Wildlife, sport and activities, sometimes all at once

(Editor's Note: This story first appeared in the Mountain Home Design 2007 issue of Mammoth Monthly magazine. Download the entire magazine here)

At almost ten thousand feet, the brilliant, noonday alpine sun is visible through the water, even far below the surface of Thousand Island Lake.

The water shimmers like a bolt of cross-died silk as blue turns to gold, gold to blue, then back to gold again. A slip of a rainbow trout glides past, just beneath eye level, then does a ninety-degree turn and shoots back towards shore, looking as startled as a trout can look.

Lower down, the bottom of the lake is a fine silt: pale cream, littered with ebony and gray basalt boulders that have tumbled down from Banner Peak, looming three thousand feet above the lake.

The water is bracing -- cold but not unbearable. It is mid-summer in the High Sierra, and these few brief weeks between late July and mid-August are the only time it is possible to traverse the mountains by swimming these high country lakes. Any earlier, any later, and it is simply too cold.

Right now, though, it is time to come up for air. Swimming up, moving closer to shore, the shallow water is warm, almost balmy. Surfacing, the deep underwater blue gives way one final time to gold, then to sun-shot white, and, finally, to the deep blue of the high country sky. It is an unwelcome shock after the sweet weightlessness of being underwater, to feel the drag of gravity and the pull of the earth.

But not for long.

Only as long as it takes to fill lungs with air and walk across this narrow, grassy peninsula that separates massive, mile-long Thousand Island Lake from the next unnamed lake that lies between here and home.

Bare feet pad through the soft carpet of alpine sedge and grass, still lush and neon-green after a record-breaking snowfall the previous winter. The silky black boulders underfoot, born of the ancient volcano that created the thirteen thousand-foot peaks of the Minarets and the Ritter Range high above, are hot, a welcome warmth.

The sun is high in a cloudless sky and it is unusually warm for this high lake-filled alpine basin. It is August 4; it is noon; it will not be dark until nine o'clock and there are still a dozen more lakes to go before reaching tonight's home, a teal-blue tent on the shore of an unnamed tarn over a mile away.

The next lake on the other side of the narrow land bridge is much smaller than Thousand Island Lake, much shallower, and, consequently, much warmer.

This close to shore, everything can be seen in intimate detail: thick-cushioned moss overhung with pale lavender aster and white-gold columbine, white phlox, yellow arnica, magenta owlsclover.

Small trout live in this zone. They nibble toes and legs trying to find a meal, then move on.

Reaching the end of the lake, in keeping with today's plan to minimize land time, the way home is down the outlet creek. The creek winds its way through several huge, terraced, perfectly flat football-field-sized green meadows, each meadow separated from the next by a short waterfall that descends into yet another flat meadow.

Swimming the moss-lined creek is easy enough; slipping over shallow granite strewn cobbled creek bed produces a few scrapes (nothing serious) and there are places where the creek is eight feet deep, clear as light, colorless in the afternoon heat -- swimming holes made in heaven by a god that knows perfection.

Getting down the waterfalls is another matter and despite the enticing and abundant Jacuzzi-style whitewater pools, (albeit cold Jacuzzis) there are times when the otter must become human and get out of the water and walk. But this giant basin below Banner is at its prime right now. It is soft and lush with the snowmelt-fed grasses, and the meadows separating lake from lake, creek from tarn, tarn from pond, are easy under the feet.

Heading home, the afternoon shadows lingering, the lakes actually get warmer as the evening progresses, making evening swimming a joy. Water stores the day's heat much like a solar battery, and tonight, when the Milky Way swings down close and brilliant, the heat from the water will be released, slowly, throughout the night.

Until then, though, there is still another quarter mile to go. The pattern of swim and walk is repeated over and over again, each tarn or lake with a different feel, a different beauty.

By the time the tent is in sight it is after eight o'clock. The sun is setting directly behind Donahue Pass two miles to the west, gilding the soft night air with deep rose and gold.

When a sudden evening rain squall hits, the late sun turns the rain the same colors, and I cannot resist one last plunge into this one last tarn, finally, reluctantly, surfacing, wading home in the warm, molten rain.

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