The Range of Light

Self Portrait - Staring up at Mt. Emerson ©Bennett Barthelemy / August 2016

I stumbled upon a Wilderness, a Peak, and a new route last week...

I grew up just a few hours from the Sierra but this area just above Bishop I never managed to explore.  So psyched there are gems still waiting out there... The John Muir Wilderness is definitely a magical area within the Range of Light - and its naming seems well-aligned to honor this hero of the wild world... Definitely ready to return here.

"And from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flower-bed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.... Then it seemed to me that the Sierra should be called, not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after ten years of wandering and wondering in the heart of it, rejoicing in its glorious floods of light, the white beams of the morning streaming through the passes, the noonday radiance on the crystal rocks, the flush of the alpenglow, and the irised spray of countless waterfalls, it still seems above all others the Range of Light." John Muir