My Trinities

By Tim Sims

NEWLY REVISED for next year's hiking season! The most comprehensive guide to Northern California's most spectacular wilderness area, the Trinity Alps (plus a chapter on the Russian Wilderness). Photos and text about more than 200 lakes, all major peaks and trails, plus extensive off-trail info. Geology, botany, birds, human history, swimming holes, bear dens, life-or-death narratives, and humor throughout.
This is a guidebook that refuses to talk down to the reader. The author doesn't come off as some godlike Expert, but rather as the waiter bringing the dessert cart to your table: "Would you like to try a slice of Caribou Lake this week? Or perhaps the waterfalls above Grizzly Meadows?"
The Trinities' story is told in a subjective, often stream-of-consciousness style that covers not just the What, but the Why. Designed for hard core hikers, newbies to hiking, and even couch potatoes with an interest in stories of adventure or natural beauty. Though the subject matter is very regional--most Trinities hikers come from the area between San Francisco and Seattle--the stories are inspirational for readers anywhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tim Sims
• Release date: Jun 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301600168

Tim Sims

If you read my book, My Trinities, you'll probably learn as much as you'd like to know about me. But if you'd still like to know more, or if you have comments or criticisms or corrections or additional information for the book, email me at [e-mail].I'm still out there hiking. In fact, I update the text and photos at the end of each hiking season. So if you've bought my book, you can download the new-and-improved version for free!

Book preview

My Trinities

Playing in

Exploring Northern California's most spectacular wilderness

by Tim Sims

Published by Tim Sims at Smashwords

Copyright 2013, 2020 Tim Sims

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity. (John Muir, 1898)

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why This Book?

Ycatapom Peak: a Typical Day on the Trails (with Poison Canyon & Eleanor & Shimmy Lakes)

White Trinities

Smith & Morris Lakes (with Stuart Fork, Alpine Lake, & Sawtooth Peak)

In the beginning . . . Canyon Creek (Canyon Creek Lakes & Boulder Creek Lakes)

Where It All Nearly Ended: Grizzly Lake (with Thompson Peak)

Caribou Lakes Basin (with Big Flat, Caribou Mountain, Sawtooth Ridge, Little South Fork & Moraine Lakes, Snowslide Lake, the Caribou Lakes, Pothole Lakes, & Bear Dens)

Coffee Creek Trails (with Boulder Creek, Sugar Pine Lake, East Fork, North Fork, Battle Creek, Union

Creek, Foster Lake, South Fork, Rush Creek Lake, Salmon Mountains spine, Adams Lake, & Packers Peak)

Hiker at Rest: Place Names in These Alps

Papoose Lake (with Hobo Gulch, the Green Trinities, & Rattlesnake Canyon)

Sapphire & Emerald Lakes (with Stuart Fork, Morris Meadows, & Mirror Lake)

Griz Reviz-ited (with Cæsar Peak, the Thompson & Cæsar Glacierets, & Lois Lake)

Boulder Creek Lakes Revisited (with Forbidden Lakes)

Canyon Creek: Taking Attendance

Canyon Creek: Higher Up, Further In (with Upper & Lower Canyon Creek Lakes, L & Kalmia Lakes, & the world's best swimming hole)

Josephine Lake (with the Salmon Lakes & the Matterhorn)

Bear Lakes Basin (with Big Bear, Little Bear, & Wee Bear Lakes)

Rush Creek Lakes

Hiker at Rest: Learning the Hard Way

Red Trinities

Swift Creek (with Parker, Foster, & Mumford Meadows; Parker Creek & Steer Creek; Tri-Forest Peak & Red Rock Mountain; Twin Lakes, Ward & Horseshoe Lakes, & Landers Lake; and Bear Basin)

Granite Lake: a Riot of Wildflowers (with Gibson Peak , Seven Up Pass, Siligo Peak, Four Lakes Loop)

Above Boulder Creek (with the Boulder Lakes, Cub Wallow, & the Lion, Conway, Foster, & Sugar Pine Lakes)

Tangle Blue, Marshy & Log Lakes

Short & Sweet (with Stoddard, Upper Stoddard, & MacDonald Lakes, Doe Lake, Granite Lake [north], Eagle Creek, Shasta View Mine, Stoney Ridge, Granite Peak, Middle Peak, Echo Lake, Van Matre Meadows, Bee Tree Gap, Long Canyon, Bowerman Meadows, & Lake Anna)

Northern Trinities (with Fish Lake, Twin Lakes, & Poison Lake; Long Gulch & Trail Gulch Lakes & Deadman Peak; the South Fork Lakes & Hidden Lake; Mavis, Section Line, Virginia, & Fox Lakes; Telephone Lake & the Marshy Lakes; Mill Creek, Washbasin, & Mosquito Lakes; & many Boulder Lakes)

Hiker at Rest: Superlatives

Russian Wilderness (with Russian & Eaton Peaks; & Russian, Waterdog, Bingham, South Sugar, Eaton, Big & Little Duck, Taylor, Paynes, Upper Albert, Statue, & Big Blue Lakes)

And for an encore . . .

Private swimming area on the far end of Grizzly Lake.

Introduction: Why This Book?

How to use this book:

1) Start reading here.

2) Keep reading until the words run out. (The last words will be my email address.)

3) Call up your friends to arrange your next (or your first!) play date in the Trinity Alps.

Why should you read this book?

If you have ever experienced the Trinity Alps (or the adjoining Russian Wilderness), then you already know the obvious answer to that question. If you have spent an afternoon splashing about in one of its swimming holes, or hiked through a hundred-fifty-yard chute of sweet-smelling azaleas, or watched a bear belly-flop into one of its crystal clear lakes, or climbed through a snowfield to summit on one of its many peaks with spectacular, hundred-mile views—if you've ever been a part of any of this, then motivation will not be an issue. Of course you're going to read every word you can find about such a place. Of course you're going to want to see someone else's pictures to compare to your own. Of course you're going to look for points of connection with the experiences of another hiker.

If, on the other hand, you've never had the privilege of spending time in such a wonderland, well, maybe you should take a couple of minutes to glance through my photographs in this book. Go ahead, I'll wait. I had to leave out some of my best waterfall and stream and swimming hole photographs—sorry—because my partner Christine is naked in most of them and, well, that would have made this a whole different category of book. But enjoy the rest of the photos—even in their less crisp, compressed-for-ebook state—and see if they don't draw you in, singing a siren song that says, Trinities! Trinities! Trinities!

If you're a Trinities virgin, you might be interested in knowing that the Klamath Mountains (home to the Trinities and the Russians) straddle the border between far northern California and southwestern Oregon. They contain some of the wildest, most rugged terrain in the western United States. Wild and scenic rivers wind through impossibly steep canyons. Thousands of species of wildflowers dot the moist green fens or punctuate the crevices in the rocks. Wildlife thrives.

That's four uses of the word wild in five sentences, but if you knew this backcountry, you'd know that's not excessive.

You might drive all day in the Klamaths and not find a single mile of flat, straight road. California's Trinity County, in the heart of these mountains, doesn't have a single traffic light in the whole county. Few human beings find a way to live here. Many who do are connected with the US Forest Service, managers of much of this land.

Of course there are national forests here: the Klamaths boast the most diverse collection of conifer trees in the world. (You'll read more about that later.) Within these national forests, several most special places have been carved out for wilderness hikers: the Marble Mountain Wilderness, the Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel Wilderness, the Castle Crags Wilderness, the Russian Wilderness, and—a drum roll, please, for the largest (535,000 acres) and most dramatic—the Trinity Alps Wilderness.

The term desolate, as in desolate wilderness, never applies to these wilderness areas. No, these wildernesses have a couple of hundred pristine lakes in glacially carved cirques and valleys. They have year-round snowfields and roaring cataracts and mighty streams. They have stunning peaks and gentle, welcoming forests and meadows. Think Yosemite, without the crowds.

And when I say without the crowds, I'm not just referring to some of those out-of-the-way lakes you've never heard of (but are about to), the ones that offer solitude 355 nights or more of any given year. No, in the Trinities and Russians, even a big-name lake can give you solitude if you time it right. Twice I've had the entire Caribou Lakes basin all to myself (well, except for two bears) for three consecutive days and nights. I've had both Upper and Lower Canyon Creek lakes to myself for two days. I've had one or more all-mine nights at magnificent Grizzly Lake on four different trips. And Papoose Lake three times. Sapphire Lake, deepest and bluest of them all, surely has dozens of visitor-free nights each summer. And when you find yourself in one of these solitary events, it's almost too much to take in, an embarrassment of riches. I find myself running about, desperate to take in with my senses as much as I possibly can, because I know that in this ever-shrinking world, this sort of privilege can't possibly last forever.

For now, these wilderness areas are virtually unknown outside the region, which is fine with most of us who hike and climb and fish and swim and hunt and camp here. And even if the outside world does find out about them someday, few from the big cities will make the effort required to get here.

But those who do find them might appreciate a little help. Hence this book.

But aren't there already some guidebooks for the Trinity Alps?

Yes, but this is not your typical guidebook, and definitely not your grandfather's trail guide. There's nothing plain vanilla about it.

A generation ago, three books of that more traditional type were written for these Trinity Alps. One (or two) might be out of print. They all do a more than adequate job of getting the hiker from road to trailhead to the destination lake. I know I've pored over their pages many an hour, and learned quite a lot.

Yet something is lacking in these books. For one thing, those books tend to be the sort that you might refer to briefly in the week before a big hike, and not so much the sort of book you would want to sit down and actually read. No dramas, no hair-raising bear stories, no humorous anecdotes.

Secondly, those books abandon the hiker at the lakeside campsite. They have little to say about exploring what's beyond: the dramatic peaks, the granite spires to be negotiated in the high arêtes, the unnamed lakes, the hanging gardens, the hidden waterfalls and swimming holes, the hard-to-reach views, the intriguing lichens, the best rock climbing, the bear dens, and the many other off-trail adventures that, for some of us, are a big part of the reason for our being there.

Don't get me wrong: this book does cover the basics for Trinities novices—and with far more attention than those others to the geology, the wildlife, and the wildflowers. But this book also addresses those higher up places, those further in places, those fascinating worlds within worlds inside the wilderness experience that keep us old-timers coming back here year after year.

A third issue: the old guidebooks can sometimes talk down to the reader and come off authoritarian and oh-so-serious—This is what you need to do! These are the items to include in your pack! These are the wilderness rules to observe! It's Moses on Mount Sinai! You can almost feel a stern finger wagging in front of your face. So matter-of-fact, so rule oriented, so humorless, taking themselves oh-so-seriously when the Trinity Alps (or Russian Wilderness) hiking experience should be such a free and joyous affair!

I used to tell my struggling violin students, "There's a reason it's called playing the violin!" The same principle applies to enjoyment of the Trinities. We are here to play. We are here to revel in the beauty. We are here to find amazement.

So even though this book will tell you a lot about each of the major trail systems within the Trinity Alps and the Russians, it is much more about why we hike, what we hope to find, what we feel when we're standing atop that peak, what it is within us, as human beings, that draws us higher up and further in to these wondrous places. I don't just want to inform, I want to inspire.

To do that, I try to take you inside my own mind while I'm hiking up the trail. I give you the play-by-play account. I want you to feel the heat, to smell the wildflowers or the scent of the bark. I want your pulse to race upon encountering the spectacular view. So I spend my time in these pages telling you, in a very personal way, what I find most interesting, most dramatic, most amusing, and most challenging in this wilderness.

Each chapter explores one main trail system and all its surrounding side trips, first in the glamorous White Trinities, then circling around through the outer regions of the Red Trinities, the northern trails, and finally the Russian Wilderness. I share pictures from my own hikes. I tip you off on the psychology required to attack each trail. I offer my own opinions. All of which makes this book more of a labor of love, and far more subjective than the typical hiker's guidebook.

Rather than trying to strip out everything that is personal or unique, leaving a bare skeleton of facts, I've chosen to leave the muscles and flesh (and the heart and the guts) still on the body. You, the reader, get to pull out those items that will be relevant to your own hiking experience—just the way you would if we were to meet someday on the trail and get into a conversation. (And we just might.) The skeleton can do little more than tell you What; only the total package can begin to get at Why.

Strangely, by putting more of myself into this book, by being unapologetically subjective, I think I've succeeded in writing a more accurate and truthful account of what you'll actually find there when you strap on your pack and head on up the trail.

We all experience life subjectively, we all have slightly different realities, so why pretend that the emotional, physically demanding, highly aesthetic experience of a mountain hike can be captured through some dry, misguided objectivity?

My Trinities is precisely that: my thoughts and my emotions and my experiences in these mountains. Yours will surely be different. You'll have your own favorite lakes, your own private names for swimming holes or off-trail routes, your own thrilling peaks, your own favorite wildflowers, your own bear stories. And yet, as I so often find when swapping tales with my fellow hikers on the trail, you will no doubt find many, many points of connection between your experience of the Trinities and mine.

And in that sense, although I wrote this book for the hikers of Northern California and vicinity, this book is also for a wider, more general audience. Hikers in other parts of the country—or former hikers who've been forced by age or injury to retire their boots—or even couch potatoes—can enjoy vicariously my sense of wonder and awe, or the humor in the many mistakes I've made, or the drama of the occasional white-knuckle adventure.

We all need to reconnect with wilderness—especially here in 21st century America. We live in an age when to be an American, as far as the rest of the world sees it, is to be obese, loud, and shallow. Wilderness hiking works against all those trends.

So from swimming holes to bear dens, from ice fields to flowered meadows, all of these tales from the Trinity Alps (and Russian Wilderness) trails can expand and uplift your spirit. And even if you're unlikely ever to hike anywhere near these particular alps, this is a book to inspire you to get out, wherever you are, and GO!

Those trails aren't gonna hike themselves!

What makes you such an expert?

Use the term expert, and people will want to challenge you on all sorts of arcane details. So I won't ever use that term. But when it comes to these mountains, I am far more experienced than the average Trinities hiker. I've logged thousands of miles hiking here. The Forest Service says there are 510 miles of trails that they maintain within the Trinities. I've covered most of those miles, plus a few hundred more on off-trail scampers.

I have visited all but a handful of the named lakes, and many that have no name. I have climbed most of the prominent peaks and ridges—pretty much anyplace that doesn’t require ropes, pitons, carabiners, harnesses, hammers, drills, and other heavy, expensive equipment.

On this snowy winter morning as I write, my life list of Trinity Alps lakes stands at 165. That's in addition to all 44 of the Russian Wilderness lakes (including a few just outside the official wilderness boundaries), and another 80 or so subalpine lakes in an arc from Castle Crags Wilderness to Mount Eddy to Kangaroo Lake to the Marble Mountains. Those numbers will all be considerably higher by the time you read this page. The point is: I've been around.

I’ve read everything I can find about the history and geology. I’ve tracked down as many of the wildflowers as I can. I'm learning the birds and their songs. I’ve long studied the habits of the big mammals who hang out here. But there will always be so much more to know about the geology, the botany, the biology, and the history of this region.

So I'm not passing myself off as an expert, nor am I the world's greatest hiker or climber. I'm just an experienced, thoughtful Trinitarian who finds himself, in the mornings of these cold winter months, with enough time to write down his adventures to share with his friends.

Never talking down to the reader from some exalted throne of Expertise. No, I see myself more like the waiter at the restaurant coming to your table with the dessert cart, tempting you with one treat after another. How about trying a little Caribou Lake this weekend? Or if not, there's a nice slice of Grizzly Lake. There's something sweet and delicious for everyone.

[back to Table of Contents]

Ycatapom distant right, Mount Shasta distant left.

Ycatapom Peak: a Typical Day on the Trails

(with Poison Canyon & Eleanor & Shimmy Lakes)

IT'S A LATE September morning, still dark, and a pack of coyotes just outside my bedroom window howls in chorus in response to the whistles of a passing train. They do this most summer nights, and I don't mind in the least being pulled back to consciousness for their wild and woolly choral recital. I consider it one of the perqs of living in the mountains. It sounds . . . wild.

Who knows what they hear in those whistles? Do the coyotes think the train is another of their species? Doubtful—they seem smarter than that. Surely it's not some romantic wistfulness, the way some of my species hear the sadness of departure, or the excitement of travel adventure, in those far-off wails. Something, though, draws them in, makes them want to raise a howl and join in with that sound.

Me? Well, I too hear something in the whistle of this particular train, something familiar and fun. This train has come through here many times before. Its whistle is three-toned and pitched higher than most. And it's blowing the same three-note chord that opens up the vocals to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody:

Is this the real life? [Bottom note of the chord changes.] Is this just fantasy? . . .

Sometimes I, too, hear the train and want to sing along.

Judging by the hint of gathering light in the east, it's not quite 5 a.m. That's early, even for me, and a part of myself, out of habit as much as anything, wants to shut my eyes and grab another half hour of sleep. But the reality is, there is no part of me that could go back to sleep just now. Not today, not with a Trinity Alps hike coming up.

In bed in the darkness, I can't possibly know that within just a few hours I will be seeing a sight to make my blood race, a sight to live within me and inspire me again and again in the coming months. If anything, I'm thinking of today's trek as more of a late-season fitness hike. Yet already I am suffused with a nervous energy, an anticipation, and wave after wave of curiosity. I'll be day hiking in a brand new area of the Trinities today, terra incognita. And though my planned hike is only on the lesser, eastern side of the wilderness, mostly in the ultramafic Red Trinities (as opposed to the grand, granitic White Trinities), I know these mountains well enough to expect great things somewhere along today's trail. In my couple of hundred trips into these alps, I've never yet come home disappointed.

I get up and slip into my oh-so-comfortable, oh-so-familiar hiking clothes.

I splash soy milk on the oats I've been soaking overnight, slice up a few garden strawberries, and push the first bite of breakfast between my lips. Breakfast will be a standing-up, multi-tasking affair, grabbing bites and chewing while I move about the house assembling all I'll need into my fanny pack. Relatively little remains to be done, because a) I travel light, and b) I keep that fanny pack ready year round for hiking at a moment's notice.

It holds a camera (batteries charged), topo map, a bag of trail mix (sunflower seeds and almonds that I've toasted with a bit of tamari, along with dried papaya, dates, raisins, and coconut flakes), a small magnifying lens (for rock crystals, the delicate centers of wildflowers, or to help counting up the contour lines on my topo map), pen and paper for notes, lip balm, a small tube of sunscreen, a whistle (the full extent of my emergency equipment), band-aids (to prevent blisters under my ankles, mostly, since I rarely remember to use them if it's just a matter of covering up some blood), and cotton balls (to prevent ear aches on cold windy ridges). A friend who's a doctor also gave me two small towelettes of insect repellent and two tablets of allergy medicine, which I haven't needed yet in the three years I've been carrying them around. (Lavender scents and light-colored clothing seem to help quite a bit in mosquito season, and I left most of my allergies behind when I moved away from the Midwest.) Oh, and toilet paper, of course.

And that's it. I'm ready to go on any opportune morning. Just throw in a lunch (today it will be leftover beans and rice) and possibly an overshirt, fill up the water bottles, grab my hat (for ticks as well as to block the sun), and I'm out the door. It's all very practiced and efficient.

Here's a partial list of what I'm not carrying with me: a phone, a music player, a way of connecting to the internet, actually anything that might bring that world—that rushing, crowded, greedy, always-selling, often angry, conflicted, self-important, stressed-out world—into this world of quiet, wild, pure natural beauty. It's not that I'm afraid of technology, like some Luddite from the world of Geezerdom. In fact, I quite like the idea of portable wildflower apps, birdsong apps, even a scat-and-tracks app to enhance the learning experience on the trail. But I need boundaries. For me, it's all about the John Muir quotation: Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity. Just leave me alone with the whole sensual experience these mountains can offer, and don't connect me with that noisy, irrelevant world.

* * *

I'M STILL eating breakfast from a standing position. This time I jam into my mouth two big bites of oats. While I'm chewing, I slip out the south door and into my herb garden. Beside the French lavender, I pinch off four sprigs of mint: two sprigs of peppermint and two of spearmint. These will go into my water bottles. When the day heats up, the water I'm drinking will taste more and more like mint tea, rather than tasting vaguely of plastic. (On lengthy backpacking trips, when I'm filtering water and refilling the bottles again and again, the mint can still stay fresh for as long as three days. I can also replenish the supply with the fragrant leaves of coyote mint or some other wild mint along the trail.)

I'm taking four water bottles today. Two will hang in the mesh pockets on the sides of the fanny pack; one will stay in the car to refresh me when the hike is over; and today, an extra bottle will ride inside the main compartment of my pack. Water can be a limiting factor in the late summer months following a dry-ish winter. And I'll be covering new ground today, where I'm not familiar with the number, location, or quality of the water sources. My other option is to carry one bottle of water and use the second mesh pocket for my water filter. But in nine days I'll be climbing Lassen Peak, where the replenishing of water will not be an option, so I'll use today's hike to practice carrying the extra water weight.

Back inside for another bite of oats and strawberries. I look around. What else needs to be done? Oh! I almost forgot—I frequently do—to write down my destination on the sheet of paper with emergency contact information that I leave on the kitchen table. That's about my only concession to the possible solo hiking dangers out there—aside from choosing a brightly colored shirt (fire engine red or neon yellow) for hikes way off trail. That's to help in recovering my remains. (Like that will matter to me!)

I started writing down my destinations when Christine went back east to take care of her mother. Not that the destination note will ever do me any good. If I were to break a leg or in some way become incapacitated deep inside the alps, how long, really, would it be before one of my neighbors—whose houses I can't even see from my place—thought to break into the house to find the note? Two weeks? Two months? At that point, we're not talking rescue, we're talking about the recovery of a few bones and a little bit of chewed up gear.

Besides, the note would only tell my initial intended destination. I nearly always zing off on some exploratory tangent along the way. In our weekly phone calls, I do try to tell Christine where I'm going—if I know myself. The major backpacking trips fall into this category. But most of my day hikes are more spur-of-the-moment.

The morning after watching 127 Hours for the third time—that movie about the solo hiker who had to cut off his own arm to escape from a canyon in Utah—I left the note on my kitchen table and I made a sign to put in the window of my pickup: Hiking solo near Log Lake. If it's dark and I'm not back, I need help. Thanks.

I wrote this, it turns out, because of a misapprehension. The lake list on my Trinities topo map says of Log Lake, No trail. Very Diff. X-Ctry. So I headed into the wilderness, compass and topo map in hand, and really didn't have a Very Diff. time finding the lake. I did, however, have to climb over about a hundred downed trees and push my way through steep brush and occasionally hike up the creek bed itself.

As I approached the lake, I heard the last thing I expected: human voices. I saw two geezers—probably younger than I, if the truth were known—and the daughter of one of them, a beautiful, all-smiles 20-year-old. Seeing me crash through the brush, they asked how I had gotten there. As I was explaining, they probably noticed the rip in my right sock, the scratches on my legs, and the fact that I had to lick the blood from a gash on my arm I had only now become aware of. When I finished describing my route, they explained to me that they had come in on The Trail, which had been put in post-map publication.

We had a good laugh about my re-inventing the wheel. And I'm sure, back at the trailhead, the sign in my pickup's passenger window was drawing a few chuckles at my expense. Oh well, as Jane Austen says, What are we here for, but to make sport of our neighbors, and they, in their turn, to laugh at us.

* * *

I'M DOWN TO three last bites of breakfast. I'm still multi-tasking, barely tasting my food. Yet even as I busy myself with the mundane and the prosaic details, an anticipatory glow washes over me, caresses me, enlivens me. These mountains will do that.

Thoreau spoke of sucking out all the marrow of life. That's precisely what I intend to do today. I am up, up, up for it. And if sucking that marrow turns out to mean pushing my body higher or farther than my usual comfort zone, then so be it. Whatever this new trail demands, I'm ready to give it up!

I run over to the closet to pick out some CDs for listening to in the car. The right music matters. Being a musician, I'm particularly susceptible to earworms: little snatches of music that bore into my brain and get on an unstoppable loop, running over and over and over and over through my head. Those earworms can be murder on a trail.

In the days when I still had a job, I would practice violin for an hour before my two-mile walk to work. On the walk in, I would often find that I had a short theme from my practice music, or maybe just one or two measures, rolling along in my brain, always in time to the rhythm of my steps on the pavement. The earworm would work its way just below the surface of consciousness, so that various tics and gestures of mine would all fall into the rhythm of that music. Eventually, I might forget all about it until a co-worker, three hours later, would ask me what song I was humming. Still there, dammit! It would take the blasting music in the weight room, during my extended lunch break, to kill that morning earworm . . . or maybe replace it with a new one.

Right now, I'm still humming the Bohemian Rhapsody I woke up to. One train-whistle chord: that's all it took to set it off! So I need something to replace Queen. If I'm going to get stuck on some loop, it needs to be music I won't mind hearing again and again and again. Something like Gustav Holst's The Planets or—oh, this will do for today—Beethoven's opus 18 string quartets. (I play these quartets myself occasionally.)

And the music for coming home? That needs to be up, celebratory, grand. One summer I got on a Bonnie Tyler kick: I Need a Hero. Lately, though, I've been going with a Schumann quintet played by French pianist Claire-Marie Le Guay and my German friends in the Mandelring String Quartet. There's a moment in the final movement where the music builds and builds to a chord that you think must be the grand climax. But then the transition shows that that first chord was merely a false cadence. There's still more to come: a grand fugue—a musical chase—that's going to lift me out of my seat (literally, the first few times), shouting Ohhhh! to the uncomprehending Jeffrey pines along the Park's Creek road.

But that's just me.

* * *

I'M IN the car by 5:45. (The prep time takes about as long to read about as it does to actually live it.) It's still dark, still e-a-r-l-y, but hey, those trails aren't gonna hike themselves! Today's initial destination is the Lake Eleanor trailhead, off the Swift Creek road. I'm coming in from the east (Mount Shasta). I'll be taking the Park's Creek road, my favorite of all the wonderful roads that approach the Trinities.

Now, if I were going to Grizzly Lake or the Russian Wilderness or any of the lakes draining to the South Fork of the Salmon River, then I'd drive a little farther north and take the Gazelle-Callahan road to forest road 93. That route too has its charms and its interesting features. The half-billion-year-old limestone bluffs of Bonnet Rock and Lovers' Leap used to be coral reefs around an island arc in a shallow sea. The Callahan chert outcropping has been used for thousands of years as a source of rock for scrapers and spear points. Cool.

And back in the years when Christine and I were living on the coast, in Trinidad and then Arcata, going to the Trinities meant a harrowing drive east on highway 299. That road is all hills and curves and frustration, especially if you get behind some white-knuckled tourist driving his monster RV at 35 mph, and the next place to pass won't come for eight or nine miles. I've started many a hike with a wave of carsickness to overcome and with my left knee already aching from using the clutch so often.

But the Park's Creek road—ahhhh! The pavement is indeed narrow, too narrow for a center stripe. And it winds around a lot. But there's almost never any traffic early in the morning—or any other time of day—and the views are spectacular. As you come over the pass, where the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the road to go toward Deadfall Lakes and Mount Eddy, you're suddenly looking down onto the dramatic white-granite walls of the Bear Lakes basin, with the rest of the Trinities spread out behind it. (And at the end of the day, coming back on this same road, you get the thrill of topping out and this time seeing Mount Shasta in all its glory.) As you drive, if you roll down the window, you get to smell the vanilla odor of the Jeffrey pines that dominate this portion of the ultramafic (serpentine) landscape.

There's a certain bear I watch for along this portion of road: a large, reddish-brown male, about the same color as the bark of the Jeffrey pines. Unlike so many of our local bears, who turn and run at the first sign of humans, this bear is proud and strong and sure of himself.

I've come across him several times now. One morning I was driving Christine's ancient little Honda CRX on the final uphill stretch before the pass. The bear was standing in the middle of the road about a hundred yards ahead of me. He turned and looked at me, but made no move as I approached. I took my foot off the accelerator and coasted to a stop about ten yards from him. Unconcerned, he took his time finishing his business, whatever that may have been, and then, unhurried, ambled along on his way. Magnificent!

Wow, I love this road. And I love this excited feeling of entering a wonderland. Since my early retirement, I've been living every day in beautiful mountain scenery. My house is surrounded by cedars and pines—as I said before, I can't even see the homes of my neighbors—and I have long, dramatic views. So the on-the-road transition to wilderness is no longer as abrupt as it once was.

Back in the day, I remember leaving work at the university, walking away from great, steaming piles of stress, and getting in the car to head for these alps. I needed those hours on the road: to decompress, to calm my busy mind, to prepare myself for the glories ahead. Nowadays, I move easily from one beauty to another.

I follow Park's Creek road to its end at highway 3, which runs north-south along the eastern edge of the Trinity Alps. I drive south a while, then turn west and bounce along for eight miles on the Swift Creek and Lake Eleanor dirt roads.

* * *

THE SUN has just peeked over the eastern horizon as I step onto the trail. I'm a morning person generally, but in the mountains that tendency is reinforced by my conscious desire to do most of the serious climbing in the cooler hours of the day. Plus the early morning light is good for photography. Plus there's a better chance at seeing wildlife about. Hiking alone, I just might be able to sneak up on somebody and observe.

(Unfortunately, I sometimes hike so quietly that I inadvertently sneak up on the humans I overtake, scaring the dickens out of them. With one middle-aged woman in the Ansel Adams Wilderness, I thought for a while she might go into cardiac arrest! Her initial instinct was that I was an attacking bear.)

The sky is clear this morning, and there's a crispness in the air that I smelled with my first deep breath upon exiting the car. That first breath—shall I call it a trailhead tradition? I think I do it consciously, though it's hard to imagine anyone not taking a deep whiff of the wildness here. I love the smell of this place: the cleanness, the earthiness, the combination of bark smell and stream smell and rock smell and floral top notes. I love the smell, and I love the taste, and the sights and sounds and touch of it. This wilderness is an engulfing, engaging sensory experience.

Somewhere among the trees just above me, a mountain chickadee whistles its greetings: Hey, Tim-my. The hey is a half note on a-flat, followed by an eighth note and a dotted quarter note for tim-my, both a step-and-a-half lower on f-natural. H-e-y, Tim-my. H-e-y, Tim-my.

About half the chickadees I hear sing that step-and-a-half interval. The other half only drop down a full step, from a-flat to a g-flat. (I'm guessing on the exact pitches, based on the fact that I tune my violin to an A-natural each day, and that note tends to stay with me.) Why the difference in the interval? Geographical differences? Age or gender differences? I haven't found out yet. But I find great warmth in those greetings whenever I hear them, especially if I've been away from the mountains for a while. And such a booming voice for such a little bird. It's a mere handful of gray-and-white feathers, with a black mask over its face, like it just came from a bank heist. Yet despite its size, that song penetrates the woods for great distances.

(By the way, I am well aware that not everyone hears the words Hey, Timmy in that call. Some hear chick-a-dee or fee-bee-bay. One friend grew up hearing cheese-bur-ger! But because I love this place so much, I will probably always hear my name in that song.)

Anyway, as I say, the sky is clear and the air crisp this morning. It looks like it's going to be one of those perfect end-of-summer days. I am out here nearly every week from spring thaw until snow closes the passes. I've experienced these Trinity Alps in weather ranging from withering heat to pouring rain, blizzards, and hail. But the high percentage of perfect hiking days still amazes me. Just one more thing to love about this wilderness.

Eleanor Lake comes up quickly on the trail, less than a mile. This is strictly a fishing lake, as opposed to the more granitic, glacially carved swimming lakes in the White Trinities. I suppose some swimming takes place here on hot afternoons, but the swimmers will have mud on their feet and ankles as they exit the water. Which is not to say this can't be a beautiful lake given the right light conditions.

On this early morning, Eleanor Lake has yellow and orange grasses along one side—what pass for fall colors in this evergreen environment—and is about a quarter covered with lily pads. A mating pair of ducks drifts along lazily on the far side. An idyllic setting.

On the near side, some fisherman (or fisherwoman) has pitched a tent about, oh, 18 inches off the trail. As I pass by quietly and glance inside, a small dog looks out at me nervously. It can't be easy for her, surrounded by a world of strange new odors and suspicious sounds in the night.

The trail now goes downhill three contours' worth (240 feet) over the course of half a mile, and I think about how I'll react to that when it's one final uphill at the end of the day. Probably no big deal. Though I wonder, as I often do, just why the trail builders made this choice rather than following the contour on the hillside.

I cross a little stream, barely running this time of year, and begin the climb toward Shimmy Lake.

This is peak berry season, as evidenced by great piles of bear scat on the trail. Most of the piles are black, corresponding to the predominant color of the berries on this slope. But one pile is reddish, dotted with the bright red berries themselves.

This surprises me. In nature, red is so often a warning color. Poison! Not always, of course. I enjoy strawberries (wild and domestic) and red raspberries. And when I'm hiking, I love browsing on those brilliant red thimbleberries that stain my fingers and taste like the red Play-Doh we used to have in kindergarten. But these particular red berries, in the poop, appear to be winterberries, and the one time I put one of those in my mouth and bit down, I had an immediate, strongly negative reaction. Without conscious thought, my mouth