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California Sierras in War Times by Lester Rowntree

My little home hangs to a hill above the Pacific. For the back garden there is a mountain surfaced with the gray-green of artemsia brightened for most of the year by wild flowers. Fifty steps, flanked by California wild flowers and species plants from many countries, wind down to the drive below. Out of the front window of my study the dark boughs of Monterey pines make a floor for the wide stripe of ocean blending into the riband of fog which merges sky and water. Little fishing boats from Monterey still - even in war time - go down the coast in the evening and come back at dawn, all white in the water’s light and dragging their dories behind them like newly born young.

The activities of last summer (which was to have been spent in the field) had to take new shape and, for once, I lived through the months with fog and the barking seals and the red-tailed hawks hovering over the flower-spilled hillside; however, I was able to wangle a Sierra pack trip, short but full enough of impressions to supply happy memories for a rubber-bound 1943. The procedure of getting to the summer Sierra is always the same: the Coast Range must be crossed, the hot Valley spanned and the first night spent in the yellow pine zone. Next morning the load is transferred from car to pack animal. The horses and mules patiently wait their turn, taking deep sighs as the cinches are tightened, watching the packers out of the corners of their eyes and ruminating on the length of their trip. The lookers-on, this year reduced to very few, pass banter and advice, wave an envious good-bye and the slow movement along the flower lined train begins.

Blue lupins and red columbines and penstemens, rose-pink sidalceas and scarlet castillejas, yellow eriogonums, potentillas, mimulus and brodiaeas, and presently the bloom of diffusive Phlox douglasii smothering its stiff mats against the granite rocks. Then the sprawling Arctostaphylos nevadensis taking the place of A. patula, willing to tackle any obstruction, falling back only when the boulder is mammoth or the tree trunk tall, and without any effort or benefit of human hands accomplishing just the effect the rock gardener yearns for and cannot achieve. With it grows the huckleberry oak Quercus vaccinifolia, making with its small shining leaves, much the same distant impression on the landscape, and the low holodiscus, foamy-cream with bloom. Low Delphinium decorum var. patens in many colors paint the openings in the forest; Calochortus leichtlinii looks up as we pass. There is dwarf Allium campanulatum in dry spots and tall A. validum among the taller Lilium parvum in wet ones. Now the creamy flowered snow brush, Ceanothus cordulatus, all feathery with bloom and, at the edges of dark brown pools, Phyllodoce breweri and Ledums, among whose foliage mosquitoes lie in wait for human ankles. The fragrance of monardella keeps pace with us, the wind blows in one’s hair, the music of streams is constant in the ear and the old sense of freedom and release comes back again.

For obvious reasons, the Sierra section nearest to home had to be chosen; north of the haunts of Aquilegia pubescens and Lilium parryi but not far enough north for Lutkea pectinata, Phyllodoce empetriformis and the L. howelli and L. heckeri groups of Lewisia. This was a quick renewing of old and familiar acquaintances, with little chance of meeting the unusual.

On water that was recently snow, the pads of Nymphaca polysepala lay basking in the sun and Cassiope mertensiana was just past blooming, the tiny meadows were alive with lovely grass of parnassus and shooting-stars and buttercups. Kalmia polifolia var. microphylla was covered with wide rosy saucers and the little streams which cut their ways through the mountain meadow were edged with squashy wads of Gaultheria humifusa. Low shad bushes were in full bloom as the first Pinus contorta var. murrayana and mountain hemlocks were reached. One look at the hemlocks told me which way the prevailing wind came from, for on that side the branches were short and stiff, while on the sheltered side there were long and feathery. Red firs and the silver pine, P. monticola, appeared together with the snow banks, the nosy Clark crows and the rosy finches. At the edges of melting snow banks, flattened, impatient heads of pale yellow eriogonums were rising from depressed pads of crowded silky foliage, despairing now but soon to become spirited plants alert with promises of abundant bloom. Like all other alpines, the eriogonums were hurrying to make the most of the short time at their disposal, putting on, in the rush of business, a show of brilliancy and opulence.

In this zone, about 9000 feet, I was dropped off. I set my little pup tent up on a flowery ledge close to an ancient tamrac pine above a lake. Into the tent went cameras, presses and books; the bed roll was spread not far off on a mattress of hemlock boughs. That first evening as I lay gloating, I counted seventeen different flower species and as darkness came on, listened to the sound of melted snow running over granite (like the voice of a querulous woman), the soothing song sung by the wind in the conifers and the constant coughing, coughing of the lake below. When I opened my eyes next morning the fuchsia tints of penstemons, the lavenders and lilac of phloxes, the blue of alpine lupins and the yellows of dwarf mimulus were reaching for the slanting sunrise light. The calochortus in the chinks at the foot of my bed retired, I noticed, long before I did, and never got up until after I had breakfasted. A crevice behind me was crammed with the bright light green fonds of Cryptogramma acrostichoides. At the base of a rock at my side ran a silver line of Pellea breweri clothed in what the Royal Horticultural Society color chart calls chrysanthemum crimson, were flowers of Rhodiola rosea edged close to mats of Erigeron compositus starred with bloom, and all around me were the pervasive white pads of antennarias. Over to the right Mimulus lewsii, together with that widely distributed little shrub, Potentilla fruticosa, were enjoying life in a shiny spot slithering with seepage, and over-beyond was the only salmon pink Aquilegia formosa I have ever seen. In the moisture at the base of wet rock cliffs, Veratrum californicum gathered in colonies, their classical shoots still partly folded, though those we had seen below had spread their majestic, ribbed leaves and shot their starred flower spikes.

A home-like feeling always comes after living in one mountain place for a few days. Only by repeated wanderings through the canyons and over slopes can one make them one’s own, and only by lying in the same spot night after night, watching the approach of night and day’s dawning steal over rocks, water, trees and flowers, can one really come to know the mountains. In the moonlight a granite edge, painted purple by seepage becomes illumined thistledown floating in a pearly aurora, and dark boughs of prostrate old evergreens take on life and character they never manifest by day.

The recumbent conifers are among the most imposing sights in the Sierra. Out of a hair line which splits the exposed granite comes a seedling Tsuga mertensiana, Juniperus occidentalis or tamrac pine, quite expecting to become a stalwart monarch of the mountains. Winds batter it and snow sits upon it and every attempt at the perpendicular is thwarted; yielding to the inevitable it finally travels sideways and gives itself up to the horizontal life. The branches hug the twisted and weathered old trunk close, the fresh growth of their young boughs showing in sharp contrast to the old bark, which has a smooth silky silverness beneath its seamed and shredding exterior. Sometimes it becomes a wheelshaped affair, quite flat, the distorted hub alone showing its years. Work your way across the dramatic snow - smoothed granite slabs where these antique dwarfs prolong their existence, over the steep shoulder and down the sheltered slides of broken stone, and you will find all three of these conifers erect and invincible, their roots deeply anchored in loose humus and rock, and their trunks shielded by the neighboring cliffs.

These fissures in the granite boulders provide happy places for sprouting seeds, for they are filled with the most satisfactory mixture of humus and gravel. I watched the building up of this idea combination, the slow breaking of the thin veneer-like crust on the granite, and the mingling of its crumbling particles with bits of rotted woods, last year’s cones and fallen leaves, all pulverized by winter. This perfect diet for alpines filled the fissures and the first inhabitants moved in. Sometimes these form a living ribbon following the line, sometimes little groups of individuals such as three inch Erysimum perenne or perhaps a low and wide red-berried elder, Sambucus racemosa or the rather similar mountain ash, Sorbus sitchensis.

Everything up there seemed filled with exhilaration and levity. Humming birds made little swipes at my hair, flying off between thrusts and squeaking, “there now.” Small groups of warblers fluttered from hemlock spire to pine top, apparently just for fun, and in the dusk as I am dozing off, a pair of foxes chased one another back and forth over the smooth rocks – quite oblivious to the human who lay within that still cocoon.

I came away feeling that I was just beginning to rediscover all there is to know about the mountains. But a war was on and there were things at home to be done, so I left my symphonic world, recrossed the Big Valley and, passing again over the Coast Range, returned to the fog and barking seals, the artichoke fields along the river’s mouth and the telephone.

This article was originally published in the July 1943 issue of the National Horticultural Magazine.