That’s from a solid LA Times story about what just happened, published on Christmas. But it overlooks an underlying reality.

It so happens a geologist wrote up an analysis of Wrightwood, geologically and topographically, years ago. Turns out to be no mystery why a debris flow came through the town in these December storms. Not only was Wrightwood built atop the San Andreas Fault, but the town is also downhill from a geologically famous natural hazard. It’s a huge deposit of a loose rock that has encourages mudflows in the area for at least the last five centuries, and is even visible from space!

A geologist and professor named Garry Hayes explains on his blog, called Geotripper.

Friday, December 26, 2025

Revisiting the Wrightwood Mudflows of Ages Past: That Slope Won’t Be a Problem Will It?

Like many others, I’ve been astonished by the storms of the last few days and the effects across all of California and the Pacific Northwest. It’s not quite over, and if you are in one of the danger zones, listen to the emergency workers. They know what they are doing. 

I’ve been especially attentive to the stories coming out of Wrightwood in Southern California. It’s been a well-known trouble spot for many years. Back in 2013, I paid a visit and had a look at the geological conditions that have plagued the area. What follows was posted in March of 2013.

You learn something new everyday. At least I hope you do. I learned something astounding revealed by satellite imagery of the Mojave Desert.

We were headed home a week or two ago, and were taking a “short cut” along the San Andreas fault in Lone Pine Canyon and through the town of Wrightwood. That’s right, “through” the town. The village is built on top of the San Andreas! But that’s not what I learned. I’ve known of the close proximity of the fault and the town for years.

It had something to do with the town’s other famous natural hazard: the Wrightwood mudflow. There is a slope south of the town heading at an elevation of more than 8,000 feet composed of deeply weathered and crushed Pelona Schist. As can be seen in the picture below, the slope is so steep that trees and shrubs can’t gain a roothold, and failures are constant, especially during the spring snowmelt and during heavy rainstorms.

The Pelona schist formed in the accretionary wedge of the subduction zone that lay off the California coast during the Mesozoic Era, and as such may be similar to the Franciscan Complex farther to the north. It is an attractive muscovite mica quartz albite schist in hand samples, but it doesn’t do well on steep slopes.

We passed several channels that were clearly designed to send the flows through town without causing further damage.

In May of 1941, just over a million cubic yards of mud and boulders flowed down Heath Canyon and into the town of Wrightwood, damaging and burying a number of structures. No deaths or injuries were reported. The immediate cause was the rapid melting and runoff of the heavy snowpack during a period of unseasonably warm temperatures. Surges of mud continued for a week. Other damaging mudflows occurred in 1969 and 2004. [for more, see Hayes’ post].

Blogging is an almost-lost media art, but still can be hugely informative.

[This first image comes from the story in the winter issue of the magazine, as linked above, and has a slightly different tone and fewer pictures than this blogger’s version of the same story. FYI. Bloggers need not worry about column inches.]

As I plod at first light up the legendarily difficult “Golden Staircase” towards Mather Pass, panting, pushing down on my hiking poles for a little extra oomph, with five miles and thousands of feet still to go to reach the crest, I wonder what in the world has come over me. 

What kind of spirit is this? What has possessed me to try this — at seventy? 

In my chest I feel my heart pound. A fiery ache fills my watery legs.  Every few minutes I look around for a flat-topped boulder on which to sit, rest the weight of the pack, catch my breath, let my thudding pulse slow. I stop often this way, to nod and smile perhaps a little wryly at the occasional younger backpackers who pass me by. 

I blame John Muir. Were it not for Muir; for his captivating adventures, for his inspiring and oft-quoted words about his beloved “Range of Light,” I wouldn’t be here. Trying to walk 212 utterly exhausting miles through the High Sierra — in smoke. 

The Sierra National Forest, fifty miles to the south, was on fire. And for that too — some say — John Muir is to blame.

I flashback forty years. With my young family — a thirtysomething partner and a twosomething child — I visit a tiny luggage store next to the Vista Theater in Los Angeles to buy a suitcase for a trip. On a high shelf behind the sole proprietor stands a dozen or so travel books for exotic and pricey vacation locales, including one wildly out of place — “My First Summer in the Sierra,” by John Muir. I buy it on impulse, remembering a handful of blissful times in my youth in the mountains. Upon reading I find myself plunged into the raw beauty of the Sierra once again. A different,  wilder life awaits me. If I want it. I search out more of Muir’s writing and hear the mountains calling him. I hear that call too. 

“Camp out among the grass and gentians of glacier meadows, in craggy garden nooks full of Nature’s darlings. Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,” Muir wrote in 1898. “Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” 

Living in smoggy, chaotic, traffic-choked Los Angeles in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I needed that natural peace. Eventually I went to the mountains to look for it, even walking the JMT in a heavy snow year in 1995, thirty years ago. As countless others go to the mountains today, perhaps equally “over-civilized,” people who find they need wildness and beauty and adventure in their lives, (And as did countless others in the late 19th century, about as many women as men, who united to form the Sierra Club, which Muir launched in 1892 “to explore, enjoy, and protect wild places.”)

So perhaps I should credit John Muir and his allies. Had they not spent decades expanding the national parks and forests, building trails, blocking planned roads through the mountains, expanding forest protections, the John Muir Trail, or JMT, wouldn’t be here. Exhausting me. 

Flash back a few days, to September 3. With a friend from days spent on the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails, I head south from Tuolumne Meadows. We’re left gasping in the thin air on the first steep climb, but a night later recover under a full moon by Thousand-Island Lake. 

After four days and a stay at a hiker’s cabin in funky-but-friendly Red’s Meadow — about fifty miles south of Yosemite — we turn up the JMT again, energized but troubled by reports of a major fire fifty miles to the south. Dingy blue-grey wisps of smoke hang in the trees. 

The smoke came from the Garnet Fire, which — following lightning strikes — had broken out a little over two weeks before in Sierran forests east of Fresno. The fire burned for almost a month with catastrophic intensity, consuming about 60,000 mostly uninhabited acres of old growth forest. This is the sort of forest fire which some experts blame on, yes, John Muir. 

DID MUIR”S VISION OF WILDERNESS BRING ENORMOUS FIRE TO THE SIERRA? 

“To solve the wildfire crisis, we have to let the myth of “the wild” die,” was the headline on a story in August in the L.A. Times by reporter Noah Haggerty. In a story published just days before the Garnet Fire broke out, Haggerty wrote that “Muir sold the president [Teddy Roosevelt] on a uniquely American myth of the wilderness — that if we work hard enough to isolate public lands from our influence, we can preserve a landscape essentially “untouched” by man.” 

Haggerty in his news story interviewed fire ecologists and indigenous fire experts working to bring beneficial “good fire” back to Sierran forests. The idea is to reduce fuel for wildfires to prevent an all-consuming wildfire. The Garnet Fire is the sort of inferno that has destroyed millions of acres of forest in California in the last five years, in dozens of uncontrollable fires, many of them — such as the Camp Fire that killed 85 people in Paradise — lethal. 

Muir in 1903 on a famous camping trip in Yosemite with Teddy Roosevelt convinced the President to put Yosemite under federal protection. With this protection came a vision of wilderness untouched by man, implicitly (if unwittingly) excluding the first peoples who lived there. This prevented native peoples from “tending the wild” with frequent low-intensity fires, all but guaranteeing the destruction of forests, when the suppressed fires came the next time. 

“The single most important reason mentioned by Native American elders when asked why their ancestors burned the Sierra Nevada was to keep the underbrush down to prevent a large, devastating fire,” writes M. Kat Anderson, a leading researcher of indigenous land-management techniques used in the Sierra. In a report to Congress in 1996, she documents that in the 500 years before 1800, as many as 100,000 Indians lived in the Sierra, and the burning, tilling, seeding and other tools used by residents in over 2500 native villages had an enormous and beneficial impact, making forests sustainable, as they cannot be if left entirely untouched.

It’s a powerful critique of Muir’s vision of a wilderness untouched by man. It’s a fact that Muir’s desire to protect forests from man — and loggers — shaped Teddy Roosevelt’s thinking about public lands. It’s true that Muir’s idea of “the wild” as a place apart from man proved short-sighted, because it assumed that Sierran forests would not need tending.

But it’s also true that the federal government didn’t take control of the management of Sierran forests for many decades after the Gold Rush, well into the 20th century for most such forests, and long after — tragically — the native peoples, such as the Yokuts and the Mono that “tended the wild” in Sierran forests had been decimated. 

Fire ecologists know what happened in the forests that burned in the Garnet Fire because in these Sierra National Forest lands stands the Teakettle Experimental Forest, a block of about 3000 acres used for the past century to study and test forest management techniques. A meticulous fire scar study of the Teakettle forest showed that before 1865, fires in the Teakettle were frequent, occurring in the range of every 11-17 years, presumably started by native peoples. No major fire occurred after 1865 was detected when the study was conducted — none until this year.

Muir has been blamed for many sins, including racist remarks about people of color in his early years, even if he argued forcefully and at length against the eradication of Indians (when that was California state policy — a $5 bounty for Indian scalps –in the19th-century). One can blame him for not realizing that the “gentle wilderness” he so admired in the Sierra forests was the work of the first peoples, and needed their tending. Yet when indigenous “good fire” in the Sierra National Forest came to an end, Muir was working as a young inventor in a broom factory in Ontario, Canada. He had yet to even see California. He had nothing to do with the decimation of the 90,000 first peoples who lived for centuries in Sierran forests, a great number of whom were felled by European diseases in the 1830’s. To blame John Muir for the genocide of California tribes, not to mention for forest management policy a hundred years after his death, makes little sense. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of “The Sierra Nevada: A Love Letter,” has come to Muir’s defense, with several other California writers. He points out that Muir never advocated for the removal of native peoples from the land in anything he wrote, even in unpublished letters or journals. Further, exploring coastal mountains in Alaska in later years, Muir lived for a time with the Tlingit people. As a child Muir had been nearly worked to death by his father,and often beaten. For that reason he greatly admired the respect these people showed their children.  

“I have never yet seen a child ill-used even to the extent of an angry word,” Muir wrote. “Scolding, so common a curse of the degraded Christian countries, is not known here at all. But on the contrary the young are fondled and indulged without being spoiled.”

Regarding the Garnet Fire, Matthew Hurteau, a fire ecologist, published in early September an impassioned piece called Eulogy for the Teakettle, in which he mourned the loss of the grand old growth forest to which he had devoted two decades worth of his work and life. The tragedy for Hurteau — and the Sierra National Forest — is that he and his colleagues over several years put together a treatment plan to reduce the risk of a catastrophic fire in a large and ancient forest.

Despite bureaucratic opposition, a government shutdown, and management changes, in 2018 they won a $896.000 CalFire grant for prescribed burns for most of the 3,000-acre old growth Teakettle forest. These treatments were meant to save the forest. After countless delays, they were scheduled to begin in the fall. 

“I cried on September 1,” wrote Hurteau. “I am sad and angry. I am sad because this old-growth forest is no more. I am angry because this outcome was a choice. The choice was inaction by forest “leadership.” They chose doing nothing instead of working to prepare these incredible trees that are hundreds of years old and some as much as 9 feet in diameter.” 

I had read reporter Haggerty’s accusatory piece in the L.A. Times before I started on the JMT. Although most analysts don’t blame Muir for the “Smokey Bear” policy of fire suppression — which became official Forest Service policy after WWII —  it’s widely accepted among foresters that this policy has failed. In 2007, two researchers with the USDA (which oversees the Forest Service) published a white paper called “Be Careful What You WIsh For: the Legacy of Smokey Bear,” pointing out that “the long-standing policy of aggressive wildfire suppression has contributed to a decline in forest health, an increase in fuel loads in some forests, and wildfires that are more difficult and expensive to control.”

Still, the possibility that my hero — the man whose signature I had tattooed into the inside of my forearm — could have even inadvertently caused such ruin unsettled me. Would these fires spoil the Sierra? Would I come to dread this trail?

Lose faith in Muir?

I walked southbound, a little more hesitantly, towards Evolution Valley, I had in mind what a Hawaiian-shirted backpacker told me when we encountered him and a friend on the trail. They were heading out, cutting their trip short, and he told me why. 

“I don’t want to have to see Evolution Valley in smoke,” he said. “I don’t want to remember it that way.”

Days later I reached the famously beautiful Evolution Valley. The valley, as paradisical as any in the Sierra, was shadowed by orangeish clouds flowing into the valley and building up against the peaks. Blessedly, these same clouds that night brought rain, washing the air.

The precipitation resumed late the next day, as I panted my way up out of Evolution Valley to Evolution Basin, a thousand feet higher, but this time it came as hail and hardened snow. I hastily put up the tent. After a freezing night, the air at dawn could not have been cleaner. The grand views went on and on and into memory.

The renovated Muir Hut atop Muir Pass serves as a portal to the higher and much more challenging JMT in the Southern Sierra. Each of the next five 12,000-foot passes on the southern JMT took me a half day or more to climb, and as I made my way slowly up the switchbacks, I forgot my worries about smoke. In their long history, these rocky mounts have seen far worse — ice ages, avalanches, monumental floods — and recovered every time.

“By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs — now a flood of fire, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life,” wrote Muir, about Mt Shasta.

He could easily have been describing the timelessness of the Sierra. A few days of smoke cannot ruin these mountains, any more than a few crashing waves can ruin a beach. 

I headed up the all-but-endless climb up the Golden Staircase, a path that steepens pitilessly towards the top of the glacial canyon and Mather Pass. After seven hours or so I at last crested the final rise and collapsed at the top, on a tiny beach near an outlet stream. Rethinking my allegiance to this trail. 

Robinson too, as much as he adored the Sierra and admired John Muir, had no such affection for the JMT.  

“Have I mentioned that I don’t like the John Muir Trail?” writes Robinson snarkily in his “The Sierra Nevada: A Love Story.”

“The Interstate 5 of the Sierra, the crowd scene, the foot killer, the permit sucker? The 212 miles of nonstop human busyness?” 

Four days later, when on my way out I crossed over the Sierra crest on Kearsarge Pass in Onion Valley, the last of the high passes on my route, I decided in my weariness that he had a point.

One can experience the Sierra in all its glory without spending weeks on the Muir Trail. Muir himself often wrote of a day chasing a butterfly, or hours spent counting the tiny flowers in a yard-square of mountain meadow, or of simply strolling along in the sunshine. 

“Hiking — I don’t like either the word or the thing,” he wrote in 1911. “People ought to saunter in the mountains, not hike.” 

Here’s a junction sign at a crossroads: one arrow points towards Lake Edison and the Ferry, and another arrow points up the long forested hill to the Bear Creek Meadows area. It’s a relentless but soft under foot climb of about five miles and 2,000 feet.

On that all-afternoon uphill stretch, I ran into a nice young man, Kelly Song, with a buddy, and a camera. He asked if he could take my picture, as he was experimenting with 35mm photography again. He said he worked in the movies. I said sure. So that’s what I look like on the trail, I guess.

Ah well — though the trail can be demanding, and embarrassing, also it will surprise you with unheralded spots of surpassing beauty. At this stop on Bear Creek, shortly before the trail turned away from the water, I couldn’t stop photographing the Zen-like features of the water, the tall trees, the mosses and plants growing between the straight-line time-smoothed fissures in the granite.

I had nothing in particular to do at this campsite, and left promptly the next morning, as had become my custom, but nonetheless I could not get over the beauty. Clambered all over the water-smoothed surfaces. Loved it. Never forget it.

On the other hand, it’s a good trail and footpath too, and this time going over the nearly 11k pass I didn’t bonk or have to nap. I had adjusted to the altitude I guess.

On the southern side of Silver Pass (above) the trail fell moderately but persistently — as often happens on the JMT heading south, over a tough pass you find yourself sauntering down a broad valley — despite the lousy air, a lovely landscape. Everything was great except for the tainting of the smoke.

Now — away from Yosemite — I was meeting a different kind of hiker; experienced, athletic, often testing themselves against the famously difficult High Sierra trail.

I ran into this charming fellow named Chris, who spoke with an Australian accent. He was planning to finish the trail and then head home. He said he had been hiking from Horseshoe Meadows (and had covered most of the trail in six days) with a friend but his “mate” had injured his knee badly at Bubbs Creek and had already been evacuated and then flown home to Australia.

A few short miles over the pass I found a flat place not far from the trail, and not far from a little creek — ideal camping, obscure, pleasant, safe from prying eyes, even sheltered. I went to bed early, resolved to get up early, to wake at 5:00 to pack up, gulp down a cold-soaked oatmeal and protein powder concoction left to me by Chris and hit the trail at first light. At 6:15. These are cheesy old guy tricks, maybe.

I don’t care. I packed carefully.

Because sometimes these cheesy old tricks work — in fact the dawn air was clear as clear could be, if a little extra colorful in the far distances.

You couldn’t blame them, but the trail ascended gradually to pleasantly scenic Lake Virginia, and the haze in the air in the early morning wasn’t terrible.

Heading south the trail dives nearly 1000 feet in less than a mile or so into a little-known stream and valley paradise called Tully Hole. The trail’s not dangerous, but it’s consistently steep. Behind this veteran European thru hiker named Laurent, you can see the trail zig-zagging down the hill. Didn’t seem to both him or his party.

After a long hour of descent with a pack that wasn’t quite right, and clothes that were a little too warm, and socks that had some grit in them, I stopped to reoutfit, repack, get some water, etc — even though I know Chris was ahead of me and would get a lot further ahead of me because I stopped. But I felt like I had no choice. I couldn’t turn this into a race — not even against smoke.

And when I got to Tully Hole, I wished I was going yet slower, and that I could simply stop because it was so darn paradisiacal.

Eventually I caught Chris just past the Fish Creek Footbridge. He was frustrated because he had been there for an hour, even as the air began to worsen, and he couldn’t even move because he had to wait for me. We had a good talk: when he fully explained the obstacles, I understood why he had to turn around now — he couldn’t stand 200 miles of smoke, so it only made sense really to go back. Even though it was a big ol’ climb back to Purple Lake and past it to Duck Pass.

To the smoke that spoiled the trip for him he gave a hearty salute:

But he couldn’t stay mad for long:

We parted: Tugboat headed back to Mammoth by way of Duck Pass: I headed south for Horseshoe Meadows, first by way of Silver Pass.

Red’s Meadow is at a low spot on the JMT — 7,630 feet — and heading south the trail climbs mostly gradually but steadily to 10,300 feet and Duck Pass.* Not a bad trail at all, except the air was the stuff of a horror movie, or an apocalypse.

Before the day was out we began to feel the air scratching at the back of our throats. We played hopscotch on the trail with Jamie and Marie, also SOBO on the JMT, and ran into one party of folks heading for a pass. This was a party of three women, one wearing a knee brace, clearly experienced and knowledgeable. The apparent leader — with dark hair, a strong profile, and a confident way of speaking — was wearing an N95 mask, and from what she said, they were heading for an exit to Mammoth, although they did say the mornings were fine, and she spoke of getting up really early — like 4:00 am — as a possible strategy.

Near the Mammoth Cutoff Trail junction, Chris took a break and let me catch up and told me that he was “not thrilled.” He didn’t like the way the air was hitting his throat, and didn’t think he could complete the trail if this continued indefinitely.

I heard that but let him know — I think — then or later that I was resolved to continue, partly because this was the thirtieth anniversary of my first journey on the JMT, and partly because I committed myself to this endeavor, despite my advanced age of seventy years, and would be embarrassed if I fell short.

But I did have second thoughts, I admit, when I saw a Purple Lake outlet smothered thick noxious woodsmoke.

What to do? Still, to get off the trail was unimaginable to me. I privately resolved to make this part of the adventure, come what may, but what I didn’t fully grasp was that Chris was facing a crossroads that very night, or actually earlier, a couple of hours down the trail. For him to go on was to commit to 200 miles. Possibly in smoke. To exit at Vermillion/Mono Hot Springs wasn’t really possible because the ferry and the VVR had unexpectedly closed due to a death. To exit at the next resupply, Muir Trail Ranch, was conceivable, but would mean somehow who knows how going over a hundred miles through the mountains on back roads back to Tuolumne Meadows with little or no public transportation — at least a day’s journey, if not much longer.

Chris got pretty quiet, but went along as I suggested we get up and get going really early, to take advantage of the clean air, and to try and beat the smoke south, away from its drifting pattern. I did have worries. I recalled — or was it Chris who said this? — that Snappy and Ryan were getting off the trail to get away from the smoke, because it was said to be bad down south towards Vermilion. I recalled what a fast-moving duo of guys mentioned they saw down this way — what they described as “a wall of smoke.”

Kind of like this?

[*Chris noted the junction, where a trail could take you in less than a day over Duck Pass to the Mammoth Mountains area, where he happened to have an uncle and friend willing to pick him up and take him to his vehicle at Tuolumne Meadows]

Well, we sauntered right into Reds Meadow, at which point I apparently completely forgot that my phone also has a camera in it useful for documenting people especially, but also places and even things, so I’ll have to briefly recount what happened in our enjoyable afternoon and evening at Red’s Meadow Resort, near Mammoth, and available by bus line.

Perhaps I was shy, as sometimes happens when I first hit the trail, but Chris likes town stops, and of his own volition booked a hiker’s cabin at Red’s Meadow, so we had a chance to shower, launder some clothes, and have a couple of generous old-fashioned diner sort of meals — tuna melt, that sort of dish. Teenagers at both the take-out window and the store across the way were stepping up to man the register and the griddle, and seemed eager to please. Enjoyable to see that kids can still be kids, at least some places. Here’s the hiker cabin Chris rented from Red’s Meadow Resort the morning of our arrival on September 6th.

Among the ‘packers at the tables, scarfing down food and waving away the persistent and abundant and carnivorous bees (actually wasps no doubt), were the voluble Beans, a balding middle-aged man with a silver goatee, and two chatty and friendly gay men, who we in time met and hung up with, named Snappy and Ryan, and two 30’s or so women, who in time I came to know as Jamie and Marie.

The universal subject of conversation was smoke from the Garnet Fire, started by lightning, which had been burning for nearly two weeks in remote heavily wooded forest land well to the south, a few miles from Cedar Grove, in Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park to the southwest. Though a considerable distance from Red’s Meadow, hiker reports and some modeling available online showed a lot of smoke in the midsection of the Range of Light, well south of Yosemite but north of the much bigger and taller mountains to the south, and including famously beautiful waterfall trails such as one passing through Evolution Valley.

When we woke in the morning and headed out, fairly early, with packs weighty with food for the four days before our last big trail resupply, at Muir Trail Ranch, the smoke hung ominously in the tall pines. A long ways to Whitney, as the sign said.

Once while getting water a pair of young men asked me if there were sites up where we were, and I said yes and said they were welcome to stay, which was true. (I knew Chris would agree.) But they nodded and moved on.

The trail winds its rocky way over ridges and past a couple of little lakes, Emerald and Ruby, before going up and over a ridge and then descending rapidly to sizeable Garnet Lake. It’s worth mentioning that the trail here was as crowded as any Sierra trail for thru hiker types that I’ve ever seen, and a lot of the hikers passing me by (no complaint) didn’t seem to know the rudiments of hiker etiquette. Oh well. I didn’t either, when I started, and who knows what gaffes I may have committed.

I find that the John Muir Trail is frequently used as a means to an end: a sort of self-initiation, a preparation for an entirely new life. For example, when I first walked the trail, in July-August 1995, I fell in with a quietly determined young Asian-American man who was preparing himself to go to law school that fall. We went over Glen Pass in deep snow together as I recall (wish I could remember his name).

My doctor Andrew Mace told me that he walked the trail the summer before he went to med school. In my experience you encounter a lot of people who are testing themselves against it, and with cause: it’s a real effing challenge, some of those passes. I saw a couple of trail runners go up Glen Pass, dancing lightly up the path past me, lithe, a couple in track gear, carrying almost nothing but a little water. Still, Glen Pass is 11,926 feet in elevation above sea level. It’s more manageable than some other passes, because it does employ switchbacks, but a lot of those switchbacks are tight and steep, with big granite steps to negotiate, and even the trail runners slowed to a walk as they maneuvered around and through the stones and boulders of this winding trail, which keeps its summit hidden from view.

In this case the pass over which the intrepid ‘packer must climb, is nowhere near 12,000 feet, but nonetheless a challenging uphill trudge, as can be seen below when the black line of the JMT turns angular and twisty,, such as climbing up out of the Garnet Lake basin, an elevation gain of 400 feet in a half or quarter of a mile. (This is the area just above and to the right of the “No camping within –” warning.)

But our reward for going over that pass and continuing on a little later in the day than would be my preference was the discovery of a platonic ideal of a campsite; just off the trail at Gladys Lake, towards the lower end of the JMT in the map above.

A perfect campsite: properly sited more than 100 feet from the friendly circle of Gladys Lake, but not too far — one could fetch water easily. The camp was well off the trail and not visible to passers-by, but still obviously a well-known and well-used camp. Just over the crest of a ridge was a vast canyon, through which Shadow Creek runs. This is the one section where the JMT has split from the PCT. It’s spectacular and at the same time homey as you could want, with a kitchen area all set up, a firepit with some wood left by previous campers, two or three perfectly groomed tentsites. A big ol’ log to rest your back on. Lovely.

I experienced many a gorgeous campsite on this trip, but it’s hard to compete with a “grand show” such as this. The extraordinary cloud formation I believe is the edge of a vast swirling monsoonal system, one that more than once during the course of this journey turned stormy and sometimes even threatening.

Here is a record of sorts of our progress. It’s mostly an excuse to post pictures of the Sierra and my fellow pilgrims.

“This grand show is eternal,” as Muir said, and “See how willingly Nature poses herself on photographers’ plates. No earthy chemicals are as sensitive as those of the human soul. All that is required is exposure, and purity of material.” [John O’ the Mountains, 1872]

We launched from the trusty NPS Wilderness Permit office in Tuolumne Meadows, where I turned in a permit I had gotten to leave five days later, after my buddy Chris /Tugboat leapt on an opportunity that came up on the website and got a permit for us to leave on the 3rd (of September). We knew we were carrying too much but we correctly wanted an accurate toll of the damage, and asked if they had a scale and they did, but no hook to hang it on, so we had to awkwardly hold it in the air to get a reading. I was a little over 34 pounds; Chris was a little over 35. Too much. Tugboat cussed at that, half-joking, half-not. We both have an overpacking problem.

Regardless, we set out promptly at 10:30 on the trail up Lyell Canyon, and soon enough fell under its spell. Countless people have walked this trail for thousands of years, with little doubt — it’s so obviously the way south from Tuolumne Meadows that some today call it the John Muir Freeway.

Yet it still entices. One finds startling pictures without hardly trying, as so often seems to be the case with the Sierra.

[Space for graphic profile of the Lyell Canyon part of the JMT heading south out of Tuolumne Meadows and up towards Donohue Pass. ]

Suddenly the trail takes a turn upward and before long one ‘packer after another is panting as the trail switchbacks up a trail that’s increasingly rough, with lots of boulders to maneuver around. Those suffering people included Tugboat and me, Heavy Lit, and countless others, many of them faster than us. We were really hffing and puffing: the trail ascends a little less than a thousand feet, and plateaus briefly before resuming an ascent out of the valley below.

We found a perch to catch our breath and rest up for the final ascent of the day. Despite our late start, we had climbed switchbacking up out of the valley and we felt it. My heartrate was getting into the exhausting territory. “Really kicked my butt,” Tugboat said, before falling into a much-needed recovery nap. I was not fortunate enough to fully sleep, but boy I needed the rest, a break from climbing.

A half an hour later we found a lovely place about 200 feet from Lyell Creek. A designated spot, well below the trail, and private, but well above Lyell Creek, and hygienic. Perfect. Next morning we and at least a hundred others set out for Donohue Pass, leaving on our right, to the southwest, the remains of Lyell Glacier.

By lunch we were at the pass, at a moderate 11,000 feet, and quite heavily trafficked — including mule trains.

Now we were in the Sierra, with the mountains — such as Banner-Ritter — to prove it.

We camped that night at fabled Thousand-Island Lake, and happened to meet — to our good fortune — the folks who had hired the mule trains. They had a large party camped higher up on the hill, with a fabulous view of these great mountains. The fellow said he used to be a triathlete, and couldn’t carry a pack anymore, but he still loved the mountains, and they hired mule trains to go as a party, and bring a kayak, and kayaked around Thousand-Island Lake! And they gave us each a muffin! Did not expect trail magic well off the trail at the start of the High Sierra.

Come back soon for more JMT in 2025!

After playing to countless “rooms full of rednecks” in Texas and other Western states, the hard-bitten and almost menacingly articulate McMurtry started thinking the origin of the redneck as a people, where they came from and where they went. He learned that in the past in Europe if you weren’t the first-born son, you got nothing, basically, from your family, and so why not start over someplace new?

From that demographic fact he draws some pretty interesting conclusions.  Here he is live this year with his fellow road warrior Betty Soo in Northhampton, Mass.

[Note: when I saw him at the Troubadour in L.A. a couple of months ago, he encouraged anybody “good with the intertubes” to post video of this song, because he said he “wanted to get it out there.”]

I introduced this song to some musician friends of mine and they were impressed, especially with McMurtry’s ability to subtly develop and sing out a this-is-who-I-am voice of the redneck. (And the redneck, for good or not good, clearly is a figure central to our culture.)

In the old world when your race was run
It all went to the eldest son
What’s the poor second son to do?
But join up with the common man
Set sail for the promised land
Across the might ocean blue
And they made us who we are
So let’s wave those stripes and stars

[chorus 1]
For the sons of the second son
Products of genocide
Polishing up their guns
Righteous and justified
Sons of the peasantry
Thinkin’ they’re finally free
Sons of the peasantry
Thinkin’ they’re finally free
Sons of the faithful serfs
Salt of the blessed Earth
In search of a master

[Verse 2]

And for a while we did okay
Or lookin’ back it seems that way”
Tried to put our best foot down
We left tracks in the lunar dust
Did away with the meaner stuff
All could ride at the front of the bus now
Didn’t need no Jim Crow car
And we thought we’d come so far

[Chorus 2]

Sons of the second sons
Products of genocide
Polishin’ up our guns
Eating that Southern Fried
Sons of the peasantry
Tellin’ ourselves we’re free
Sons of the faithful serfs
Salt of the blessed Earth
In search of a savior

[Verse 3]

Nowadays we’re feelin’ stressed
It’s all for us and damn the rest
Tellin’ each other have a blessed day
All camoed up and standin’ tall
Building bombs and border walls
As all collective conscience falls away
And they wave those stars and bars
Is that really who we are?

[Chorus 3]

Sons of the second sons
Products of genocide
Polishin’ up our guns
Payin’ on double-wides
Sons of the peasantry
Tellin’ ourselves we’re free
Sons of the loyal serfs
Salt of the blessed Earth
In search of a savior

[Chorus 4]

Sons of the second sons
Products of genocide
Polishin’ up our guns
Livin’ in double-wides
Sons of the peasantry
Tellin’ ourselves we’re free
Sons of the pagan serfs
Salt of the fuckin’ Earth
In search of a Caesar