~ Preface ~

Why is it that whenever I return from a trip and try to put my recent wilderness experience into words, I often end up staring at a blank computer screen? Perhaps it's just a simple case of "writers block" but I have the feeling it goes much deeper than that. I imagine it has a lot to do with why I enjoy traveling alone with minimal gear.

For me, there's just something "pure" about sleeping under rocks, cooking out of an old "tin" can, making what you need with found materials and only having Mother Nature to talk with. It really doesn't bother me that there are many questions that go unanswered because I think it's that sense of the unknown that continues to lure me back into the woods.

Originally, the working title for this trip report was to be "Sierra Solitude: Twenty Nine Days Alone in the Range of Light" but of course I only ended up spending twelve days out there. Let me try to explain.

First off, my food plan turned out to be not much of a plan at all. My original plan was to haul my supplies in using a cart (see Chapter One) but that fell through. Then I thought I'd try lugging everything in at once using a pack-frame but the final load was just too heavy for me to handle. In the end I left half of my provisions behind in the steel drum I was using to house my depot supplies and would come back to retrieve them halfway through my trip. More on this later.

Another part of my plan was to travel up to Bill's camp to hang out for a while but after two days into our visit, I informed Bill that I had decided to cut my trip short. We talked extensively about my decision and in the end I'm not sure if we ever arrived at a specific reason why I was choosing to leave early. Maybe it was the human contact element of our visit that allowed a sense of loneliness to flow over me or perhaps I felt as though I accomplished enough on this trip and that returning to camp would begin to feel like serving out a sentence. I also wasn't looking forward to hiking all the way back up a certain pass just to bring back more food. Bill and I are firm believers in doing what feels "right" so in the end I just went with my instincts.

On with the report. I'm trying something a little different with this report in that instead of trying to tell the story in the order that it happened, I've decided to divide everything up into chapters. With an enormous change in my life presently underway, I think this with allow me to add information when I have time and not feel pressured to write everything at once.

Eric Stoskopf

November, 2003