Perhaps each stunningly gorgeous and pristine area such as this should have so foreboding a name as this to keep it so: Desolation Wilderness. The next series of posts will be dedicated to the experience of backpacking in this fantastic place.
To begin, the contrast of city living to wilderness camping is, well, day and night. What a welcome change. You must bring food, create your own water supply, pack out all of your waste (except that for which you dig a latrine pit), and use just your own legs for locomotion. You must plan diligently, prepare for worse than you expect, and work hard while there. But your payment is beyond generous, almost unfair and seeming undeserved. Every turn of the head will take your breath away if you're not careful. (That is, at this high elevation, if you have any breath left to take.) The silence is at times deafening -- and if you don't know what I mean, please let me try to explain. It is a phenomenon where your mind expects sound, since it nearly always detects it. You are so confounded that you hear nothing that you do, actually, believe that you've lost your hearing. Cover your ears and you will sense little difference.
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| Day and Night, Desolation Wilderness, July 2012. |
And the visual experience, from plants to rocks, sky to water, wood to birds, is very difficult to capture. Tiny fragments captured on film will serve as just enough to remind me to go see and breathe the real thing, again and again.
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