May 30, 1968
As alarmingly scarce as the snow in our hills is this spring you will still find plenty of it if you try to drive up into the mountains – and all in the wrong places.
Always we start out too early. The warm spring weather and the vanishing snowline makes us impatient to get up into our favorite high meadows and valleys. From down below, the snow up there appears to be just about gone, but when we drive hopefully up the narrow winding road, before we get within miles of our objective we drive around an innocent-looking bend and smack into a 10-ft. snowdrift.
It didn’t happen quite like that to me last week when I went into Young’s Valley, because I was stopped by lesser drifts only a few hundred feet above Camp Chicago. But near the top of the high Sanger saddle, on the north side just before the road breaks over the top I found the snow to be at least 10 ft. deep on the road. The snow from the ridge above always moves down, glacier-like, over the road at this particular spot and here is the last drift to melt and open the road in late spring or early summer.
After climbing to the top of the divide, about a mile by road from Camp Chicago, a Forest Service sign on Sanger saddle informed me that I had another six miles to hike before I reached Young’s Valley. The day being perfect and my yen to see Young’s Valley undampened, I hiked on in.
Every year I have made a practice of driving in to Young’s Valley at least 2 or 3 times during the summer, sometimes camping up there 2 or 3 days and botanizing the surrounding mountains. Each time I would go in I’d find a different set of flowers blooming in the Valley, and I wondered how many I had missed. So my plans for this year include a series of trips to Y. Val., about two weeks apart, beginning just after the snow melts and the first flowers bloom, and continuing on to the end of the season in late fall.
I had to walk over so much snow going in this first trip (before the middle of May) that I wondered if Young’s Valley would still be covered with snow. But, although there was patchy snow in the mountains all around, the floor of the little valley was entirely clear, still soggy from the recent melt but completely free of snow.
I spent a couple of hours in the valley, and it was one of my most enjoyable sojourns up there ever. It was fairly cold and breezy in the mountains around, but down in the valley it was sunny and warm. I sat on the remains of an old tree trunk at the edge of the valley and ate my lunch, and as I ate I also treated my eyes to an incomparable feast of the beautiful high snow-speckled peaks all around. Because of the cluster of grand peaks that surround Young’s Valley, some of the highest in the Siskiyous, this is a place of almost incomparable beauty, and my favorite mountain retreat by all odds.
While I was in the valley on this particular spring day the out-of-this-world splendor all around and the unimaginable peace and quiet was something that would have to be experienced to be believed. The only animal life I saw consisted of a chipmunk, a blue grouse and a pair of ravens, and the only sounds I heard, aside from the faint sound of the wind higher up and the low gurgle of slowly running water was the croaking of the ravens as they winged their way across the narrow, mountain-walled valley.
As I sat there eating and wondering, a deteriorating contrail that a high-flying jet had left in the sky drifted vertically along the crest of El Capitan, looming above Young’s Valley to the east, giving that magnificent rock the appearance of being in eruption.
The first spring flowers to bloom in Young’s Valley I found to be western buttercups, spring beauties, glacier lilies, Drummond’s anemones, mountain penny-cress, wedged-leaved violets, and a very few precocious alpine shooting-stars.
And so my mission having been accomplished, in spite of the lingering deep snowdrifts, I trekked contentedly back to the vicinity of Camp Chicago, where Little Toot was impatiently waiting for me, both of us resolved to try again in a couple of weeks or so.
