Why Wild Places You Will Never See Still Matter
It's 4:30 a.m. and I'm on my way leaving Glendale California driving North for 3 and 1/2 hours to the Sierras. The hour is early for sure, but it's one of those times where you sort of get to forget about time, and it's a very peaceful transition from a large city to the desolate high desert on highway 395. As the sun rises over the mountains and the East, I feel like I'm in a completely different place, which is part of the magic of getting out here and getting away from the technology. Technology the schedules, the timelines, and all the rest of the pressures that exist in modern life. Backpacking for me becomes this moment to reconnect with myself and also to forget myself to forget the memories and ambitions that I've had day-to-day that I wake up with and go to sleep with.
On this finale episode of Rebel Nature Season 1, I’m going to take a more personal POV. I’m going to go through my personal journal entries from a backpacking trip I took in the summer of 2024 to the highest and most remote lake in the 48 states, Lake Tulainyo, which sits at 12800 ft. in the shadow of Mt Whitney. I had to scramble up boulders and go completely off trail for an entire day to reach. And when I do these extreme adventures, where does nature sit in my mind and how does my extreme connection with it change my perspective? And also what have I learned from everything I’ve talked about this year?
INTRO
I've hiked in the Sierras quite frequently. It's my favorite place to go long distance backpacking. I've hacked the John Muir trail completely end to end twice as well as more than a dozen adventures through adjacent trails and national parks. However This adventure is going to be special, something I've never done before in the Sierras. I'm actually going to leave the trail, and hike up a mountain to find a lake next to Mount Whitney.
While Mount Whitney is well visited every year by thousands of hikers, this Lake, only a mile or two away as the crow flies, is extremely remote and difficult to get to. Is the highest Lake of any reasonable size in the 48 states in the United States?
I've seen scattered photos of it before, but certainly I've never been there. Yet. I think about it all the time. It's my desktop image on my computer, it was my poster image in my office in New York City, the image I was supposed to use to sort of describe myself abstractly. It's been a place I wanted to go for 10 years ever since I learned about it, but I've never been
And that's got me thinking a little bit about Rebel nature and the wild places. The wild places that we know exist everyday out there in the world in the Arctic in Siberia in Africa in South America, and even here in the United States, the wild places that are unsettled and unvisited, what value do we put on them.? What is the intrinsic value of a place that you can't build a home on? You can't extract oil from? These places that we go out of our way as a nation to preserve for their intrinsic value, what does that say about our society and what can we learn from exploring those ideas?
As I drive up to 395 the build ings fall into more and more disrepair buildings. Barns coffee shops 70 to 150 years old slowly begin to miss their doors, their windows and then their roofs, open to the high desert air sharing Fields with cattle, solar panels and new aqueduct construction, it's 7:00 on the 395 and the sun is now firmly in the East, it's 71° but it's going to get cooler. We have to take the highest highway in the country or at least California to get to our destination. A cottonwood lakes trailhead.
Will need to ascend 2 to 3,000 ft, check this, to get there along a steep narrow highway that cuts along the Eastern side of the Sierras at lone pine California
One of the most frustrating things about going uphill is then realizing you have to go back down to go back up again, this can feel like kind of a waste like the effort you spent was for nothing because you're simply giving it away only to have to do it again to get to the summit you're trying to reach. Reach. I think the fallacy here is thinking that getting to the summit is the goal, no. My friend walking the trail is the goal. And the trail goes up and down, the trail will never move in. In what seems to be the most efficient way, even though actually it is getting you there in the most efficient way possible. There's so many unknowns that have gone into a decision about a trail going up or down, a River occasionally washing through, landslides, technical feasibility, we just can never really know. Really know. I think the point is not to second-guess the trail but to trust that the ups and downs will get you where you need to go and that both are important to the cause.
The summit is not your goal anymore than death could be your goal, but rather to have hiked well and with great partners, to have risen to the cause when you needed to and made sure you got rest and protected yourself when you needed it most. No the summit can't be your goal because that is the end, and the end is of no satisfaction, if the effort and the character was not in its right order in the first place and it's right order in the first place .
I'll continue to say that the greatest thing you can find in nature is yourself. The valleys and mountains are nothing compared to the pure character you find in yourself when everything else is stripped away. The tallest mountains and highest lakes are simply signifiers of what you could very well attain without the distractions that come with Modern Life. There's no greater gift that this life can give you then being in perfect harmony with the person that you're meant to be. For me I found this in my wife and I found this in nature and nowhere else. Everywhere else feels like a game or a Dodge, a hustle, a way to satisfy my urges for creativity. That will also appease to give me the money I need to live in this modern world.
I'm simply not sure it's meant for me, but all the people I love are there and all of my pets, and all of my memories and my childhood, so I can't abandon it completely, and I simply won't. I simply won't. But I don't know that my choices are being made purely. I worry that my life is being spent in service of other goals in service of summits and peaks, instead of in service of the trail. I wonder what that would be like, it certainly sounds a lot like Buddhism, in the best ways.
I don't think anyone would write a eulogy of me saying that guy Christopher sure did live for the moment embracing and savoring every detail as it happened. Surely they would say I had ambitions and thought for the future and thought a lot about my past but I'm not sure anyone would say. Here's a man who relished every moment. I'm not sure that's good or bad, except that it makes me realize. I probably am not relishing every moment, and those are all the moments I have, right?
I wonder what it's like to be yourself. Is it something that just seems so natural? You don't even realize it's happening? Perhaps it's a certainty in every word and step that comes from deep within instead of from what is learned from or affirmed by people outside. I wonder if this voice that I'm writing in is even my voice? Maybe it's too stuffy or too formal or too academic. Maybe it is laid in with trappings of the things that I think I meant to be or should be or ought to be. I wonder what happens when you distill yourself to your pure essence. What happens?
I truly wonder what happens because, I do any of these things only to stave off the risk of being rejected in some way. Whether in talent or value. But if I truly was myself and I truly knew it and I truly felt what I was meant to do with every fiber of my being. Then , I couldn't be rejected, or at least I couldn't feel the shame of it because there's nothing else to be. The trail moves one direction, there's only one way to go
In the midnight where I stood, at soldier Lake, I saw a million stars and one half moon. I saw the pools and rings of fish, and I felt the gravel beneath My wet wool socks. It was 39° and I could not be warm. In the midnight where I stood at soldier Lake. I could snuggle in as deeply as I could to my sleeping bag, wrapped in a emergency blanket and alofted by a sleeping pad above the hard granite Boulder on which I slept. But I could not be warm. I could try to be and in the effort of doing so. Maybe even get a little warmer, but I could not be warm , warm the way I wanted to be. No for that I would have to wait for morning and for the Sun. No, I would have to wait until tomorrow came before I would be able to feel like myself again. I would have to wait in my tent on this Boulder with the fish jumping the half Moon rising foretelling the coming sunrise as I lay horizontal and wet wool socks. Waiting for my warrant to come
Tell me who you think I am,
So that I can know who I am not
I think we tend to think of the world as the most advanced and modern it's ever been. And I suppose in the sense and definition of those words, perhaps that's true. But maybe it's just in its nascent era, at a point where the world is trying us on to see if we fit, to see if we scratch its neck too much or if we fit too tightly in the waist. Maybe the world is giving us a chance to stretch out a bit like brand new boots. Maybe the Earth has a timeline that we don't comprehend. Maybe it's our obligation to do our best to accommodate it and not the other way around. We do a poor job of accommodating the world. Only in my wildest dreams. Would we ever be able to serve it. How would we ever?
Sitting at home in my bed at 7am., a day ago I was 15miles into the backcountry just starting a hike that would take me 2000+ ft up a mountain cliff. My lips chapped and my face covered in sunscreen and dust, a handful of granola and a small metal cup for water. This morning I'm sipping coffee from a porcelain mug and staring at my feet and candles in a little fireplace beyond. My dog is sleeping comfortably on my lap under a fleece blanket. My wife is planning her day on her laptop. I love both mornings and there's no reason not to have it all.
I reached Tulayino Lake at 2pm. The wind is so intense that I couldn’t bear to get out my journal to write this in place, but I did jot it in my head as I stared out on the clear azure blue and knew I was probably the only person who has seen this in quite awhile. The reason this lake is set aside for you and me, even if we never visit, must be that deep down, humans know we can’t conttol our baser impulses. We crave development the way we might crave a midnight snack when we’re on a diet. We know thta modern life demands the commoditazation of everything, the quantitative value of goods and services, and in this world an empty and clear lake home to me and two marmots hardly measures up. And in our hearst we know that just knowing these places exist gives us hope, hope that there is still a world which has not been designed, controlled or shaped by us. That there’s a place for things that don’t need us and that we need them to reset our brains, our hearts and our everyday ways. Staring into the sun, 40 mph gust knock me to the talus at my feet. I’ve just climbed a 400ft wall after hiking 12 miles off trail and I am in the middle of nowhere and it will take me even more time to get down and back to a river to camp. In one way I am tempted to lie back in the grass and let the earth take me and return to it. Im shook from that thought. gazing across at the mountain peaks and away to the commercial airliner that seems twice as close as usual, because, well, it is. I remember my wife and my dogs and my life and the value of the world I have waiting for me, and know that modrn life is not all bad, just cloudy and messy and noisy and unsympathetic. I make my way down. Down the high meadow away from the lake, down the wall, losing my canteen to the infinite betwen the boulders, down the slopes to the river bed and my tent which now feels as civilized as a Glendale home where all my love is stored warm and waiting for me. I did what I cam here to do, and I just want to be home.
In short, I am aware that these places exist and would feel sad if they were gone, but yet it's hard to put a finger on exactly what I value about them, especially places I know I'll never visit.
Humanity needs to know that there are wild places that we are preserving. We need to know that we haven't consumed the entire world with our obsessive compulsion for technology and civilization and progress. There's always going to be a part of us that longs for simple, wild places, and even if we never visit them, it gives us some comfort to know they exist. Exist. This is the existence value of things. The value of things never seen never visited and yet admired and loved.
