The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson

 

Source of book: I own this - a gift from my wife

 

As we come to the end of the year, looking back, I note that I have greatly enjoyed many books this year. Others have been informative but perhaps not pleasant. But I must say, despite the stiff competition, The High Sierra may very well be the most delightful book from this year’s reading. It was just a pleasure from start to finish in every possible way. 

 

First of all, Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer. I confess that I haven’t read any of his books, so I really don’t know if I would like them. Although, given his admiration for Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, as well as his clear gift of storytelling throughout this book, I suspect they are good. 

 

As I said above, my wife found this book for me. Not too long after, a friend of mine (who I first met only via a “friend of a friend of a friend” link, but ended up meeting in person for some epic hiking) also recommended it. We discussed some of the things in the book as I read it - one of the benefits of the internet in bringing people together across geography. 

 

Robinson is also an avid hiker and backpacker - one might even say borderline insane, given some of the stories in this book. The High Sierra is a recent book - published in 2022 - and covers an incredible breadth of topics in its 522 pages. It also contains a number of Robinson’s best Sierra Nevada photographs, poems by himself and others, and an extended recommended reading list. 

 

As a fellow lover of the Sierra Nevada mountains, I found Robinson’s evident love to be wholly familiar. They are indeed beautiful, and there is nothing quite like the high sierra - above the trees - anywhere else in the world, with the “just enough but not too much” glaciation that left basin after basin filled with small lakes and astonishing views. 

 

And what about those topics in the book? Well, most of the chapters are only a few pages long, so there are a lot of them. They are broken down into categories: “Geology,” “My Sierra Life,” Sierra People,” “Psychogeology,” “Names,” and so on. These are presented in no particular chronological or topical order, but presumably the one that made sense to the author as creating an arc of sorts. It works. 

 

The “My Sierra Life” chapters are all about the author’s own wanderings in the Sierra, and range from inspiring to terrifying - he has had some pretty close calls over the years with weather, although by the present time, he is thoroughly prepared. Still, he takes some risks that make me uncomfortable. But even these are fun to read, because Robinson’s writing is so evocative that you feel like you are there. 

 

The other topics suggest what the other parts of the book are like. Robinson tells the stories of a lot of Sierra explorers from John Muir to Gary Snyder (who is a friend of his - I’m jealous a bit there.) The geology sections are scientifically accurate, but also constantly tied into the emotional and visual landscape - the very opposite of dry writing.

 

In the “Names” sections, he notes the really good names in the Sierra, and advocates for changing the lousy (or even outright offensive) ones to something better. I’ll specifically note that the Matterhorn (the California version) is a terrible name for several reasons, and his proposal to rename it “Snyder-Kerouac” is perfect. 

 

Robinson also writes about his experiences in the Swiss Alps, and how they contrast with the Sierra Nevada. There are a few chapters about routes - some of which are far too crazy for me, but others of which I have actually hiked myself. And, as I mentioned, all of it is delightful to read. 

 

Scattered throughout are a lot of references to literature, writers, musicians, works of classical and pop music (Brahms 4 for the win!) and much more. Robinson is not merely educated, but has branched out into areas of knowledge outside his job and degree. For an autodidact like myself, I recognize a kindred spirit who is always learning, always exploring. 

 

I’ll just hit a few highlights along the way, but note that anyone who loves the Sierra Nevada will love this book. 

 

I’ll start with his discussion of how the mountains formed. His analysis is delightful.

 

It’s interesting to note that before the theory of plate tectonics was developed in the 1960s, no one could understand why mountains even existed. Earlier theories of orogeny, the term of that time for mountain formation, were completely lacking the basic mechanism involved, so their ideas were badly off. As Wolfgang Pauli once remarked about an incoherent theory in physics, these concepts were “not even wrong.” 

 

Here in the western US, where the bones of mountain ranges are easy to see, it seems obvious in retrospect that plate tectonics explains mountains. But my parents were literally born before scientists figured it out - this is a really modern insight, and required the ability to measure across distance and time in a way that earlier scientists could not. It is one of those true “Eureka” moments in science. 

 

Robinson is from the Boomer generation, so it is unsurprising that he experimented with psychedelics in the late 60s and early 70s. He talks about it a bit, but he found eventually that they weren’t really enhancing anything for him - in fact, he realized that two things gave him a far better high. One of which, of course, was the mountains. The other too is one I identify with greatly. 

 

Literature itself is the real psychedelic, the actual cosmic trip.

 

Robinson is a big proponent of hiking off trail. Not in the sense of cutting switchbacks or other damaging behavior, but in the sense of going places where there are no trails - hiking cross country. In the high sierra, this can be done with a minimum of damage if done right. So much of the country is just rock or decomposed rock. I myself have done this on a few occasions - coming back down from the Palisade Glacier to Sam Mack Meadow with my brother-in-law, for example, or scrambling to the top of Shell Mountain, or summiting the pass above George Lake on the flanks of Kaiser Peak. None of these are at the same level as the extended week-long trips that Robinson does a few times a year which are mostly off trail in the wilderness, but they were still fun explorations. 

 

Hiking cross-country is the true mountain walking. Trails are thin roads; only when hiking cross-country do you choose your own adventure, in every step you take. The freedom forces a certain attention to process. This is possibly true in other contexts. There are no trails at all in Miter Basin. Where every way will go, trails become unnecessary. Every hiker takes a personal route here, never repeated by anyone else. That individual route makes it your place. Your life can begin to look like that. When is it ever different? 

 

I particularly like how he compares this to life. My own journey over the last decade and a half has increasingly felt off-trail. Circumstances have led me away from organized religion, and rejection has led me away from my birth family. To a degree, these are uncharted mountains for me to navigate. I have a topo map, I suppose, and some idea of where I want to go, but I have to figure out each step as I go. 

 

I also wanted to mention another line. Robinson and I both take pictures where we hike, but we know that pictures will never truly capture what it is like. 

 

If you see a pretty photo from the Sierras, you always have to remember, it was a zillion times more beautiful than that!

 

This is truth. 

 

Robinson spends a chapter talking about Hetch Hetchy. If you want to watch a hiker fume and sputter, just mention this reservoir. Trust me. Later in the book, the author imagines a time in the future when they finally (and inevitably) remove the dam, and let the graceful canyon return to its original form. But in this earlier chapter, he talks about what was going on and why Hetch Hetchy was created. And no, it wasn’t because of need, but because of a desire to extend a middle finger to the Sierra Club and conservation movements generally. 

 

There was pushback to this new movement, a pushback that continues to this day. Unsustainable extraction continued on a huge scale. And when the Hetch Hetchy yosemite was proposed as a reservoir to hold water for San Francisco, Muir found himself right in the thick of the fight. He understood that drowning Hetch Hetchy, which was within the new boundaries of Yosemite National Park, was a deliberate attack on the idea of wilderness protection, made by people involved in all kinds of extraction industries. It was well understood even at that time that lower foothill valleys could be used to store the same amount of water as Hetch Hetchy: going after it was a strike in a war, a stab at the heart, just like today’s attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wilderness Area. 

 

Here is another line that I loved, as a regular hiker in the Sierra:

 

But maps are definitely not the territory, nor are photos. They are all small and flat. When looking at them, the verticalities of the Sierra are hard to remember. In fact you can never seem to fully recall just how up and down it is up there; in the field that tends to come as a perpetual surprise. That’s okay: you’re up there to go up and down. Or you’d better be. 

 

I had this happen earlier this fall: we hiked from Glacier Point in Yosemite to Tunnel View. Since this particular hike isn’t done the whole distance that often (from what I can tell), there is no official elevation change guide. An unofficial calculation I found after the fact showed that our 15 miles of hiking had 2300 feet up and 5100 feet down. That’s like hiking into the Grand Canyon, then halfway back up. Even “flat” looking hikes like this one have a lot of ups and downs. 

 

One account of an early hike is pretty funny. Robinson and his buddies were hiking….in blue jeans. Yeah, I used to do that as a kid, before I realized just how useless jeans are on a trail. I’m not sure I would go as far as Robinson in claiming jeans are only good in cigarette ads, but they are not particular great clothing for active exercise of any kind. They get wet, sweaty, and chafe. 

 

I have to say, the craziest and most unexpected story in the book was that of Clarence King. Perhaps if you hike the Sierras, you are familiar with the mountain named after him. It is located in the Kings Canyon wilderness, and is pretty striking. 

 

Anyway, this is one of the names that Robinson approves of. King worked on the survey of Mt. Whitney, and wrote a book about it. He hobnobbed with authors like Henry Adams and William Dean Howells, and had quite the career in government work. But that is actually the unsurprising part of the story. 

 

What IS more surprising is that he had a secret double life. One where he claimed to be Black, and lived with and had children with a Black woman in Brooklyn. And nobody found out until he confessed to his mistress by letter while on his death bed. Apparently, despite looking pretty white, nobody caught on. After all, who tries to pass for Black? At least back then, it was very rare. Crazy story. 

 

Robinson reflects on his youth quite a bit in the book. One of the lines that really stood out to me was a moment of incredible self-awareness:

 

Well, youth. White American middle-class youth, a young man, one of the most privileged people of all time, and in the 1970s. A baby boomer, in other words, part of that accidental aristocracy of all world history - the crown of creation as Grace Slick sang so memorably. 

 

Not many of my parents’ generation realize, let alone acknowledge, that they are the most privileged people in history - my dad and so many like him made 6 figures by the end of their 30s (back when today’s equivalent would be more like $250K) with a high school diploma, retired at 55 with investment real estate built on the gains that now put housing costs out of reach of my children’s generation. Robinson gets it, about this and about a lot of things. 

 

The book devotes one of the longer chapters to the women of the Sierra Club back in the early days, long before women could vote. There are plenty of names that should be better known: Helen Gompertz LeConte, Marion Parsons, and others who hiked and wrote and advocated for wilderness. As Robinson notes, from the beginning, the Sierra Club was a feminist organization, with the expectation that women could and should hike as well as men (spoiler: of course they do.) 

 

The Sierra Club as feminist organization: whether this was an accident or by Colby’s design, it was very real. Because as soon as women got into the high Sierra wilderness and did what men were doing up there, it became clear that they were just as strong as men. For many of the men, and maybe some of the women too, this was news. It wasn’t trivial news either. Recall the Victorian “cult of true womanhood,” in which middle-class women were considered creatures of the house, weak and in need of protection, their four cardinal virtues “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.” Getting out of this system for a month every year was a huge relief, even a euphoria. Women wrote in the Bulletin of “true democracy,” meaning everyone washed the dishes, no matter what their status was at home. They described the trips in rapturous terms, using words like equality and socialism and utopia with the utmost seriousness. 

 

Regular readers of the blog will know that the “cult of true womanhood,” aka “the cult of domesticity” is a real sore point for me. It is the reason my mother rejected my wife and drove her out of the family with constant antagonism. While Robinson doesn’t say it here, the other point that goes alongside “middle-class” is “white.” This Victorian belief of helplessness was applied specifically to white women of the middle or upper classes, and was part of the drive behind lynchings. In any case, the idea of men doing dishes seems less radical now, but it clearly was progressive back in the day. 

 

I want to mention a quote from Marion Parsons. She was widowed fairly young, and never remarried - instead devoting her life to mountain climbing, writing, and lobbying. And she was considered a highly effective lobbyist for the Sierra Club. Anyway, here is what she wrote about the high hiking trips in the Sierra:

 

“You make the discovery that you yourself look as queer as your neighbor. You are a Sierran by that time, body and soul, ready to find your place in the socialist’s Utopia which you inhabit for a few short weeks.”

 

Another total character in the book is Judge William Wallace. Among other things, he was a terrible mapmaker, which led to later explorers ending up lost and confused. But anyway, he was a respected judge, and didn’t feel that it was quite respectable to admit that he liked disappearing for a month or three simply to walk around the Sierras. So he made up a “copper mine” - and registered it, spent money on it, and hired people and mules. But all it was in reality was a small bit of copper-bearing rock on top of a ridge. (Part of what we call the “roof pendant” rocks - those that the granite intruded under, before most of the older rocks eroded away.) 

 

And another one: Norman Clyde. (These names are found in the Sierras, if you know where to look.) He was widowed almost immediately - she was a nurse and caught tuberculosis. He never got over it. His second marriage, so to speak, was to the Sierras. In fact, very few people even knew he was married. There is a picture of him in the book, and it is truly a window into his tortured soul. 

 

Robinson is into hiking really light, something I have never entirely embraced. (Probably because mosquitos eat me, and I am unwilling to stay overnight in the Sierras without a bear box.) Many of his solutions seem a bit cold to me, and his stories bear this out - a bad rainstorm can overwhelm a tarp used as a shelter. He does share a luxury with me, however: taking a little bit of Scotch up the mountain for sipping while watching the sunset. 

 

Another thing we agree on: neither of us likes the idea of true mountain climbing - the places a mistake gets you killed. He prefers Class 2 scrambles, which is about my comfort level as well. 

 

I really loved the chapters on names. Names fascinate me, to say the least. And the Sierra is full of some really great ones. (I love the Gorge of Despair, for example, even though I am unlikely to ever visit it.) I highly recommend Names on the Land by George R. Stewart - I read it before I started this blog, so I can’t share a review, but it is one I think people should read. 

 

In addition to renaming Matterhorn, I agree with Robinson that something needs to be done about Pioneer Basin. 

 

This basin is surrounded by four peaks named after the railroad Robber Barons. Robinson proposes two options. One is to re-name the basin Robber Baron Basin. Which is pretty funny. Or, since the four old rich dudes were really just rich fucks from the past who profited off government graft dangerous low-wage labor, maybe rename them after better people. He suggests using pioneering American female authors: Willa Cather, Edna Ferber, Zora Neale Hurston, and Edith Wharton. Yeah, that would be pretty cool. 

 

Considering how accurate most of the book is, I was kind of startled to find an obvious error (which I suspect Robinson would see instantly as well.) For some reason, in the chapter on trailheads on the west side of the range, in describing Mineral King, he accidentally reverses the direction for Farewell Gap, placing it to the north along with Timber Gap, rather than the south. Since I have hiked both of those gaps, I know full well where they are. I’m thinking this was a brain fart that wasn’t caught in the proofs. 

 

I am thrilled that Robinson also decided to take on the question of racist figures of the past and the features named after them. Louis Agassiz, for all his work on glaciation and ice ages, was one of the founders of the “scientific racism” movement - the belief that white skinned people were the most highly evolved species. And, of course guys like Joseph LeConte Sr., who was a Confederate and enslaver. (Not to be confused with his son Joe Jr., who was both a true Sierra pioneer and a decent person with progressive political views.) Locally, I can see (on a clear day) from my house, Breckenridge Mountain, which is actually listed as a local Confederate monument. It was named after (but misspelled) John Breckinridge, the last Vice President before the Civil War - who turned Confederate traitor thereafter. I’m definitely hoping that as part of California’s renaming project - removing racial slurs and horrible people from our place names - this one goes. If I had my way, I’d name it after local conservationist and teacher Ardis Walker. 

 

As part of this chapter about the bad sorts, Robinson also does something necessary, which is to address the question of John Muir. Unfortunately, much has been said against him as of late, claiming he was a white supremacist (not really) or even that he advocated for the removal of Native Americans from their land (totally false.) Robinson specifically addresses this, having read all of Muir’s published work, as well as his unpublished writings at the University of the Pacific. He categorically denies that Muir ever said this, and I agree with him that this was either a conflation with another Sierra Club founder (who was racist) or something just made up. 

 

Robinson also addresses the fact that in places in his writing, Muir will say derogatory things about individual Native Americans he meets. But also notes that Muir wrote far harsher things about specific white people - miners, ranchers, loggers. Once you look at the context of the uncomplimentary statements, they really don’t look racially motivated or driven. I’ve read Muir as well, so I get what Robinson is talking about. This particular Native American keeps insisting I have alcohol or tobacco to give him. (Muir had neither.) Just as an obvious example. 

 

More than the context, though, is the uncontestable fact that Muir literally advocated against the Native American removals, calling it a “mean and brutal” policy and said those who advocated for it or carried it out should be ashamed of themselves. Seriously, this is the kind of standing up against racism that we should all aspire to. (And it is one of the reasons I am estranged from my parents - I stood up to my dad’s racism and he couldn’t take it.) 

 

I understand the controversy over Muir - so much ink has been spilled about it, but my own view is that we should stop automatically assuming that certain luminaries of the past were white supremacists without examining what they said and did in context and in the context of their times. (I wrote a bit about this once…) Acknowledge the bad, but don't throw away the good. For me, this is similar to dismissing Mark Twain because of his early toxic writing about Native Americans, without the context of his later writings showing his positive change and growth.

 

Speaking of white guys who actually try to be decent people, Robinson remains on the side of decency throughout the book. From time to time, this comes out in how he talks about people. Gary Snyder gets a chapter, and he deserves it for so many reasons. But one of the most interesting is the influence he had on Robinson. 

 

For Robinson, when he was an aspiring writer, he was drawn to women like Ursula Le Guin, becoming a feminist as a result. But he also noted that it was difficult to find male role models - the post-war generation was…problematic. But then there was Snyder, unafraid to be vulnerable, kind to women, sensitive to nature. And so, Snyder became Robinson’s role model, and eventual friend. This passage is fascinating.

 

What stuck out about the various men writers, scattered like ninepins over the social landscape, was alcohol. Alcohol, and the bluster of the dominance battle to be alpha male in various forms: the Great American Novelist, the biggest bestseller, the most famous TV celebrity. One could be excused for thinking that being an American male writer was predicated on drinking a lot and treating women badly. How else to be a great writer? Even the ones who found jobs in postwar academia tended to be like that. 

 

I also want to mention Thoreau, and a rather peculiar bit in Thoreau’s journal. In it, he describes a dream he had of hiking above the treeline, something he had never done. Robinson quotes a bit and notes that it actually perfectly describes places in the Sierra. Which is….interesting. Was this some sort of a vision, one wonders? It’s not like he could just pull it up on Google. 

 

Thoreau led to Muir, of course, making Thoreau in so many ways the father of American conservationism. Robinson makes a cogent plea for the rest of us to follow in their footsteps, to preserve - and indeed expand - the wilderness. And to recognize that we are part of nature, tied to it with inseparable bonds, and dependent on our preservation of the natural world for our own survival. It’s an excellent book, perfect for slow browsing and musing. It also makes me want to go hike…just as soon as I get through the December madness that we musicians have every year.