Gentle Wilderness: The Sierra Nevada

Nearly a century after John Muir’s personal account of the Sierra Nevada, Richard Kauffman has come along with a colour camera to recapture the feeling of discovery and the vividness in what Muir called the Range of Light.

If you believe nostalgia serves a purpose, you don’t mind enjoying it now and then.

Before knowing that it served a purpose and when very young, I stumbled across John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra and began to feel nostalgic about a place I had not yet known, in particular the approaches to Yosemite and the high country above it.

Muir’s own sense of discovery was so vivid as to instil a sense of already having been there.

Nearly a century after Muir’s first summer, Richard Kauffman has come along with colour camera instead of notebook to recapture the feeling of discovery and the vividness in what Muir was to call the Range of Light. Here is the Sierra the way Muir saw it, the way others have seen it confirmed in First Summer; and here is the place I myself have felt at home in for nearly half a century, whether for only a week or two at a time, or a month or year or two— the way it was then and is now. A cool Sierra wind blows through Mr. Kauffman’s colour photographs, a gentle wind. The light is that of the gentle hours, warm light on a friendly, inviting land.

The gentleness of this Sierra wilderness is never cloying. Fear can be mixed with the exhilaration that the cliffs and torrents and storms bring. The passes come impressively high, your breath short, and your pulse rapid. But there is always enough gentleness in the Sierra, or soon will be when the storm clears; no other mountain range I know can out-gentle it.

The Sierra is worth feeling nostalgic about, either after the fact or in advance. Nostalgia is good, because it is the real bond with things-as-they-were that man requires, and that he forgets only when he is on pavement too long, becomes overconfident, or otherwise succumbs to the illusion that civilisation is more than a micron-deep veneer over the evolutionary flow of things that built him. Nostalgia helps him remember the truth—-if he lets it.