This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough. Mary Mary Hunter Austin

Last week, Michele and I went over to the east side of the Sierras to preview the fall color. Well, really, to get out of the house, to have some input other than the television and the fall colors were the excuse. This year was hotter and drier than it used to be, so does that mean the trees will change into their fall finery earlier or later? Does it make any difference? My guess is earlier because the lack of water should trigger shedding leaves to cut down on transpiration, but that’s just a guess. Like almost any trip, we started in traffic on a freeway and the crowded highways turned into much emptier roads east of Groveland.

We had left home under clear blue skies and the PurpleAir sensors were telling us that it was clear in the greater Bishop-Lone Pine area, but, as we headed east the sky started getting hazy and then smoky. We passed The Rim Fire overlook and, even in this dry year, the land is recovering. Faster than I had expected. I had passed the Rim Fire overlook right after the fire, like right after in October of 2013, and the devastation rattled me but now I am starting to accept that this will be a normal part of the West’s biosphere.

To make a long nothing-happened story shorter, I’ll summarize it with we went over the Sierras just in time to catch the wind direction changing with the smoke from the Knp Complex fire that has been threatening the sequoias in the King’s Canyon-Sequoia National park area now drifting over the mountains into the Owen’s Valley. But Purple Air said Tahoe was clear, so we drove north, through Nevada, to Tahoe where it was Indian Summer warm and the air was sparkling clean…until the next day, when it wasn’t, so we drove home where the air was still soft and clear.

On our drive north through Nevada, we drove by Boundry Peak, the highest point in Nevada, where a hiker had been lost and had come close to dying a couple of days earlier. Looking at Boundry Peak, it seems that it would be impossible to get lost, but the West is immense, the spaces way bigger than they seem, and the humans on the land invisibly small. I know, I spent a good part of a day trying to be seen by a helicopter.

In my early twenties, I was involved in rescuing a badly hurt climber who had fallen on the steep side of Mt. Banner. Three of us were camped at Thousand Island Lake waiting for a fourth, coming in a different way, to climb Ritter. It was a warm afternoon and we were basking in the sun by the side of the lake when a guy came running up saying that his buddy had fallen on the south side of Banner the day before. Two of us packed our equipment and some warm clothing and started up the mountain. As it got dark, we stalled out trying to get onto the glacier above Catherine lake and spent the night in a boulder field. We got up early – even in one’s early twenties, sleeping sitting up on rock promotes getting up early – got on the glacier, and hiked to the top. Once we got there, we were a little like the dog that caught the bus, now that we were on the saddle at the top of the glacier, we really weren’t sure what to do next.

Luckily and almost magically two more climbers showed up right after us. Both of them were doctors and way more experienced climbers than us. They had heard about the fallen climber and had climbed up from Lake Ediza to offer help. The doctors took over and we helped, eventually finding the injured climber who had fallen about twenty feet before being stopped by a ledge. By now, the climber had been on the mountain, exposed, at about 12,500 feet, for three days and two nights. He was a mess with severe gangrene on two fingers and a swollen foot peeking out of his crushed boot. He was hallucinating, calling for his mother, which was disturbing, but we could hear the distant sound of a rescue helicopter and we all felt that it would find us soon.

But it didn’t. We 3/4s carried and 1/4 dragged the injured guy to the saddle between Banner and Ritter where we were more visible. There, we tried to attract the helicopter’s attention. Picture four of us, standing on white granite in the middle of a saddle above a glacier, jumping up and down and waving two large orange panels, and for hours a helicopter, not knowing exactly where we were, was flying around looking for us but didn’t see us, couldn’t find us. We could see it but it always seemed to start towards us and then turn the wrong way. Finally, as the shadows got longer and the air colder, the helicopter flew away, leaving us in the fading sun and empty silence.

We were deep in the Ansel Adams Wilderness but were only twelve to fifteen miles away from civilization at Mammoth and that is where the helicopter went to find the guy who had told us about his fallen buddy. About half an hour later, the helicopter showed up again. Now, with a guide, they knew exactly – well, within a football field size space – where we were. Now they could see us.

As an aside, the helicopter had burned up almost all of its fuel and only had time enough to winch up the injured guy, drop us a one-man survival pack including an insulated field coat – the kind with fur around the hood – and fly back to the trailhead to refuel. We had to spend a second night on the mountain, huddling together in the cold, sharing the pseudo food in the survival pack four ways. End aside.

But that was almost sixty years ago and, on this latest trip, we were comfortably cruising north in the climate-controlled cocoon of a Hyundai Tucson. About forty miles north of Boundry Peak and eighty miles northwest of Banner is Hawthorn Nevada, a small town in a large valley. The valley has been denuded to build storage facilities for various munitions. Normally, I don’t think that civilization sits very well in the desert, too much of the normally hidden rubble and detritus is exposed, but in Hawthorn, everything has been swept clean and it looks almost like a giant art project. An art project illustrating the banality of the weapons of war and death.

The last time I was here was in July of 2011 with Ed Dieden and we stopped at the local museum called the Hawthorne Ordnance Museum but, really, a museum dedicated to a variety of increasingly effective ways of killing people. Happily, we skipped it this time, cruising by Walker Lake on the way to Squaw Valley where, the next day, we walked along the paved trail overlooking the Truckee River which was almost empty but still almost impossible to get lost on.

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