I could not agree more. I have to spend a week a year above 8000 ft breathing clean air, surrounded by trees, boulders and the big shoulders of the Sierra Nevada.

Backcountry California is still a very, very special place.

Was there just this last weekend. Amazing how the sierra back country can give you clarity.

I just got back from a 5 day trip to the BWCA. I'm fat, out of shape and a definite city girl, and yet I willingly...HAPPILY canoe for miles, portage my supplies over rough terrain, and put up with the flies for the absolute beauty and tranquility of it. Every time I get back I am exhausted and in pain, but I am also recharged.

I am reminded that the world exists beyond this little powerbook screen.

It's a sad moment as the charms of summer have suddenly been cracked off by departmental meetings and prepping for another semester. This article lets me dream a little of kicking back on a high country lake shore without a care in the world. What a lovely escape. Thanks.

I caught the backpacking bug in the 70's, and hiked many miles in the Adirondacks and New Hampshire's White Mountains with my boyfriend at the time. But it'd been 30 years since my last trip when I signed up with a backpacking group through www.meetup.com. We (seven 20-somethings and me) did a weekend trip on the Thunder Swamp trail in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains and, despite thunderstorms, heat, humidity, and ravenous mosquitoes, it was a phenomenal experience. We ate ripe blueberries along the trail, forded a rushing river holding onto a rope tied to two trees, camped by the tea-stained Saw Creek, and woke at dawn to mysterious splashing sounds, like cannon balls dropping into the slow-moving waters. The last evening, I convinced the two other women in the group to walk upstream for a nude dip to wash off the sweat and dried mud--that bracing bath was lovelier than a hot tub soak at the pricey Post Ranch Inn at Big Sur.

At 55, I move more cautiously now--mindful of the repercussions of a blown knee or sprained ankle, and, like Gary Kamiya, rely more on anti-inflammatories; but, also like him--once past the range of dayhikers, with my home on my back, I feel nature’s caress on some inner part otherwise inaccessible.

Thanks, Gary, for your beautifully rendered tribute to backpacking and the Sierras.

Many of my happiest childhood memories are wrapped up in summer backpack trips all up and down the Sierra Nevadas throughout the 70's. It's true that they do welcome you like no other mountain range.

A few years ago, driving up the eastern Sierra escarpment, past Lone Pine, Independence, Bishop and Tom's Place, I was astounded how little they seem to have changed. I live in Washington State now, with beautiful mountains, peaks, and a real sense of wildness. But they somehow don't compare to the warm, sunny, Sierras I remember from my youth.

You're article was one more reminder that I need to get back, back to where I once belonged.

How eerie. I dreamed I was camping in the Sierra last night and woke up this morning with those happy feelings that Gary Kamiya describes. Unfortunately they faded way too fast.

I miss my backpacking days. It's been a couple of years since I last went on a Sierra adventure. It's hard with a 22-month old. But this article gives me hope. I vouch to share with my daughter as soon as possible the wonders of the backcountry, a loce of nature and the great rewards that come to those who are willing to put in a bit of effort. What a wonderful gift to offer to one's children or, as in the author's case, to one's parents.

My wife and various friends have backpacked the Ouachita Trial and the Ozark Highland trail of Oklhoma/Arkansas. Good times, good times.

We'll have to skip our fall hike this year, as we're going to take a crack at the coast-to-coast trial in northern England.

I don't know that I have heard the wilderness experience described better than this:

"Of course, the great and abiding mystery of nature is that it isn't happy to see us, is utterly indifferent to us -- and yet still caresses some inner part of us. Maybe that's because that inner part, like a tree or a mountain, is itself a piece of the eternal world and recognizes its touch"

Great writing. Thanks.

(I am 55, and not slowing down much yet. Here is a solo backpack trip to a trailess Colorado Basin last June:

http://www.naturalist.org/pages/070207.html)

Both of my grandfathers used to go into the Immigrant for fly fishing. My parents took us up there for their 25th. We moved to Kauai before making the trek. I keep thinking someday, yea maybe someday...

Thank you Gary for you wonderful and very insightful sharing about the Sierra Nevada. It roused thoughts of my own outing to Sequoia National Park this summer. I had the honor to climb the Black Kaweah, the dominant mountain in the Nine Lakes Basin area of Sequoia, for the third time with my 26 year old son. I first climbed the mountain with my wife when I was 28 in 1977. Several years later my son and I climbed the mountain when he was 10.

Standing on that mountain for the third time this summer almost brought me to tears. So many memories over a lifetime seemed to be intimately connected, like time itself had been squished. It was like some part of me had remained on the mountain over the years. The view from the Black cannot be described. It can only be experienced, especially when intermixed with all the memories.

This mountain has given my son and I a valuable new dimension to our relationship, one that we will both cherish forever. We have climbed several other peaks over the past few years. But there is only one Black, and only one Nine Lakes Basin where it towers. Three cheers for the Sierra Nevada.