That might be the phrase, the quality in the high Sierra that called me, in the soul, the pure water of existence. Undetracted, undiminished, undissipated, undeclined, etc. etc. In this book I’m reading, A Naturalist’s Guide to the Southern Rockies, the section on montane weather and solar radiation, it talks about sunlight passing through the atmosphere, and the various gases scattering different wavelengths in different directions, and that the blue color of the sky is a result of water vapor deflecting blue wavelengths more than other wavelengths. Red light, invisible to our eye, is undeflected. “Most people have noticed how much bluer the clear sky looks in the mountains than at lower elevations. This intensity of color results from a decrease in molecular scattering, which primarily affects wavelengths in the short-wave, or blue, end of the spectrum, and the greater availability of short wavelengths at higher elevations because of this decreased scattering” (pg 157). Thus, to ascend into the high mountains is to approach the undeflected radiance of the light, the shining elemental insight Ansel Adams talked about epiphanically, the vision of an archetypal Sierra glacial lake basin near treeline that caught my imagination and stirred me to go to Thousand Island Lake, and I happened to go on the waning gibbous moon, the same as the vision. “All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation… My approach to photography is based upon my belief in the vigor and values of the world of nature, in aspects of grandeur and minutiae all about us.”

“I was climbing the long ridge west of Mount Clark. It was one of those mornings where the sunlight is burnished with a keen wind and long feathers of cloud move in a lofty sky. The silver light turned every blade of grass and every particle of sand into a luminous metallic splendor; there was nothing, however small, that did not clash in the bright wind, that did not send arrows of light through the glassy air. I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light. The moment I paused, the full impact of the mood was upon me; I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses… the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks… I dreamed that for a moment time stood quietly, and the vision became but the shadow of an infinitely greater world—and I had within the grasp of consciousness a transcendental experience.”
~Ansel Adams

Mystical, lovely, profound—what we know in our minds is also in the high mountains. We see something in common. The pure abstraction of mind is especially present, prescient in the high mountains. Minds are mountains; mountains, minds.

“O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.”
~GM Hopkins

The deep, abstracted blue in the mountain’s elevation, the sky is pure as the water and the knowledge thereof. Dzogpa chenpo, natural perfection, dzogchen. It is divine, the glory of the Lord, the face of God that cannot be brought down into the valley, the sacred pneumos that is stirring over the mirror-face of the deep. The black inside iridescence is undeflected radiance.


March 4, 2024
Longmont, Colorado