The Sierra is a very special place. It is the artistic backbone of the West, for many have come before with their camera, pen, paintbrush, and boots to be bathed in that glorious silver light, and to lose themselves in the soft pine and hard granite peaks. To venture into the High Sierra is to go inwards, to the heart of the thing, to find that place where the pitch of a distant wind swirling through a granite chasm mixes with the the echo of a lone birdsong, mixes with the smell of burnt sienna and pine.
I have worked the Sierra for years with my camera, sometimes getting something, sometimes getting nothing but the chance to sit in solitude on morning sunrise or swim in a glacial blue lake. Those moments erase all thought of modern life, of modern worry. And that is enough.
