I climbed Pyramid Peak on a day of broken clouds, bitter winds gusting hard out of the west, a few flakes of September snow in the air. On the summit I sought shelter behind a low rock wall, huddling in its lee and hoping for a respite from the wind, so that I could relax enough to enjoy the view. I’d come to the alpine in search of Holmgren’s buckwheat, a plant endemic to the Snake Range, with the hope of bivouacking above treeline, where I might sleep, quietly and alone, beneath a brilliant night sky - but the gale-force winds meant my camp was hours away. Still, before me there was this 7,000-foot drop into Snake Valley, a broad sweep of alpine habitat rising another thousand feet to Wheeler Peak, and the seemingly endless iteration of mountain ranges and valleys running toward the cloud-torn horizon. Beyond all else, the view from Pyramid Peak encompassed time, in all of its magnificent variety and complexity: the deepest time of Pole Creek Limestone and Prospect Mountain Quartzite, formed more than 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian Period. The fault-block beauty of the Snake Range, Confusion Range, Fish Creek Range, Wah Wah Mountains, and Snake Valley—the dip and thrust of the Basin and Range country that began 17 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch, and continues on, into the present. Tectonic convulsions, mountains rising from the plains, valleys falling from the mountains, mountains slowly drowning in their own rock-spall debris. Remnant glacial cirques and moraines in the highest ranges. And then the salt pan playas and ancient beach strands, remnants of Pleistocene Lake Bonneville, which was one thousand feet deep and the size of Lake Michigan fifteen thousand years ago, when its southwestern arm reached far into the Snake Valley. Imagine that. Imagine the lake, the giant ground sloths and mammoths and short-faced cave bears and saber-toothed cats roaming the Great Basin, before both the waters and beasts began their long retreats, into a great drying and perhaps greater dying. Just imagine. And closer at hand, somewhere in shallow time, some nine hundred years ago, were the Fremont people who once grew corn and hunted antelope near present-day Baker; the waxing and waning of mining and ranching, scattered cabins collapsing into forest and meadow, the creation of Lehman Caves National Monument in 1922, Great Basin National Park in 1986. The National Park Service bought out the last Snake Range grazing leases in 1999 and the meadows are thick with basin wildrye. In some areas invigorated aspen clones advance into meadows; in others white firs invade aspen stands, a legacy of one hundred years of fire suppression. Pine bark beetles and fir engraver beetles flourish in this twenty-first century drought. In places the beetles’ host trees die, while the remnant glacier beneath Wheeler Peak—the only one in Nevada—retreats before a gathering warmth. But the bristlecone pines, some almost five thousand years old, live on. Deep time and even shallow time: the ultimate antidotes to hubris. They’re almost enough to give me a proper perspective—on my own mortality, sure, but also on the shit and stupidity and inhumanity that characterize so much of today’s news.
And up on Pyramid Peak, confronted by that great sweep of time, I thought of my favorite Theodore Roethke lines, from “The Far Field”: I learned not to fear infinity, The far field, the windy cliffs of forever, The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow. . . . But it occurred to me, as I started down from the mountain, weary of the wind and cold, that I’d write that last line differently, although with much poorer poetic effect: “The presence of time in the white light of the past.” On my hike Holmgren’s buckwheat would prove elusive, and the winds eventually drove me from the high ridge where I had hoped to bivouac—but I hung onto time, and so came away happy. And for a brief while I was content.
3 Comments
Lisa Hendricks
9/21/2017 07:58:24 am
You should have used your Bothy Bag.
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Chris
9/21/2017 08:17:51 am
Sucker would have blown away, a kite over the Snake Range!
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Cashirer
9/21/2017 12:26:09 pm
Good piece! "Poetry in Notion!"
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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