in serious jeopardy.
They were common when dinosaurs roamed the west and to stand in their presence is to be in the world as it was millions of years ago. It is a humbling thing. To stand with a tree that was old when Columbus stumbled off his boat or a tree that was alive when Paul was writing to the Corinthians has a way of making you consider your perspective on things. It feels like a privilege.
I am not smart enough or wise enough or even articulate enough to convey the awe these majestic and primitive life forms inspire when you stand in their shadow. Maybe John Muir can say it for me.
“It took more than three thousand years to make some of the trees in these Western woods — trees that are still standing in perfect strength and beauty, waving and singing in the mighty forests of the Sierra. Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries … God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods… but he cannot save them from fools.”
I have nothing to add.
Off the grid for the next 8 days!
Love to All!