The vast wilderness still exists
When our girls were still quite young, we joined some close
friends and spent Thanksgiving sharing a condominium at Donner
Lake.
The holiday falls at the perfect time of year for solitude.
Summer boaters are gone, and ski resorts are frequently waiting for
enough snow to open. The place was nearly deserted. We looked out
over the lake, enjoyed a modest blizzard and counted trains as they
rolled by on the track bed high above the lake.
The vast wilderness still exists
When our girls were still quite young, we joined some close friends and spent Thanksgiving sharing a condominium at Donner Lake.
The holiday falls at the perfect time of year for solitude. Summer boaters are gone, and ski resorts are frequently waiting for enough snow to open. The place was nearly deserted. We looked out over the lake, enjoyed a modest blizzard and counted trains as they rolled by on the track bed high above the lake.
We also made a trip to the nearby state park that marks the spot where the Donner Party passed a long and unimaginably horrifying winter 160 years ago.
Today the park is a quiet place, just the spot where, desperate, one might choose to try to survive the winter. It’s a wooded site, flanked by a small creek. Unlike the winter of 1846, today’s visitors will never escape the background hum of traffic along Interstate 80 nearby.
As California’s population steadily approaches 40 million, it’s easy to think that it’s impossible to be truly alone.
But a flight over much of California reveals a vast emptiness, punctuated by clumps of urban humanity.
Across the West, there are still plenty of places where a person can just disappear.
That realization was brought home again dramatically a few days ago, in news accounts of a San Francisco family stranded and alone from Nov. 25 to Monday, along a rural road in Oregon.
First, they ran the car engine to seek warmth from the car heater. Then the gas ran out, and still no one had happened by. Next, they burned the tires from their car, one by one, in an effort to attract attention. Finally, as the mother waited, she breastfed her two young daughters to sustain them.
While the mother and two daughters were rescued, safe and well, the father who trudged away on snowshoes to look for help was found dead late Wednesday evening.
The family might still be missing but for friends who chartered a helicopter to scan the hills of Oregon.
We all know what we’re supposed to do when traveling to remote areas in winter. Pack a few blankets, some food and water, a fully charged cellular phone, maps and tire chains. But how many of us do?
Given humankind’s propensity to clump together, most of us are unlikely to find ourselves well and truly alone, but as this week’s news accounts testify, we are one wrong turn away from a crisis.
We are also one correct turn away from adventures that take us past the end of the road and into places where we are unlikely to encounter another person.
Many years ago, my soon-to-be wife and I trekked up an old path near the crest of the Sierra.
The trail was deep, worn by countless walkers, but we encountered no one all day. The trail had been established as a trade route by Native Americans. The Paiute would cross the mountains to do barter with tribes in the Yosemite basin.
Our topographic map was marked with some curious runes, and we did not know what we would encounter until we arrived. There at the summit of the Sierra on Mono Pass, we stepped into a collection of mine shafts, equipment and tiny cabins built of hand-hewn lumber. No signs interpreted our experience. No fences held us at bay. There around us, above the treeline, was mute evidence of the hardships men will endure in the pursuit of precious metals.
But that long summer’s day, the cabins and the trail itself were the only sign that we did not have the Sierra Nevada all to ourselves.
