The Colors of the Sierra Nevada

    September was a fine time to hike the Emigrant Wilderness Area – great weather, good swimming, few people, and magnificent colors, even without the rampant color of wildflowers. Here, in layers, were blue sky, white-granite mountain peaks, and green conifers; here, pasted against a blue sky, was a white snag with a slash of red wood in it and some green lichen on it; here, layer by layer leading the eye upward: pale green water grasses, Easter-egg-blue water, dark green conifers, white rock, blazing blue sky. 

    Walking up or down a massive slope of white granite towards or away from Big Lake revealed the same blue-on-white juxtaposition: granite and lake, or granite and sky.

As I walked through a wide expanse of dry-grass meadows, a pair of Western bluebirds, flying from rock to rock over the muted browns, flashed a pure indigo that was as much an enrichment against the dun-colored grasses as entire banks of scarlet Indian paintbrush and yellow Oregon sunshine.

    One morning I awoke to a deep red sunrise over Emigrant Lake that changed so swiftly from red to pink to gold before fading into the pale blue morning sky that I didn't make it to the lake in time to swim in the colors and swam instead in steel-gray-green morning water. At mid-day I swam through blue. In the evening, the water was black.

     Granite, I saw as I walked day after day through Emigrant Wilderness, is not monochrome white but a multitude of soft colors, the same colors of Veronese houses in Italy. Last month, at a cafe on a street corner in Verona, I wrote in my journal the names of those colors: mustard yellow, mustard brown, salmon, pink rose, the lightest possible chartreuse or yellow – all with an underneath hint of brown; pale lemon, burnt sienna, cream, orange, burnt umber, salmon pink, blue-gray with a tinge of lavender. Or go ahead and call it lavender, I said in my journal. 

    Now I saw those colors again, as though the Veronese painters had made a trip to the Sierra Nevada and exulted in the colors that striped the granite and bundled in it. When they returned home, they painted their houses those exact colors. In Verona, the colors enriched every street. In the granite, they emerged subtly from the predominant white. Finding them was like finding Easter eggs in the grass.