I’ve never read any of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novels as I’m not much of a science fiction reader. Although I’m aware that he has a stellar reputation for his fiction writing, what drew me to his new volume of nonfiction is the fact that I’m a recent transplant to northern California. I’ve been eager to learn more about the impressive mountains, the trailheads of which are now less than a half-day’s drive from me. Who better to learn from than someone who has been hiking in the Sierras for decades --- and is an immensely talented writer to boot? As Robinson notes, after his first trip to the Sierras when he was a college student, he became “a Sierra person” and never looked back.

"THE HIGH SIERRA is a fascinating combination of memoir, travelogue, scientific overview, history and much more.... This handsome volume is also generously illustrated, primarily with Robinson’s own color photographs..."

THE HIGH SIERRA is a fascinating combination of memoir, travelogue, scientific overview, history and much more. Robinson cleverly breaks up his book (which is over 500 pages) into short chapters, interspersing these various strands with one another.

For example, he features nearly 20 different profiles under the category “Sierra People,” which includes everyone from early environmentalist John Muir to “reclusive neighbors” like coyotes and pine martens. He recounts his own Sierra experiences --- some dramatic, some mundane, some transcendant --- under the category “My Sierra Life” and recalls a “typical” day of backpacking that becomes much more. He considers the complicated and beautiful geology of this remote place, comparing it with other ranges, particularly the Alps.

This handsome volume is also generously illustrated, primarily with Robinson’s own color photographs (though it is a shame that the matte paper the pictures are printed on fails to show them to their best advantage).

Through all of these wide-ranging considerations, Robinson’s personal knowledge of this place and his curiosity to learn more are palpable. In particular, his chapters on the names of various Sierra places (which he categorizes as “The Good,” “The Bad” and “The Ugly”) make a compelling case for reconsidering how we think about place names not only in the Sierra but elsewhere. This encourages genuine investigation about why and for whom places got their names and considers if renaming them might be part of a process of reducing harm.

Most profoundly --- and this, I suspect, is where his background as a science fiction writer, especially one grappling with the climate crisis, comes in --- Robinson shows, in countless moving and wise ways, what a landscape like the High Sierra can illustrate about deep ecology, deep time, and what we can both learn from and owe to the peoples who populated these mountains for thousands of years, not to mention the varied species of animals that still roam there.

Robinson’s personal love story with the Sierra is a significant one, but it’s just one of countless stories of this place --- stories with human and non-human characters, stories in which the mountains, although perhaps not quite everlasting, still outlast almost everything else we know of.