Discovering a Backyard
Early in 2020, before Covid (yes, there was a time before Covid) I was planning a summer photography project to hike the 193 mile length of the Sierra High Route over the course of 30 days, photographing it with the Horseman SW-612 panoramic film camera. The route stays primarily above 10K feet and exists mostly off-trail, meaning for days on end you must route find your way through the trail-less maze of granite mountains, passes and canyons. Over the years I’ve hiked several sections and they quickly became my favorite parts of the High Sierra offering; solitude, grandeur, adventure and beauty. To highlight this nature of the route I opted to photograph it in true panoramic, which is why I chose the Horseman camera. A fully mechanical 6x12 centimeter frame size that wouldn’t burden my pack weight too much but meet my two main criteria, being panoramic and shooting film. But alas, by May it was becoming clear that life was on hold. Our family has been lucky through all this and our own personal adjustments are a small price to pay for the larger health of the world so I postponed the trip for a year.
I turned local instead. And our local ecosystem is pretty special, living at the base of the Sisters Mountains and the Central Oregon Cascades. As the summer set in I started to hike a series of long distance routes weaving throughout the Sisters Wilderness. I created my own off-trail sections and got to know the mountains here more intimately than I had before. The col between South and Middle Sister is a jumble of mixed volcanic rock, snow fields and undulating micro canyons. The flanks of Three-fingered Jack are steep and lined with a shale like scree that makes off-trail travel rather tricky, and there’s a field, on the western side of North Sister, where obsidian glass litters the ground. The north side of Broken Top became a little secluded haven, high enough to wander in sub-alpine vegetation but low enough to make scrambling easier. I didn’t photograph on these trips, initially because the weather wasn’t interesting but it turned into a hiking project and allowed a little respite from image making that I didn’t realize at the time I probably needed. I fell into a rhythm on these hikes. When I hike alone I hike fast and can pound the miles. My mind sharpens and the world collapses to that of wilderness, breathing, stepping, experience. Poetry flows, not in vocabulary but in the immediacy of existence in such a state of mind. To wander the mountains is to discover, what that discovery is, well, that’s up to you.
