This weekend, I’m headed back to the Sierra with the Descenders for our annual Monster Climbs trip. I’ll be posting some photos this week to get you drooling for all the beautiful roads we’ll be climbing. Sorting through the photos this weekend got me thinking a lot about home.
A lot of people think of the place where they grew up as their “Home”. My wife, for example, has been living in the US for over 17 years, but still tells people she’s “going home” when she visits Germany. Technically, then, my home is gone. My parents sold the house I grew up in years ago and to be honest, I’m pretty happy not to call Orange County, California my “home”.
My home is the Sierra Nevada mountains. I’ve been traveling to the Sierras since I was about 18 months old. I used to vacation with my parents in the Bridgeport area for a couple of weeks every year. More recently, I’ve been taking my family to Yosemite Valley, Tuolumne and Mammoth.
Now, I’m no expert on the Sierra and I’ve really only spent time in a few of it’s special places, but for some reason, when I’m headed northbound on Hwy 395 just past Inyokern and I look up to my left at the great mountains of the southern Sierra rising out of the Mojave desert, I get this overwhelming sense of returning to where I came from.
Maybe it’s all the summers I spent as a kid fishing, hiking, being bored, playing with rocks, chasing girls and just generally growing up. Maybe it’s the majestic beauty of these mountains. Maybe it’s all the reasons why people like John Muir spent so much time there.
And maybe it doesn’t really matter why home is home.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I completely understand! The Monster Climbs Trip sounds great. Beautiful country and I’m looking forward to seeing the pictures. By the way, thanks for the welcome back. I’ll be climbing at the end of the month. Blood, Sweat & Gears…
http://bloodsweatandgears.org/Home.html
Wow – really great photos!
I worry that if I mountain biked where you live, I’d run into a bear! (an old phobia!)
@Donald: I’m jealous of you – 13,000 feet of climbing in a single day!
@will: You might run into bears occasionally, but usually they’re more interested in camper’s food than mountain bikers. Some people bike with bear bells though…
The Flickr photos are gorgeous! As soon as we saw the photos the girls recognized some of them and we also felt a certain feeling of love/homecoming at the sight of all that beauty!