The mountains were my first true love. From the moment of my thirteen-year-old epiphany (Mirror Lake, Yosemite Valley, May 1965), I knew that I had to go into the mountains, although I had no idea as to what that really meant, physically or logistically. But during my first long backpacking trips in the High Sierra I learned to travel safely and comfortably (well, most of the time) in the mountain wilderness. And I soon understood that the part of the Sierras that drew me most forcefully was the country at and beyond treeline. The forests might offer shelter and more luxuriant life, but the alpine offered something better: space, and full exposure to the best qualities of John Muir's "Range of Light." Later travels would take me to the Oregon Cascades and North Cascades of Washington, the Beartooth Mountains of Wyoming, the Selkirks and Purcells of British Columbia, the Himalayas. I love them all, but in many ways the High Sierra still feel like home, even though I have not returned to them as often as I would have wished.
At first my trips into the mountains were purely recreational, but later, as a field biologist, I became fascinated by alpine ecology and conducted my Masters thesis research in the Beartooth Mountains in Wyoming. Later alpine research projects took me back to the Beartooths, and to the alpine habitat of the Snowy Mountains in Australia.