Authors: Ellen Meloy
At these elevations, the zone of oaks and mixed conifers, creeks glide rather than rush. Minnow noses break the surface of pools under tangled willows, and even the rocks smell green and sweet. Along the water borders, wild ginger and miner's lettuce grow in dense mats.
At camps and cabins, mountain people made small adjustments, rather than bemoaned the lack of amenities. At one of my homes in the farthest reaches of backcountry, my “refrigerator” was a low hand-built stone cave beside a stream. Gravity and a short pipe diverted flow from the stream over the roof of the cave, cooling the fruit, milk, and other food inside. Moss covered the stone with a spongy green cap.
In camp, Mark stashes a bottle of wine in the creek to chill. He rejects my proposal to eat acorn-meal hardtack for dinner. We, too, are slaves to vehicle, cooler, and imported groceries. I brush off a thick layer of pine needles and pollen from the rickety picnic table and set up the two-burner camp stove. Stellar's jays bring splashes of deep blue to the feathery green pine boughs. They are noisy with glooks and a cry that sounds like a squeaky wheelbarrow.
Before dinner, we hike up the creek through a quiet ponderosa forest, following fresh bear tracks to a lush meadow ringed by low peaks and an approaching thunderstorm. Cattails surround a small pond, staked out by male redwing blackbirds, their epaulets bright crimson with breeding season plumage.
For a century and a half, these California mountains have been heavily mined for ore, timber, pasture, water, and recreational pleasure. Undoubtedly, livestock grazed in this meadow for many seasons; it is within reach of a rancher's seasonal use. Yet the meadow has all the signs of vegetation recovery: grass up to the waist, diverse wildflowers, no cow tracks, no corrals. To have this meadow entirely to ourselves feels strangely luxurious. Why aren't we whining about crowds and devastation?
The thunderstorm moves in quickly and chases us back to camp. Its first drops send up small clouds of dust as they hit the trail. Bear tracks now overlay the boot tracks we made on our ascent.
For years, too long ago to admit without nostalgic incantations, I lived in the southern Sierra Nevada. I lived there in times of fewer bears and a younger, thoughtless, agile grace. These mountains hold memories of my life held close to the flame. These mountains are family homelands, where homesteading ancestors ranched and ran livestock from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.
California sheep men—John Muir called them “muttoneers”— once used the western flank of the Sierra from Yosemite south to the sequoia country for seasonal pasture. In the public domain, this open range was exploited freely and thought to be inexhaustible.
My great-great-great-grandfather summered his flocks in the high country meadows west of Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Sierra cordillera. His herders were likely Mexican or Paiute, Yokuts, or Tubatulabal, possibly Basque as well. Sierra shepherds formed a distinct rural culture: independent and resourceful, knowledgeable about weather and predators, about mountain passes and plant foods in the next meadow up the slopes, the camps of rest, the creeks that watered the flock after a hard drive. Their job was to make mutton and fleece.
The family muttoneers likely set fires to stimulate forage and clear obstacles for free movement of stock, a common practice at the time. Their sheep grazed five-mile-long meadows and crowded along creeks that were home to golden trout. Their flocks may have been among the earliest wave of domestic sheep to fatally infect native bighorn sheep.
A bighorn sheep band south of the family terrain, unusual for its subalpine habitat and homeland on the far west side of the Sierra's divide, disappeared in the 1870s, victims of a scabies die-off likely related to domestic sheep.
Severe overgrazing exhausted the High Sierra's lush montane meadows. “The sod and verdure are gone—eaten and trodden,” noted a visitor as early as 1885, and “gravel is now ascendant.” By
the early 1900s, in response to widespread range degradation and pressure from cattlemen anxious to use the seasonal pastures for their own herbivores, sheep were excluded from the area. (My family, too, turned from sheep and shepherds to cattle, cow camps, and cowboys.) With the creation of forest reserves and grazing allotments, the federal government took a greater interest in managing the Sierra's public lands.
In my own California days, I frequently hiked that homeland with no awareness whatsoever of its lost native sheep. Their demise and displacement had, after all, been set against the prosperity of miners, loggers, and ranchers like my own family, whose livelihood put food on the table and progress on the agenda.
What kept the idea of wildlife conservation possible during my trekking era was partly attributable to continuing change in the paradigms of land use. A synthetic fleece rather than a wool jacket kept me warm while I read Durrell in camp at night. Brown rice, not lamb chops, simmered in the pot. Muttoneering was out; backpacking was in. So many lovers of the Sierra wanted to bring back the native fauna.
Skulls, historic records, and habitat characteristics give clues to the range once occupied by bighorns in bands along the Sierra's crest and east slope. Of seventeen populations, only nine made it to the twentieth century. By 1948, nine bands dropped to five. By the late 1970s, there were about 250 bighorns in two remote areas on the southern end of the mountain range. A moratorium had prohibited hunting since 1878. Beginning in 1972, the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service imposed sanctuary protections to reduce human disturbance.
The extant native sheep lived high on the Sierra's spectacular east scarp. In the early 1980s, their numbers were increasing. Under newly hatched recovery plans, wildlife biologists used stock from these growing populations to restore bighorn sheep to three other historic ranges, bringing today's wild-sheep areas
to five. After the reintroductions, Sierra-wide sheep numbers continued to increase.
The animals lived fat and happy on intact, albeit patchy, habitat almost entirely within public lands—rocky, steep, glacier-carved, clear-air country with broad vistas and sheer cliffs of sheep-perfect escape terrain. The hordes of hikers largely respected sanctuary boundaries and regulations. Wildlife agencies worked with stockgrowers to prevent disastrous interactions between domestic and wild sheep. Poaching was practically nonexistent. The 1986 census for bighorn sheep in the Sierra came in at about 310.
In 1995, they numbered only about a hundred—in decline, imperiled, and isolated in bands with, in some cases, an alarming paucity of ewes. The sheep population was collapsing. In early 2000, the federal government officially listed Ovis canadensis cali-forniana in the Sierra Nevada as an endangered species.
I have brought the love of my life to a steep slope of granite and foxtail pines. We climbed to these heights along creeks as clear as pain, through patches of pennyroyal that left the scent of mint on our fingertips as we brushed them in passing. The air is thin—we are more than eleven thousand feet above the Pacific—and we have held in our palms glassy chips of jet black obsidian left by Paiute hunters.
The color of the bedrock is engraved in my heart, pale beige in certain light, blue-gray when the light changes. Warm sun on dust and pine needles is the aroma of my bloodlines in these mountains. These slender foxtail pines stand as spare and formal as trees in a Japanese painting, their branches short reaches of green-black needles, their bark a rich cinnamon. The ground beneath our feet is a massive two-mile-high wall of beveled granite, the Sierra's eastern scarp rising above the Great Basin. These mountains are the land's attempt at flight.
Above us, cerulean lakes lie against the rocky headwalls of
alpine cirques—earlier Mark and I hiked up to them and back down to the foxtail trail again—and meadows of emerald sedges, scarlet shooting stars, and gentians with dense blue blossoms. The creeks fall through boulder-strewn gorges so narrow that you could leap over them if they were not so vertical. The cascades have the fresh clarity of glaciers and auras of violet spray.
Somewhere on the cliffs near the timberline are wild sheep on their summer range. We hiked up the mountainside to find them, but I do not care that we didn't. I am here, I think, to speak without words, to tell my Montana-born husband, a man with his own blood mountains, something about the Range of Light. How it strips away the veils of revelation, leaving a purity of image and sensation. How it taught me how to pay attention.
The high passes hold my family ghosts. This is the only land that could make me move away from the redrock desert without fatal heartbreak. These mountains, that desert, coincidentally the homelands of the wild animals that have kept me in thrall all year, are responsible for my nature and its consequences. For few other places is yearning worthy.
The late-afternoon light comes from the bedrock, from within the mountains themselves, pouring amber from granite and dust, wicking up through the trunks and out the branches of the foxtail pines. With apologies to photons and physics, there is no other explanation. Whatever creates this radiance, it is enough simply to breathe it.
We make our way down the steep trail until it switchbacks through the pennyroyal and manzanita and scattered stands of lodgepole pine. Below us, the land becomes drier and drier, with fields of sage and shadscale giving way to the summer brown floor of the desert valley. I remember the story of a pioneer woman from Missouri who hated this rough, arid country so much, each day she walked out of sight of her family and into the rough brush and wept over the lack of green.
As we descend, the shadow of the Sierra traverses the Owens
Valley below us and begins to creep up the stark tawny slopes of the White Mountains on the other side. The shadow is nearly twenty miles across. I once tried to walk on the lip of that shadow as it moved from the abrupt base of the mountains across sagebrush flats, wondering what I would do when I had to slow down for fences, roads, sandy playas, and the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which siphons the eastern Sierra runoff into the city so far south. The shadow moved more quickly than I could. It sped across the bajadas with day's end behind it. Its edge flew over me.
John Muir, conservation godfather, peripatetic mountaineer, rider of storm winds from atop a swaying Douglas fir, devoted an entire chapter of his 1894 book, The Mountains of California, to the Sierra Nevada bighorns. He recognized that human activities had usurped wildlife habitat in the valleys and foothills on the Sierra's west slope. But, he wrote, the wild sheep had “little to fear in the remote solitudes of the High Sierras.” Their alpine highlands, he assured his readers, their “rocky security,” would keep them safe.
In the late 1860s, Muir built a cabin in what is now Yosemite National Park. He made a bed of cedar boughs and let a piece of Yosemite Creek flow along a ditch in the cabin floor. Frogs sang inside and he coaxed ferns through the floor under his window.
Muir had worked in the Sierra as a shepherd, though he would infamously condemn his flocks, all Sierra Nevada flocks, as “hoofed locusts.” To a domestic sheep, Muir was not kind. He called it “a dull bundle of something only half alive” and “only a fraction of an animal, a whole flock being required to form an individual.”
In contrast to this portrait, Muir gave “Nature's sheep” otherworldly nobility. The bighorns’ agility and grace stunned him, purpled his prose, lured him to lofty heights to watch their as-
cents on craggy walls. To understand the design of such a creature, he wrote, you had to understand the rocks.
Like others, Muir passed on those strange descriptions of bighorns leaping off cliffs headfirst. Although his accounts were secondhand, he relayed the feat of rams diving off precipices and landing on their horns. He clobbered a found skull with his ice ax and declared it nearly impossible to crack. Another witness told Muir about watching a group of sheep jump off the brink of a 150-foot-high cliff. The sheep landed right side up, his informant said. “They just sailed right off.”
Like the desert's Blue Door Band, the Sierra Nevada sheep are loyal homebodies. Moreover, within the evolutionary fortress of home lies a strong fidelity to seasonal migration. Like good little Ovis, they vary their diet and location to take advantage of the most nutritious food available at any particular time.
Vegetation on their ramparts above the desert changes by elevation and season, drawing distinct food lines. Ecologically speaking, munching your way the two miles straight up from foothills to alpine fields would be like munching your way from Dirty Socks Spring, on the Owens Valley flats, thousands of miles north to the Arctic tundra.
During this time of year—late summer—the sheep stay in the rarefied air of the highest rock. They stared down at the tops of our heads as we rested among the foxtail pines near the timber-line. They avoid patches of willow and forest and shrub-choked draws, where visibility is poor and predators might succeed. Because the snowfields retreat late in spring and take the first storms of the fall, the plant season at these high altitudes is brief.
In winter, the sheep migrate down the mountainsides to windswept ridges and exposed, often south-facing slopes. Some of the lowest elevations—the Great Basin's grass and scrub zone—offer
the richest diet and broadest vistas. Bitter cold and deep snow are avoided, although the risk of predation is high. The lower elevations provide good seasonal sheep range. Here the Sierra bands winter.
Of all the bighorn sheep biologists I have met, the shepherd of the Sierra flocks is the most migratory. He, too, moves up and down the mountains with these wild animals and has done so for nearly thirty years. He believes that animal is place; where sheep are tells a great deal about who they are. Much of what you would want to know about bighorns in the Range of Light can be traced to the work of Dr. John Wehausen and his colleagues.
Wehausen, a researcher at the University of California's White Mountain Research Station in the Owens Valley, is a quintessential field geek. His tall frame is lean from hiking and his mind is on everything from mitochondrial DNA and plant-digestibility indexes to the dynamics of rapid extinction and reluctant colonization.