Over the past 17 years, I have hiked and backpacked across the high Sierra of California.  While I have embarked upon extended trips into the national forests and wilderness areas over hundreds of miles of the western slopes, my most memorable, elevating, and stunningly beautiful journeys have been into and through the high Sierra of Yosemite National Park.

The high Sierra — even in the summer months — are a vastly different place than the usually touristed vistas and trails.  The need for a 30-50lb backpack is an extra “entrance fee” that most visitors are disinclined to offer of themselves for access.  Even at well-known locations, such as Vogelsang Lake, I have spent days without sight or sound of another.  Stillness rules the landscape in late September and October.  Even on Summer Solstice at Emeric Lake, I was the only person camped there.

Many of these trips have been with my husband, and others have been solo backpacks.  I’ve made fewer solo trips in recent years, as the demands of hauling all of my camping and camera gear alone have become a bit less enticing.  It is challenging to maintain that level of physical training and strength with my other increased responsibilities.  Nevertheless, over the years, I have been fortunate to reach many hallowed places in the high Sierra, and rarely have I ever seen another solo woman backpacker.

Some of the travels to locations in Yosemite have been for specific clearings and planetary ley line restoration, particularly for my years of work in Yosemite Valley.  Other trips have been devoted to exploration and receiving deeper understanding of the complex time-spaces of the region. Once you have dozens of viewpoints, from different places (physical and energetic), you can grasp a whole that is not accessible from a single place or trip.

Being able to develop that wholeness of awareness, over so many years of work in this region, has offered me a powerful vantage for some of my most recent work with large-scale transformational consciousness.  These mountains, lakes, trails, and Sierra skies have created a spectacular backdrop to the deepening of my own awareness of the evolving planetary system.

With this wholeness of awareness, I would like to offer you these photographic windows into the high Sierra of Yosemite.  I have been incredibly grateful for the opportunities to be a witness, participant, and healer at these places — even with behind-the-scene hardships of weather, volatile energetics, and very complicated dimensional pathways.  While not always easy, the trail has been luminous and powerful.

Selected images from the High Sierra of Yosemite