One of the most isolated places in the world is in proximity to some of the densest populations in the world in metropolitan California. Located, technically, in Fresno County, California, its canyons and peaks, part of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, defy the imagination. I’d like to record a few recollections of my saunters through this veritable terre incognito.
Maps made of the area date back to the first surveys by William H. Brewer and Josiah Whitney of the California Geological Survey in the 1860’s. Hikers and climbers use modern descendents of these first maps, some of which are configured into 15’ x 15’ quadrangles and show contours, trails, and lakes, peaks, and valleys. For years I have called the aforementioned place, simply, the Goddard Quadrangle.
Titles of notoriety befitting the historical era of its original mapping dot the rugged watershed that the “quad” illustrates. Most names were given by Theodore S. Solomons in 1895 on an expedition for a route from Yosemite Valley to the Kings River Canyon. Included are Mts. Darwin, discoverer of natural selection, Huxley, Darwin’s evolutionary theory bulldog, Wallace, codiscoverer of natural selection, Lamarck, an evolutionary theory predecessor, industrialist Spencer, “social Darwinist” profaner of the theory, and Emerson, transcendentalist. Mt. Goddard itself is named after civil engineer George Henry Goddard, who surveyed the Sierra Nevada during the 1850’s. All of them are over 13,000 feet in elevation. Evolution Valley forms a swath of descent to forested parts. A first professor of geology at fledgling University of California, LeConte, lends his name to another canyon.
In his first trip through the area in 1873, chronicled in John of the Mountains, pioneering Sierra explorer John Muir journaled about his passage up Evolution Basin to the high peaks on the crest. “The first tributary of any size is a bright active stream coming down in a foamy cascade of one thousand feet,” he wrote. “…had a glorious view of the Owens River and Valley, and of the Sierra, one broad field of peaks upon no one of which can the eye rest. They are gothic near the axis, a mass of ice-sculpture. Mount Emerson is imposing with its evenly balanced crest and far-reaching snowy wings.” Muir then describes the party’s encampment in the South Fork of the San Joaquin River canyon. “Up early and went with Clark to a point on the divide to view the landscape and plan the route. The view is awful- a vast wilderness of rocks and canyons. Clark groaned and went home.”
I too have crisscrossed this region of gargantuan granite grandiosity many times over the years. For instance, I hiked over Muir Pass on my way from Giant Forest to Yosemite. I scrambled off trail up Goddard Canyon through exhaustively boulder-strewn Davis Lakes Basin to the lakes named after Muir’s daughters Wanda and Helen. I approached the ungodly, remote Enchanted Gorge from its gateway summits, a pair of metamorphosed volcanic rhyolite peaks named after mythological creatures from Homer's Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis. I attempted once to gaze down Spanish Peak, located in the “quad” kitty-corner to Goddard, to the stream bed below where the Middle and South Forks of the Kings River meet, and would have succeeded in visibly penetrating the view for its full 8,000 foot drop, 3,000 feet deeper than the Grand Canyon, were it not for the now famous smog generated by 28 million vehicles in a state of 35 million, or 0.8 vehicles per person. But the most memorable was a scramble to the top of the quadrangle’s namesake, Mt. Goddard, first climbed by Lilbourne Winchell and Louis Davis in 1879. It’s set off west of the Sierra crest and is therefore isolated at 13,568 feet in the middle of it all.
It might be interesting to note that all my trips into the region have been solo except this one. A fair lady accompanied me on her first “Fifty Miler” in the mountains. She declined, however, to scale the summit with me, which was the primary objective of that trip. The following is a description of the climb, made alone, and written in 1981.
“Picking the instruments of survival out of my backpack and tossing them into a rucksack, I marked off to myself, 60/40 parka and first aid kit, yes, granola bars, water bottle, bible, yes, yes, and yes… and strolled away from my partner’s tented encampment in the talus.
“The morning crispness breathed a kind of languid mien and framed expectant heart and soul with excitement spiked with dread. I trudged toward the mountain of tortured rock that catapulted another 2,300 feet into the sky. I eyed my objective. Separated from the spine of the Sierra proper, Mt. Goddard rose up in stark solitude, an apex down which some of the deepest creek canyons in the world are gouged. The Goddard quad map indicates how escaping snowmelt spills toward the south up to a total vertical distance of 11,000 feet to the canyon bottoms along the incredible Middle Fork of the Kings River.
“I bounded back and forth across the many streamlets that laced together the glacial runoff coming down from old and worn glacial icepack. The permanent ice rested on a nearly vertical slope and was haphazardly broken by the season’s heat and smudged by markings made when debris fell out of crevasses above it and came tumbling down the mountainside. Its appearance was like an old and tattered shawl blanketing the lap of a woman sitting with long, gray skirts, knees spread, and shawl spilling down pleats to languish at the hemline. Water gurgled under the steep wave of talus that had been knocked down by the expansions and contractions of the ice above.
“I parceled out a continuous litany of mini-goals, looking only to the one ahead, trying to suppress the merciless compacted collection that attempted to imprint itself onto my struggle. I scouted for some of the plants listed by Muir when he came through the area in 1873, Ivesia, Plemonium, and yellow Compositae. “I found larkspurs, columbine, Spiraea, and Dodecatheon,” he had written.
“Before me was a wall of rock hewn by erosion into vertical slabs that looked like pickets on a fence. I contemplated each move of extended, clasping appendage before feeling confident that a hold would contribute to my ascent. I felt grateful for each secure grasp on colorful crustose lichen-splotched granite in the vertical tumult of rock. I traced the toothy ridge carefully, following its disheveled sharpness south and around to the west to where it came brawling together with the great hulk of the mountain’s north face. Here, the granite splinters of the Goddard Divide reminded me of shark’s teeth ready to snap up into surprised flesh, sending me off balance and tumbling down into the gut of the range where I would be ground apart by gizzard talus and digested by enzymatic glacier waters a thousand feet below.
“SWOOSH! A few feet before my astonished face a falcon, no, two falcons, raced by, chasing each other around the top of the mountain. Effortless, even at 13,000 feet, these wedges of confident freedom were suddenly gone, having drilled away a thousand feet of altitude in seconds. Welcome to the island in the sky.
“Piles of dark gray cumulus began to assemble on the western slopes of the range. But I tried not to notice, thinking I’d be soon up and off the summit, heading back to the lady of the canyon down below. I was soon on top and attempted to absorb, in Muir’s words, “glorious” and, at the same time, “awful” views in all directions.
“Billowy masses of cloud began to obstruct the views. My whiskers and wisps of wool of my cap sparkled and crackled atop this natural lightening rod. I was ready to fry in any second. I tumbled head long down the talus, initiating a mini avalanche. I cowered under a ledge. Flashes of bolts slammed into the mountain. Thunder reverberated off canyon walls after crashing into them like boxcars against brick walls. Blizzard flakes drilled into nylon attempts to ward off cold and fear. I stared into gaping grayness, a merciless murk of wind and snow blowing past me. Awe and dread enveloped me, remembering how September storms can last well into the night. Socked in, I waited.
“Finally I caught glimpses through the gray of peaks above the Ionian Basin, cast in crimson before a rapidly advancing dusk. Misty corridors revealed the slash of Goddard Creek below Ragged Spur. I began making my way slowly down slippery talus, checking my advance carefully against memories made before socking gray cloaked the mountain again. I waited while eating raisins and reading Proverbs. I had to backtrack more than once to a point where I thought a route down ought to begin. I felt the namesake of an area west of Lake Tahoe I hiked once, Desolation Wilderness.
“I decided on a descent down a coullar that would effectively be a point of no return. Surrounding me were Promethean shafts of iron oxide-stained granite that impaled a fiery red Olympian sky. I clutched at damp and slippery rock with numb fingers. A cracking sound startled me, and I peered over a ledge toward glacier specks coming into focus. An avalanche! Boulders far away tumbled in slow motion down the ice fields of the glacier on Goddard’s north face.
“Exhausted legs, caught like prisoners between the freedom of gravity and the slavery of resistance, counted out uneven periods like a broken metronome. I could see a network of rivulets that collected the waters of Upper North Goddard Creek that, in the darkening mist, lacked any kind of definiteness, more like seeing a Martian canal system through clouds and torment with a telescope.
“Suddenly I saw a speck of red in the darkened moonscape, a pinprick in an expanse of madness. Camp. Then back again to obscuring cloud-choked depths. I blessed each vertical foot of drop.
“Once in the darkened basin below the glacier, I passed granite monoliths that seemed to ponder my stumbling gate with rather benign indifference. A silhouetted figure came out to greet me. I wondered if my eyes appeared wild and prophetic. I don’t remember saying anything at first. We walked together back toward camp.
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