I was 15 at Rainbow Lake. Ten days in the high Sierra living in a tent by the side of an alpine lake nestled in loosely-forested granite looking up at glistening snow-patched peaks, the epitome of what John Muir called “The Range of Light.”
I think that’s Rainbow Lake. I took if off of a trail description and it’s been 60 years. It certainly looks like it.
Summer of 1963 Dad arranged a Sierra Club trip to introduce us to the High Sierra. He wanted the six of us, but Mom bowed out for arthritis and took Martha on a driving trip to visit Dorothy Gormeley instead.
We were on what the Sierra Club called a base camp trip. With mostly bad rental gear, we drove to a packing station where we slept overnight. Then the next day we hiked about seven miles, with backpacks, to the base camp at Rainbow Lake. We set up our rented tent and bulky sleeping bags.
The trip was set up for 10 families, each of which had to have teenagers. With the group of teenagers we were, even the chores were kind of fun. There was a communal kitchen and a rotation so that each of us were responsible for a few meals, divided into cooking and clean up. I was barely 15 so the tasks were simple, and — because the teenagers were spread out among the various teams — a lot of fun. We had adult supervision but we also had teenage boys and girls mixed, with chores to share; and that was a lot of fun.
At night we’d have campfire gatherings, with conversation, stories, and folk singing. It was 1963 so we had the seeds of a hippy culture, but just barely.
Most days we took hikes to nearby lakes and, on two days, surrounding peaks. Getting to the top of Triple Divide Peak was a big deal. It was a gorgeous but hard cross-country hike up through high mountain lakes and rocky slopes, with some serious football-stadium-sized snow patches. On the way down, we slid dangerously but delightfully down the snow patches on our butts. That was a long day, six miles up to the peak, and then six miles back to the camp.
We also climbed Gale Peak, which was closer, on another day trip. Both of those peaks marked the eastern border of Yosemite National Park, so we were able to look down into high mountain meadows to the west of the peaks.
This is one of my best memories, my first taste of the high sierras, which changed my life. I went with my dad and my two brothers, in 1963. I fell in love with the majesty of the high sierra, the beauty of it, the peace. I went back up on my own, backpacking with friends and on one trip Vange, for every summer until 1971, when we had moved to Mexico City. And then again, when we moved back to Stanford in 1979, we went back up into the Sierra with kids (and pack burros) every summer until we moved to Oregon in 1992. And I was back in Yosemite again in 2009, 2010, and 2011 with Megan; with Vange and Timmy in 2012; and with Laura in 2018 and 2019.
