JIM CONRAD'S NATURALIST NEWSLETTER Issued from the Sierra Nevada Foothills east of Sacramento, California October 2, 2005 ***** LAST HIKE UP SLATE MOUNTAIN This has been my last full week in the Sierra Nevada foothills, so on the morning when I strapped on my backpack for the last hike up to Slate Mountain everything I saw and felt had a special poignancy. The night before, we'd experienced an unusual thunderstorm. It's still the dry season so we hadn't expected rain here until late this month or November, but that night the lightning had just gone on and on, and we got about half an inch of rain. Those first whiffs of cold morning air as I began the hike were unlike any I'd experienced here so far. There were odors of rain-saturated sawdust mingled with mud, and of vegetation that hadn't been moist for months. I'd been in dry air so long I'd forgotten how a wet landscape is pregnant with odors, something you never forget in humid Mississippi. I penetrated scent clouds sometimes like stale urine, sometimes like cheesy mushrooms or rotting fruit, but the most powerful odor was a tangy one I'd only smelled so intensely in shadowy, high-elevation rhododendron thickets in the Smokys and I was amazed to find it here among Ponderosa Pines, Mountain Misery and Pacific Madrones. Who knows what causes it? And every odor was married to an association of time and place, so that morning I navigated not only the landscape but also the shadows and bruises of my own mind, walking right past some bear prints in mud pointed out to me later (and photographed -- they are at http://www.backyardnature.net/sierras/bear-b2.htm ). The rain had washed the air, making the Coastal Range 80 miles across the Central Valley to the west look like a neighboring ridge. Until now at best I had only seen a smudgy, purple-silhouetted rim to the Valley but now I saw sharply etched gorges and cliffs, and the upper slopes were green with what Fred tells me are oak woods, but the lower slopes were dun colored just like the parched grass and herbs here. If the Coastal Range hadn't stood in the way I could have seen the sky-blue Pacific, the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, and maybe ships at sea.
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