Yosemite National Park - The High Heartland

Above the sequoia range is a colder and harsher world, a place of pristine beauty dominated by rock. It was here that the glaciers were born. Yosemite's highest peak, 13,114-foot Mount Lyell, spawned several, each moving away from the parent at about the same time. One flowed east toward what is now a high desert; another crept down Mount Lyell's west side to Yosemite Valley; the largest pushed north, dropping a big block at Tuolumne Meadows, and then went on to fill the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River and Hetch Hetchy Valley with an ice sheet 60 miles long and 4,000 feet deep, the largest single glacier in the entire range.

Although it has been at least 10,000 years since the last great glaciers retreated upslope, little has happened to alter the scene. The high heartland is still mostly a slate-gray world gouged and chiseled by the ice. It is littered with boulders that were dropped by melting glaciers, and its walls are polished to a high sheen, a sort of granitic mirror created when ice-trapped sand and stone scoured the bedrock.

Yet wherever rock is covered by soil, evergreeen forests, interrupted by azure lakelets and flowering meadows, alleviate the starkness of this rooftop world. Largest of all the Sierra's alpine meadows is Tuolumne, its lawnlike expanse sliced by the Tuolumne River and framed by peaks both jagged and round. From June to mid-August, wildflowers embroider the meadow with color. Like Yosemite Valley and other Sierra meadows, Tuolumne is only a temporary phase in the process by which glacial lakes yield to meadows and then to full-grown forests. This transition is incredibly slow, and in the High Sierra it is hindered by interminable winters and brief summers, so the luster of this Sierran valley should not be dimmed for thousands of years.

Romping through the meadows during the warmer seasons is Belding's ground squirrel, a prairie dog look-alike that often sits on its hind legs, neck craned and paws folded across its paunchy stomach. It hibernates longer than most other North American mammals, remaining underground eight months of the year. To prepare for such an extended hibernation, the rodent eats from the time it emerges from its burrow until the time it returns, and by the end of summer it nearly too fat to run.

Etched against the horizon, on rocky outcroppings, stands the twisted form of the Sierra, or western, juniper, a stout, heavy-limbed evergreen. Its branches reach out toward the sky like living driftwood; its roots curl around the granite like claws, keeping the tree in place despite brutal winds and storms. Corkscrewed and weathered by the elements, the picturesque tree is the patriarch of the highlands, a Methuselah that can live as long as 2,000 years.

Above the tree line, the gray-crowned rosy finch summers on windy ridges and rocky slopes that are shunned by other highland birds. This finch is sometimes called the refrigerator bird because it builds its nests at elevations above 10,000 feet. Flying from one snowfield to another, it eats insects that have been blown upward from lower elevations and immobilized by the cold. When the days grow short, the finch descends to lower slopes for the winter.

Just as spring creeps into this high country a blossom at a time, so autumn trickles downward leaf by leaf, a foliage shower of claret, amber, and brass that drenches fawn-hued meadows and forested slopes. Later in the season, dark, ominous clouds hover in brooding silence, their gunmetal gray matching the granite's tones until all of the Sierra is a monochrome world. Winter's unleashed fury blazes a wild path across the Sierran crest, then whips savagely down Yosemite Valley. When the screaming winds stop, the land lies smooth and quiet and white; snow blankets all. Evergreens bow under the weight of miniature avalanches, hardwood branches are wrapped in thin icy coats, and bubbling streams are frozen silent.

From the loftiest outpost to the lowest foothill, it is a scene of lonely grandeur. In time the snowmelt will once again thunder downward in great, exuberant leaps, and rainbows will stretch from Yosemite Valley's crest to the grassy floor. The snow will melt from El Capitan and run in tiny rivulets down Half Dome's head. This is Yosemite, a place so incomparable that Mark Twain once suggested it must be where God cast all His remaining treasures after creating the rest of the world.