American Artist Alan Sonneman

“Not being a native Californian, I had little knowledge of these mountains until I came west in the fall of 1973. What I knew of them came from the romantic depictions of 19th-century paintings I had seen on my early pilgrimages as a child to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.. That fall, with a copy of Gary Snyder's recently published book of poems "Turtle Island" in hand, I took my first trip to the Sierra in the company of a classmate who had grown up in southern California. We spent a bright October weekend at Cathedral Lake in the Yosemite country. The next summer we visited Dusy Basin over Bishop Pass.

I found an affinity for this place of granite, lakes, and snow. It felt much like the glacial plains of Minnesota, where I grew up, a land like the Sierra, defined by the glaciers and still in the embrace of their lingering forces. Perhaps this, too, is what John Muir found when he came west from his childhood home in Wisconsin, not far from my own home on the Mississippi River. For the next twenty years, I made sporadic attempts to return to this cathedral of white light. It wasn't until the late 90s when my youngest son was old enough to be thrown on a horse and deposited deep in the wilderness, that I returned to stay. Over the intervening years, we have returned every summer, often two or three times, immersing ourselves in the peace and grace these mountains offer.

No area in North America contains a more dramatic landscape than the Southern Sierra, to many they are our own Himalayas, a place for solace and cleansing. They encompass an area roughly the size of a small New England state, yet not one road crosses this vast wilderness, and only a few venture to its edge. From Lone Pine at the southern end of Owens Valley to Mammoth Lakes, where the San Joaquin River bisects this great block of white granite we know as the Sierra Nevada, the southern portion of this range is an area 100 miles long by 30 miles wide, making California a land apart in fact and mind from the rest of the country.

The Sierra Nevada have played a large role in the American ethos. A block of rock uplifted from the ocean, a barrier to the “Promised Land”, the highest point in the original continent of our fathers' dreams. They have remained almost completely unscarred by our hand, thanks to the vision of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.

These mountains were not crossed by non-native peoples until 1864 when William Brewer led California’s first geological survey of the Southern Sierra over Kearsarge Pass. In the successive years of the 19th century, the interior of this range was explored by the likes of John Muir, Clarence King, Theodore Solomon, and Joseph Le Conte, leaving their names on the high peaks and deep canyons they explored. This land became part of the national park system in the 20th century with the additions of the Kern Basin, including Mt. Whitney in 1926, and then the Kings River region in 1940. It was not until the adoption of the Wilderness Act in 1964 that the adjoining areas were set aside for preservation in their natural state.

The area covered by these images roughly extends from Cottonwood Lakes and the southern entrance to Sequoia National Park to Tioga Pass and Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park. Over the years, I have approached these mountains from their eastern escarpment in Owens Valley, and it is from that vantage point that these images are derived. The portals of Owens Valley provide relatively quick yet steep access to the pristine lakes and broad basins found there. Passes to the west can be reached in as little as four or five miles of strenuous climbing, with a gain of two thousand feet or more in elevation being the norm, along paths based on ancient aboriginal trade routes.

These portals are sheer and dramatic, with sharp vertical rock faces carved by glaciation out of white granite. There are occasional intrusions of more colorful mineral-laden rock as is found in the black stripes of Pine Creek or the amber-colored metamorphic rock of Piute Crags. The ancient red slate found atop McGee Pass crossing Red Slate Mountain is a remnant of a prehistoric ocean floor. Within the shadows of the highest peaks lie some of the few remaining glaciers of California.

These mountains are young, perhaps only 5 or 6 million years old, and still rising. What is characteristic and unique to them is the proliferation of benches dotted with alpine lakes usually situated at 10,000 ft. or more in elevation and ringed in jagged ridges and towering peaks. There are more than a dozen peaks over 14,000 ft., some of the highest in North America. This is a landscape of extremes, blanketed in snow in the winter and buffeted by thunderstorms in the summer. In the winter, gale-force winds from Pacific storms laden with moisture sandblast the western exposure of Whitebark and Foxtail pines to their core, twisting them into deformed sentinels thousands of years old. Above 11,000 ft. the trees give way to only a few grasses and flowers, leaving the peaks barren towers basking in the late evening alpenglow from the light bounced off the Pacific Ocean over a hundred miles away.

The high country becomes a veritable flower garden as the winter snows slowly retreat. Starting in mid-July the western slopes are covered in lupine, Indian paintbrush, and a host of other brightly colored flowers, while watery glades are full of wild onions and tiger lilies. Meadows are inundated in the early summer by mosquitoes that rise from the water left behind by the melting snow.

The summer days of late July through mid-August are often surprisingly wet and rainy. Towering thunderheads boil up over the high elevations of the Sierra, unleashing mid-afternoon downpours accompanied by thunder, lightning, and hail. These summer monsoons are caused by tropical depressions in the Gulf of California and northern Mexico blowing moist subtropical air counter-clockwise into the deserts of the southwest. On a trip in the summer of 2004 from Bishop Pass to Piute Pass, a loop of over 50 miles through the northern interior of Kings Canyon National Park and the John Muir Wilderness, we encountered heavy rain and thunderstorms almost every afternoon at around 1 pm, yet each night I slept out under the stars to wake up covered in frost. On the last day coming over Piute Pass, it hailed so hard that it quickly covered the ground in two inches of coarse snow.

Ruskin believed the earth’s nobility would reveal itself to those who look beyond its disguise of vegetation to the elevations above. These mountains reward the visitor with such clarity, things are as they are and have been for millennium. There is a knowledge of self to be found in such places. Here in these mountains, your path is clear, it is an idea of the world as it is, a type of certainty, that value is not relative or a matter of opinion. America was built around this myth of the frontier, the wilderness. A place to explore, to find one’s self, separate from the past or society. While the opportunity is still there, I will continue to return every summer as the snows recede, the flowers bloom and the fish rise on a surface of gold. I still carry the copy of “Turtle Island” with me, coffee-stained and worn, following the path.”

Alan Sonneman - Palo Alto, CA