INTRODUCTION

In The High Sierra: A Love Story, Kim Stanley Robinson describes seeing a previously unnamed peak in the Sierra Nevada just south of Mt Emerson, and deciding it ought to be named Mt Thoreau, not only because the two writers were close, but because Thoreau inspired John Muir's campaign to protect the High Sierra from logging, grazing, damming and mining; he lost some battles (Hetch Hetchy!), but without Muir, would this huge (and hugely popular) stretch of wilderness still exist?

-- Chris Wayan

Mt Thoreau (ridge, left) and Mt Emerson (pyramid, right). Photo: Kim Stanley Robinson

Thoreau's Mountain

Nothing in the Sierra is named after Henry David Thoreau--I've heard that's true of the entire American West--and snowshoeing down Piute Canyon in the spring of 2008, I looked up and saw two peaks forming a matched pair--an immense gateway, like Scylla and Charybdis in the Ionian Basin.

The one on the left was Mount Emerson, a big serrated gray pyramid, 13,210 feet in altitude. Across Piute Canyon from it, the other peak was somewhat lower than Emerson, but much more gnarly and interesting. Yes, the two peaks had much the same relationship as Emerson and Thoreau, not just in size and respect but in position, being close to each other but separated by a huge gulf of air. It was just like that in Concord.

The map showed me that the southern mountain was called Peak 12691. I shouted to my companions Oh my God! It's Mount Thoreau! They nodded, used to my mountain babbling, and we hiked on...

...there is a very unusual entry in Thoreau's journal, a dream he had about a mountain. It's part of the entry for October 29, 1857, and begins, "There are some things of which I cannot at once tell whether I dreamed them or they are real." After a paragraph discussing the logical status of what we might call the hypnagogic state, he writes:

This morning, for instance, for the twentieth time at least, I thought of that mountain in the easterly part of our town (where no high hill actually is) which once or twice I had ascended, and often allowed my thoughts alone to climb. I now contemplate it in my mind as a familiar thought which I have surely had for many years from time to time, but whether anything could have reminded me of it in the middle of yesterday, whether I ever before remembered it in broad daylight, I doubt.

I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthy line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know no path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud...

It is as if you trod with awe the face of a god turned up, unwittingly but helplessly, yielding to the laws of gravity.

-- K.S.R.

Source: The High Sierra: A Love Story by Kim Stanley Robinson, 2022, p. 419 & 426. Note: my maps show Mt Emerson as a couple miles east of Piute Canyon, near Lake Sabrina, in (appropriately) the John Muir Wilderness. -- Chris Wayan

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