Linked by Rivers

It’s 7pm on a warm mid-August evening and I’m halfway down the wall of the Tuolumne River canyon. Far below me, meandering like a silvered serpent, runs the river—still distant though I’ve already been hiking downhill for half an hour. Faint murmurs of running water and fragments of voices from a rafting party camped on a lone sand bar rise up to greet me on the delicious, velvety-soft air. 

I hadn’t planned on walking this far down—the climb back up will leave me exhausted and drenched in sweat—but the canyon pulls me in, each turn in the trail promising yet another closer view of the river, and I can’t help myself. The opposite hillside has already taken on the deepening yellows of late summer grasses, accented by the oranges and reds of the setting sun; and upriver the canyon reveals its source, a glimpse of high peaks and lingering snowy patches on the Sierra crest. The scene is utterly enchanting. 

All summer long I’ve been roaming the rivers and snowfields of the Sierra Nevada as part of my job—swimming in the South Yuba, bird watching by the Feather, leading hikes along the Merced, climbing Mt. Dana—and what strikes me is not so much the singularity of each unique place I have visited, but how they are stitched together into one conclusive whole, one rugged cord holding together the spine of California.

This 430-mile long mountain range is a playground of possibilities. There are so many canyons, trails, and forests to explore that even after a lifetime of effort you would still feel the mystery of places untouched and unknown. And in my mind, it’s not so much about the temptation of seeing new places but the thrill of revisiting old, familiar haunts year after year.

For instance, I am drawn, over and over again back to Tuolumne Meadows, as if this place were a wellspring of memory and sustenance. Here, the upper reaches of the Tuolumne River run free and wild until they are captured downstream at Hetch Hetchy Dam and diverted to San Francisco’s thirsty neighborhoods. John Muir listened to these same waters, before the dam was completed in 1923, and wrote of “silvery branches interlacing on a thousand mountains, singing their way home to the sea.”

I think less of the dam and more of lounging on the riverbank this summer with my sweetheart, watching a water ouzel flit from rock to rock; or of sitting in Parsons Lodge several years ago listening to the poet Gary Snyder tell stories of his trail crew work in the Yosemite backcountry.

The river’s many branches still gather on its thousand mountains. From the jagged spires of the Cathedral Range on the south side of Tuolumne Meadows, to the towering reddish slopes of Mt. Dana and Mt. Gibbs to the east, or the sheer massif of Mt. Conness to the north: each collecting the waters of passing storms and holding them in countless jeweled lakes and meadows.

There are endless trails here. But trails! Who needs trails in a place so open and beckoning?  Wander to your heart’s content as did John Muir. Pick a distant peak and choose a path of your own liking. Be a river and trace the shape of the land with your footsteps. 

This is exactly why I return to the Sierra Nevada every summer, because the mountains forgive me this opportunity to roam without boundaries. And if I don’t take this time to link together these peaks and rivers, something within myself starts to come unhinged. 

I guess in a word this explains why I have dropped into the Tuolumne River canyon on this sultry August evening: for the wholeness of knowing where I fit into the landscape.  Even though I have been hiking and swimming and exploring all summer long, I still need these moments when the pieces line up and make sense. When I can see the distant peaks, the shape of the canyon cut into the long western slope, the sinuous life of the river, in a single glance.

It is sometimes hard to hold onto our complex human lives, among even more complex cities and complex obligations, but there is something comforting and elemental and precise in the way a river cuts its one essential path and ties a landscape together. 

Across the canyon, blue oaks and ponderosa pines cast ever-lengthening shadows on the grassy hillside. Small, secretive wrens sing their evening songs from hidden bushes and a fence lizard scampers through dry rattling leaves. I turn one last time and head back up the trail.

This essay was originally created for the 2011 O.A.R.S. catalog. For more compelling stories from other renowned writers, click here to request your copy today!

Written by David Lukas

David Lukas is a professional naturalist and writer. For more than 20 years, he has conducted nature tours and classes in places such as Peru and Borneo. He is the author of Wild Birds of California and the newly revised Sierra Nevada Natural History guidebook, the classic hiker’s handbook to plants and animals of the Sierra Nevada. He also wrote the environment chapter for the Lonely Planet travel guide to Yosemite National Park, and several hundred newspaper and magazine articles on nature.