The Paradise Notebooks

90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada

Richard J. Nevle, Steven Nightingale

• Publisher: Comstock Publishing Associates
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781501762697
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501762819
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Biological Sciences

In The Paradise Notebooks, Richard J. Nevle and Steven Nightingale take us across the spectacular Sierra Nevada mountain range on a journey illuminated by incandescent poetry and fascinating fact.

Over the course of twenty-one pairs of short essays, Nevle and Nightingale contemplate the natural phenomena found in the Sierra Nevada. From granite to aspen, to fire, to a rare, endemic species of butterfly, these essay pairs explore the natural history and mystical wonder of each element with a balanced and captivating touch. As they weave in vignettes from their ninety-mile backpacking trip across the range, Nevle and Nightingale powerfully reconceive the Sierra Nevada as both earthly matter and transcendental offering, letting us into a reality in which nature holds just as much spiritual importance as it does physical.

In a time of rapid environmental degradation, The Paradise Notebooks offers a way forward—a whole-minded, learned, loving attention to place that rekindles our joyful relationship with the living world.

RANGE OF LIFE

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.

—Barry Lopez

BIGHORN

Ovis canadensis sierrae

The key to maintaining spiral growth . . . is to allow the outer surface, the surface farthest from the axis around which the coiling takes place, to grow more than the inner surface.

. . . If, at the base of the horn, the leading edge grows more than the trailing edge, the horn curls outward.

—Peter Stevens, Patterns in Nature

Why have we ever slandered the outward? The perception of surfaces will always have the effect of miracle to a sane sense.

—Thoreau

The belief that some are superior and some are inferior—whether racism, or sending another species into the oblivion of extinction . . . both grow from the same rotten core.

—J. Drew Lanham

8/9/17, Day 7. Kern Canyon to Crabtree Meadow. Feeling cocky, good in my legs in the cool morning. Told everyone our 2,700-foot climb would be a ‘trivial ascent,’ a comment which got a raised eyebrow from G. We follow the Kern, turn to follow the canyon up Wallace Creek passing a few fluttering aspens, travel south along the John Muir Trail. Watched as the umber-violet roof pendant atop the Great Western Divide came into view—we were on the other side of the Divide just a few days ago. Musical creek crossings across Wright and Whitney. Magic spells of water. Pack feeling lighter today.

When it comes to the law of gravity, the bighorn is a fugitive, ascending vertical cliffs by way of the narrowest of rock ledges. It is an animal of formidable strength, kinesthetic genius, and most of all, inconceivable fearlessness. To the Sierra bighorn, the blasting of hail in a violent electric storm is but a gentle summer shower. The booms of thunder are but peaceful mountain lullabies. Steep avalanche chutes? They are made for sprinting down, hurtling at full throttle with deftside-to-side leaps to break momentum. Bottomless chasms? They’re made for bounding over with room to spare. Precipitous peaks? Bag them by the daily dozen. And whereas the bighorn may not match the dazzling speed of the deer or pronghorn, it more than compensates by way of an uncanny access to the third dimension of material existence. With all its courage and physical brilliance in the vertiginous realm where mountains meet sky, the Sierra bighorn may as well have wings.

The Sierra bighorn, Ovis canadensis sierrae, dwells only in the Sierra Nevada. Considered a genetically distinct subspecies of the bighorn sheep known across the montane regions of the North American West, the Sierra bighorn’s most conspicuous outward distinction is found in horns of the ram, which corkscrew outward from the animal’s head in a broad spiral, splaying more widely than those of its desert and Rocky Mountain relatives. The horns are composed of a spongy shock-absorbing core of bone sheathed in flexible, spring-like keratin, the same durable material found in the animals’ superbly adapted hooves, and for that matter in the claws and talons (and fingernails) of its predators. Horns grow throughout the animal’s life, and each year a new section forms at its base, adding length and girth. One can roughly estimate a ram’s age by the number of deep grooves demarcating the horn’s annual growth rings.

The horns of a mature ram might weigh thirty pounds—as much as the animal’s entire skeleton. Rams deploy this formidable weaponry in fierce contests to establish dominance. During the late autumnal rut, hormones surge through the ram’s blood, sharpening a need for clarity, of knowing just exactly where one stands among one’s brethren. Rams challenge their rivals with aggressive kicks and neck wrestling contests, even taunting them with flicks of their indigo tongues. If a score can’t be settled quickly, the sheep will come to blows. Rearing up on their hind legs, they charge, falling into one another with heads clashing at speeds of more than twenty miles an hour. One such collision with a 250-pound ram would leave any one of us finished in an instant; yet the rams may go at it for the better part of a day, crashing into one another again and again, the sounds of each collision echoing like gunshots across the surround of lonely peaks.

Rams, remarkably, survive these impacts. In addition to having some shock absorption provided by their horns, the animals are able to squeeze blood into vessels that supply the brain, producing a kind of cranial bubble wrap that prevents the cerebrum from sloshing within the animal’s double-layered skull. After each head-clanging collision, the rams face off and stare at one another, as if to say have you had enough yet? until one of them finally has. The stakes are high, for the victor of these contests will win access to a harem of receptive females. The defeated might still have a chance, but only if they can manage to employ more surreptitious means to arrange furtive couplings.

Mothers know in their bones that fate does not always smile upon the young. Bighorn sheep inhabit a landscape of fear, at least for any creature of ordinary sensibility. Death comes dressed in many cloaks—disease, starvation, snow avalanches, mountain lions, coyotes, golden eagles, or perhaps an unlucky ledge of rock that should have held. For millennia the Sierra bighorn thrived despite these difficulties, until the nineteenth century at least, when the introduction of domestic sheep, which brought new diseases and competition for forage, and increased hunting began to winnow the population of Sierra bighorn.

A few days before giving birth, an expectant ewe will leave her herd in search of refuge in some remote haunt of the range, perhaps the very site of her own emergence into the world. She seeks a place with proximity to steep escape routes and unbroken views of her surroundings so that with her sharp eyesight she might spy approaching predators long before they reach striking distance. For this sense of safety the ewe treads, metaphorically, on an edge, trading prospect for protection, forgoing access to the best quality forage (and the nutritious milk it would have supplied) to escape the depredations of coyotes and mountain lions. Still a newborn lamb might succumb to the attack of the golden eagle, who can readily carry it offon the wing. The young lamb’s life is balanced on a pin. Only a few will survive past their second year.

Elders are vital to lambs’ survival. Bighorn raised in herds with help from grandmotherly ewes, whose own lamb-bearing years have receded, ensure the next generation stands a better shot of making it to adulthood. No one knows exactly why. Call it matriarchal wisdom, practicality, and care. If a lamb, with crucial assistance at a vulnerable time in its young life, perseveres to adulthood—evading claws, talons, starvation, calamitous falls, bitter cold, bullets, assaults from microbes and parasites—it might live to fourteen years of age. And what a life in these short years, full of companionship and high adventure, full of rambling among mountaintop sky gardens, where from tender alpine grasses and flowers bloom dreams of a delicious survival.

Twenty years ago—near the time each of our daughters, Sophie and Gabriella, were born—the population of the Sierra bighorn had plummeted to a tenth of its historical abundance, spiraling perilously close to the edge of what ecologists call an extinction vortex. About a hundred individuals remained. Sierra bighorn had become so few in number that the accumulating effects of inbreeding, compounded by one or two bad years—be it in the form of increased predation, disease outbreak, a particularly brutal winter, or a drought resulting in low forage production—threatened to push the species past the edge of existence, to become forever gone. The bighorn’s perilous situation catalyzed an aggressive recovery effort aimed at redistributing groups of Sierra bighorn from more established populations to smaller satellite herds disbursed over the range, with the hope of spreading out risk. Sheep were captured and relocated, with the aid of helicopters and netguns, by biologists with seriously epic mountaineering and sheep-wrangling skills. Part of the recovery effort also involved the highly controversial culling of mountain lions in areas of the range in which predation by lions had winnowed down numbers of reintroduced herds. The population of Sierra bighorn has responded to this ongoing endeavor, increasing as of this writing to about half of their historical abundance; though the future of the Sierra bighorn is nevertheless still precarious.

I cannot but hope there would be a way for both of our species, bighorn and human, to continue on our way, wandering and dreaming over high, lonely mountains of the Sierra Nevada. I can’t help but feel some sense of deep kinship with this wild creature, this animal who edged back from extinction’s cliff, with the concerted help of devoted individuals, during the very years our daughters learned to walk, then began to read and tell knock-knock jokes, then become close friends in high school. This Sierra bighorn must have high peaks and rugged rock and wide expanses of open sky if it is to thrive. I think I might need this too.

—RJN

We live in miracle when we witness a bighorn step along talus and navigate chas...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Setting Out
• Stone, Fire, Water
• Range of Life
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References