I spent the last two weeks of August walking about in solitude in the Southern High Sierra. Staying along the eastern half of Kings Canyon, I carried no electronics, a journal, 3 pens, 50 rolls of BW film, a specialized medium format Hasselblad camera, a battered copy of Walden with its marked pages glued back in place, and in lieu of hiking poles, a large tripod carried in hand. Heavy maybe, but what does the physical weight of stuff matter when the search is of something rich and deep and personal.
The route didn’t really matter, for I had no real destination. I just wandered about, in and out of canyons, on and off trail, over 10 passes, making images, experiencing rich humanity, writing and sitting each morning with a tin of coffee watching sunrise slowly creep down whatever western wall I had been sleeping next to. When I was tired I made camp, when meditative I sat and stared, when inspired I made images. The clock ceased any kind of importance, even if I had a way of checking it. This was deep time with no schedules, no calendars, no communications, and so I could stand, without distraction, and let the wilderness swirl around me in all its beautiful complexities. The small grey and white birds darting under the granite stones. The swaying of lodgepole pine. The breeze, running a mile off, passing over and sweeping on into silence. The Marmot on Pinchot who took no notice of me laying on the flat slab, my grey shorts and shirt blending perfectly with the granite. I stayed still for an hour and he went about his Marmot ways until another hiker appeared and he scurried off. The hiker set his pack down and on the shoulder strap were three dog tags. I ask him and he tells me the three were soldiers, kids, under his command, who all died in Afghanistan. He tells me how beautiful Afghanistan is, how walking in wilderness helped confront this pain, helped confront his trauma. And now he walks, the AT, the PCT, the JMT, trail after trail in a continual journey, for absolution, maybe, to honor these boys, to honor himself, absolutely. That it has given him something generous and pure is clear. He tells me of the book he wants to write and I encourage him to do it. He wanders north and I’m alone again. I stay for a long time. How often do I get to be at 12,000 feet with mountains to the horizon with nothing to pull me away. It takes time and space to let the ideas ferment and stew, why rush it, there’s enough rushing down in the world below. And so I stay and stare and chat and sit with the soft alpine breeze. I lay back down. The marmot reappears and I close my eyes.
There are all kinds of nomadic vagabonds up here, and if you come with a pack on, you too are one. There are no walls in the shared experience of wilderness travel. There is no I am this and you are that, only understanding in the effort taken, in the sacrifices made and within this is empathetic familiarity. Through hikers and weekenders, first timers and some having come here for the past 40 years. PCT’ers and JMT’ers and FKT’ers. Climbers, cross country walkers, solitaries like me, groups of friends and spontaneous trail families. You have to walk your own walk up here, whatever that means for you. And the journey is yours alone. The couple just south of Mather, who mentioned me in their own post (
viewtopic.php?t=23845) as the ‘lone bearded hiker’ who came upon me gathering water and counting frogs and when she got close, the first thing she asked was whether I had enough food. Did I have enough food. How many times have I been asked that from a stranger down in the world below. Never. How often have I asked that. Never. We talk about Lake Basin and I mention my own scary crossing of Frozen Lakes pass on a past wander. And then they we were off and I was left to my impromptu frog survey and lunch by the lake at the base of Split Mountain where a lone bald eagle slowly fished. Simplicity, simplicity, so Thoreau tells me and he was correct. And up here, in these magnificent mountains, the expression of that simplicity is keenly felt. All possession squeezed into a pack and life reduced to walking, thinking, making art, watching a Clark’s Nutcracker go about its summer work. Its tapping of the whitebark cone a kind of organic staccato, pleasant in its persistence. I try my own hand at getting some seeds, but the cones are all out of reach and the fallen ones are well cleaned. The bird is a good worker.
But that is not my work. My work is to make art. And so I scramble over granite, recross passes, and exult when I wake to sleet and snow and good clouds. I wear my body and mind down until the struggles of yesterday become the breakthroughs of today and my bag of exposed film grows in my pack. Art could be said to be the exploration of self and the world and the job of the artist is to walk to the side. To observe and open themselves up to experiencing the uncomfortable realities of whatever it is that’s being expressed. To be a landscape photographer is to do these things out here, in the wilderness, in the spaces where the imagination has freedom to roam. I was often asked what I was shooting, and I’d look around and look back at them and say, you’re in it. That feeling, right now, looking up at rising granite spires that look too something to be real, the very smallness they invoke, the very love of a place that has affected so many and been my personal inspiration for half my life.
I woke my last morning, long before sunrise, and rose to watch the crescent moon over North Palisades. The early morning stillness was bathed in a deep eastern indigo and had a rapturous ethereality, almost too perfect for the world. No wind, no ripple, no birdsong, just moon and mountain and a lone human. What a strange and magical glory it is to wander these Sierra mountains, lost to the world without. And lest you think I am simply a romantic, sounding my jubilant yawp over this rooftop, I am not immune to the struggles. The hunger, the tired legs, the fear and cold and boredom and pain. The hard is what makes it beautiful. The rich discovery that comes after you’ve broken through, when the ritual does its thing and the ego is stripped away and what is left is profound honesty with self and what it means to exist, if only for a brief moment, in sublime ecstasy.
I'll be posting more images to my website as I slowly scan the film over the next month.
www.scottmansfield.com. Please drop me a line if you have any questions.
Image Notes
These images were all photographed on a specialized film camera called a Hasselblad 903SWC using Ilford Delta 100 BW film rated at EI 100. I used five primary filters when photographing this time; a red #25, a minus-blue #12, a yellow #8, a 3-stop ND, and a 10-stop ND. Most exposures were over a minute long. The film was hand developed in my darkroom using Kodak X-tol developer diluted to 1:1
