True Nature Stories: Sonora Pass

View from St. Mary's Pass (August 2022)

It seems overly romantic now that I'm back in the city--that almost religious sense of release I felt in the High Sierra. The word "moksha" came to mind as I took in the rocky landscape with its sparse meadows, steep ochre cliffs, and river of wind-blown clouds crossing a deep blue sky. I had been making photographs here and there while my wife painted a landscape over the course of a couple of hours. The passing clouds, which occasionally spilled a dash of rain, constantly changed the landscape from bright to dark and every shade in between, first over here, then over there. I can't imagine trying to paint a landscape that refuses to sit still.

Sometimes we are the ones who have to sit still while the landscape moves into position. Such was the case for me after I hiked north up the St. Mary's Pass Trail to photograph the mountains on the south side of the valley. I'd shot a panorama from up there on August 11, 2010 (a 36x48 print hangs on our bathroom wall), and wanted to capture the scene again these dozen years later. Since I was just recently in the area of Sonora Pass, I wasn't surprised to see so little snow compared with back then, but what is interesting is that less than half the amount of snow fell in the 2009-2010 snow year as it did this last year. More snow fell this year, but it melted faster.

When I reached my destination, the whole mountain range that I'd planned to photograph was in deep shade. That would definitely not do for a comparison since my 2010 shot was made under a virtually cloudless sky. It wouldn't even even do as a shot worth hiking up there for. The short but steep hike to get into position only took about an hour, but I had to wait another hour for the mountains to come out of the shade. I'd hiked up in shorts and t-shirt and was glad I'd brought a windbreaker.

I didn't mind the wait at all. A friend took me up St. Mary's Pass for the first time in the late 1980s, and I first went back with my camera in '91. The landscape holds good memories of both those early trips. At first I didn't see any of my favorite plants from up there, Astragalus whitneyi, a locoweed whose fruits, when I first saw them, were a joy and marvel to behold. When I finally spotted a couple of the plants it was like running into an old friend.

One thing I noticed from my panoramic vantage point was a bright yellow meadow near the base of the mountains. The next day I hiked over to check it out and discovered that the source of the color wasn't the wildflowers I'd expected, but a mass of corn lilies and other plants that had already dried out. Upon closer look I was happy to see that the central part of the meadow was still blooming with ball-shaped inflorescences of purple and magenta onion flowers which were being visited by numerous honey bees and by one strikingly odd white moth-like insect about half the size of a crane fly (which iNaturalist shows to be a plume moth).

As I moved around in the meadow I came across a trail of footprints that were much too big to have been made by deer, and too incongruous to have been made by a human. It looked like I'd stumbled onto a bear trail, and the trail led into a nearby willow thicket. A nice little chill of fear raised the hairs on the back of my neck, and I hoped the bear trail was old. I imagined what I'd do if a bear appeared either in the nearby willows or farther away on the edge of the meadow. I would have no chance of finding safety by running since there was nowhere to go. I figured I'd have to stand my ground and hope that I could talk my way safely out of the meadow, with sincere apologies for the intrusion. Happily, I didn't have to do that. In fact, despite being in the middle of a meadow, I was bothered, and only briefly, by just one little mosquito!