An Accidental Wilderness

摘要

THE PREVIOUS WINTER had been a season full of storms that dumped copious amounts of snow on the Sierra Nevada, and I heard that the waterfalls were roaring. So my 10-year-old son and I decided to make an impromptu June trip to the mountains to see the spectacle for ourselves. Our destination: Wapama Falls, a thousand-foot cascade that John Muir once described as "roaring and thundering, pounding its way with the weight and energy of an avalanche." Muir's description was spot-on. A mile from Wapama Falls, we could hear its thunderous bass, as if the very rock overhead was being torn asunder. Before we'd started the 2.5-mile hike along the Hetch Hetchy Trail, a ranger had told us to be careful. "There's lots of water in the streams," she said, gesturing to a poster of a hiker who had been swept away while crossing the Wapama footbridge days earlier. "We're still looking for him."