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This chapter studies the mountain chickadees of the Sierra Nevada. Using sophisticated acoustic analyses, observant biologists have learned that the songs of mountain chickadees at higher elevations are different—in the timing and frequency of their notes—from the songs of their kin dwelling lower down. Such distinctions may signal to prospective mates their fitness for the rigors of high country living. In addition, the high elevation mountain chickadee's hippocampus—a region of the brain associated with spatial memory—is larger and more neuron-dense than that of its lowland relative, giving them a superior ability to find cached stores of seed—a life-saving skill at high elevations where conditions are harshest. The chickadee is just like the improbable life that moves in us when things are at their worst. If we listen, we can attend to an interior world that holds and concentrates all the beauties of the natural world.

This chapter focuses on aspens, which grow in fur-thick groves along the stream banks of the Sierra's eastern escarpment. The leaf stem (or petiole) of most plants is round in cross section, rolling easily between the fingers, but the aspen's is as lean as a blade; it resists such absentminded turning. This is because it is made for other purposes. The distinctive design of the aspen petiole—like an oar shaft flattened at right angles to the round paddle of its leaf—allows it to bend at the slightest provocation. Readiness is the centermost quality of the aspen leaves. It is teaching us that we need to make sure our minds are open to the minute offerings and sweeping patterns in the hours and days.

This epilogue reflects on what might happen if we brought the sciences together with poetry and spiritual texts, as if one could look through binoculars fitted with two completely different sets of lenses? Might it be possible to bring the qualities and elements of the Sierra into better focus, to see them in their grandeur and in their minutiae, to learn from them and their exquisite berth in the world? Science is thought by some to be dry, technical, and quantitative, but it is not. Study is exaltation, fact is miracle, and understanding is joy. Poetry and spirituality are thought by some to be abstract, ethereal, and private; they are not. Nature is language, mind is sensual, soul is earth, and transcendence is practical.

This chapter highlights the mountain yellow-legged frog—a frog of two species found in the high, clear streams and lakes speckling the Range of Light. Rana sierrae dwells in the Sierra north of Mather Pass and the Monarch Divide; whereas her sister species, the longer legged Rana mucosa, inhabits the range to the south—and a few pocket-sized refuges in California's Transverse and Peninsular ranges. In the 1970s, biologists began finding scores of emaciated, dying, and dead frogs in streams and lakes of the Sierra Nevada. The cause, which would not be discovered for at least two more decades, was the disease known as chytridiomycosis, or chytrid. As with that of any disappearing species, the fate of the mountain yellow-legged frog raises a briar-patch of ethical questions—regarding our responsibility to prevent its total annihilation from the face of the planet and the cost of measures needed to do so relative to other urgent environmental and humanitarian disasters.

This chapter explores the glaciers of the Sierra Nevada. Like all mountain glaciers, those of the Sierra began high up in the range where massing snow persisted in shadowed mountain cradles through summer. Though glaciers have expanded across and retreated from the range numerous times during the past two-and-a-half million years, the glaciers now in the Sierra emerged only a few centuries ago when California's climate turned cooler and wetter for several hundred years, many millennia after the passage of the last great ice age. Following a glacier's tracks in the Sierra, one must cross sprawling wastelands of moraine if one is to ascend to what might remain of the glacier's frozen body. The chapter then reflects on how glaciers mirror the hidden work of the mind.

This chapter assesses the genus of flowering plants known as Castilleja, the paintbrushes. Species of Castilleja occur throughout the Sierra, from the oak savannas of the lowland foothills to the fragrant conifer forests of the mid-elevations to the sky gardens of the alpine fellfields, blossoming in flames of vermillion and violet and cream and silvery mauve. It is not the flowers' petals that give paintbrushes their colorful fireworks but rather their bracts—specialized leaves that grow underneath the petals. Meanwhile, the job of a paintbrush's roots is not so much to independently mine the soil for what they need, but to find their way through subterranean blackness toward the roots of other plants. In this sense, the root of the paintbrush might be described more accurately as a haustorium, derived from the Latin haustor—one who drinks, one who takes in nourishment.

This chapter highlights the forests of the Sierra Nevada. Eleven thousand years ago, at the end of Earth's most recent glaciation, glaciers sprawled across the range. Forests grew at the Sierra's edges, at much lower elevations than they do today. The migration of forests up and down the Sierra is a slow dance, synchronized with rhythmic cycles in the eccentricity of Earth's orbit and the tilt and wobble of the Earth's rotational axis. Other changes in the Sierra's forest occur much faster. Recent warming in the range, brought on by increasing average global temperature caused by greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, has pushed seedlings of several of the range's iconic conifer species to start putting down roots at elevations more than a hundred meters higher than where they did a century ago. In 2015, when California was in the midst of a brutal, six-year drought, trees of the lower elevations of the Sierra Nevada were beginning to die en masse, particularly in the range's warmer southern regions.

This chapter focuses on the wolf lichen, which clings to the old boles in the heart of the Sierra's red fir forest. Used variably to kill, to heal, and to bestow beauty, wolf lichen lives for itself and brews poison for its protection. Though it cannot defend itself against toxins we emit into our air, it still sends a quiet warning. Only recently have we begun to rediscover the healing potential of wolf lichen, in particular its superpowers in combatting cancer, metabolic diseases, and an antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus, one of the most common causes of hospital-acquired infections. Just as the wolf lichen relies on the bark of the fir for support, we rely on the physical world. Whether in the mountains, on the plains, or along a coast, we have as our holdfast the earth itself.

This introductory chapter reflects on the natural and inevitable conflict between science and spirituality, which takes on acute form when the subject is the natural world. Can the earth be wholly understood as a set of elements configured by physical laws, and all life forms reduced definitively to a selection of random genetic variations from an original accident of organic chemistry? During a hiking trip to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the authors talked not only of the understanding of science but also of the countless declarations from the domain of spiritual writing, even in traditional and established faiths, that claim for nature a special place in spiritual practice. Beyond examples from widely practiced faiths, there is an abundance of texts in mysticism that testify to a life-giving dimension of meaning in nature. The authors wanted to bring these two worlds together: science and art, sense and spirit, quantity and quality, concept and metaphor.

This chapter examines the Sierra Nevada parnassian, a butterfly species which dwell nowhere else in the world but in the Range of Light. Despite their voracious appetites, the young parnassians cannot manage to consume quite enough calories during the short, high elevation summer to reach full maturation. Upon shedding its chrysalis, the adult Sierra Nevada parnassian bears a leonine ruff and a fuzzy coat of fur flocking the entirety of its black body. The striking designs of the parnassian's wings warn predators they had better think twice, lest they get a bitter mouthful of poison. In the Sierra fellfields, the parnassian does two things we all must do: it finds the nutrition it needs in the place where it has been given life, and it finds a way to protect itself.

This chapter focuses on snow. All forms of snow crystals are some variation on the basic theme of a hexagon, an exterior expression of an internal molecular order, all built from water molecules arranged in interlocked hexagons. A snowflake assembles itself within a cloud as molecules of water condense from vapor. In the obscuring flurry of a Sierra winter storm, the mountains go pale, become a monochrome of gray and white, or disappear altogether. Snow gathers in crooks of tree limbs, clings to pine and fir needles. When at last a winter storm breaks in the Sierra, it moves on to the east to rail against sky-island forests of the Great Basin.

This chapter focuses on the Sierra Nevada roof pendants. Gazing out across the roof of the Sierra Nevada, one might spy thin black and rust-orange fins of frost-heaved metamorphic rock riding atop bright granite. These fins, known as roof pendants, were travelers once, geologic migrants from the sea. The distinctive chemical compositions of these geologic travelers give rise to thin scrapes of distinctive soils. Such soils, in the austere climatic conditions of high elevation, nurture gardens with delicate wildflowers. Into these Sierra flower gardens wander bees and butterflies and hummingbirds. The chapter then considers the nature of beauty. In most cultures, in every century, beauty is bound up with unity.

This chapter recounts how the authors' families planned a hike through the High Sierra with the idea to traverse the whole range, west to east. They set out on August 3, and over the next thirteen days walked ninety miles. Beginning at Crescent Meadow in Sequoia National Park, the hike led them through big valleys, along the edges of precipitous canyons, over passes and around blue and silver high mountain lakes, to the summit of Mount Whitney; through brilliant green meadows and by the sides of creeks that, because of the big winter, had become torrents. Their destination would be Cottonwood Lakes in the Golden Trout Wilderness, on the eastern side of the Sierra, looking east over the Great Basin. Ultimately, their journey across the range was more than an excursion through terrain filled with resurgent wildness; it was a vanishing into beauty.

This chapter examines the bighorn, which is an animal of formidable strength, kinesthetic genius, and most of all, inconceivable fearlessness. The Sierra bighorn, Ovis canadensis sierrae, dwells only in the Sierra Nevada. Considered a genetically distinct subspecies of the bighorn sheep known across the montane regions of the North American West, the Sierra bighorn's most conspicuous outward distinction is found in horns of the ram, which corkscrew outward from the animal's head in a broad spiral. Rams deploy this formidable weaponry in fierce contests to establish dominance. The chapter then looks at how the introduction of domestic sheep, which brought new diseases and competition for forage, and increased hunting began to winnow the population of Sierra bighorn.

This chapter describes the pileated woodpecker, which approaches the task of roost and nest excavation with great vigor, chiseling out cavernous hollows into the trunks of dead or decaying trees until they can accommodate its crow-sized body along with several nestlings. All of this industrious labor has profound effects on the forest. Numerous species of birds and mammals reside in the cavities abandoned by the woodpeckers. The birds' prodigious foraging and excavation activities introduce fungal spores to dead or dying trees, facilitating their decay and the cycling of their nutrients into the forest soil. Woodpecker foraging also exposes insects, making them both more accessible to other species of birds and more vulnerable to extremes of temperature, all of which help to regulate insect populations. Ultimately, what the pileated woodpecker teaches us is our responsibility to others.