Fire. California is burning. Now close to a piece of my heart.
Last I saw, the Caldor Fire was one mile from our summer cabin on Silver Lake off of Highway 88. It has been in my family for four decades now, but I started going to Silver Lake when I was four years old, long before my parents acquired the cabin, mostly staying in a rented cabin at the charming and rare Kit Carson Lodge. Within the next few days, it will either have survived in a landscape forever changed or it will be gone.
Knowing this is happening is a strange feeling. Not quite real. Then tremendously sad. Then bordering on drama before remembering the situation is utterly out of my control. And I’ve vowed not to create personal drama when I can help it, having dabbled in it unawares in the past.
And maybe it will help to pen about Silver Lake.
I have long considered it among the most beautiful places in the world. It is my measure of natural beauty, with the sparkling lake, hugged by white-barked Aspen trees with leaves like green coins undulating in the breeze. And all around that, the pine forest, with sap that smells like vanilla bean and maple syrup, climbing up the sloping hills. There are wide fields of gray-white granite, carved by ancient glaciers and spotted with granite boulders looking like a moonscape.
My morning walk from the cabin is to a waterfall, a thunder of white water funneling through water-carved granite and plummeting 25 feet onto rocks and logs below and into a stream that moves snow melt into Silver Lake (elevation 7,300 feet). Of course, these last few years the waterfall has not roared like it did in the past, when there was reliably more snow and rainfall, but it’s still majestic and paintable.
On the way to the waterfall is Hidden Pond. Off the trail about thirty feet and camouflaged by a short rise of granite, you’d only know it was there if you knew the area or explored a bit. This makes it extra special. The pond butts up against sheer granite on the other side and creates a mirror in the still water. It is home to snakes and salamanders and all kinds of critters. One time, when he was seven or eight, my son Max and I spent almost an entire day by the pond. In long socks—to avoid the leaches—with a bucket and a bug-catching net, he spent all day wading in the pond catching frogs and skimmer insects and whatever he could find to put in his bucket. I happily watched him and photographed his catches, all released back into the wilds of the water.
The backdrop to our lake is Thunder Mountain with jagged peaks of dark volcanic stone, a dramatic contrast to the smooth, gray granite. The mountain is in the shape of a dinosaur or a dragon, with a long tail and arched back, its head sitting on natural caves—fun to explore and offering a seven-voiced echo at the mouth. At the peak is a canister, in which you can leave notes for other hikers willing to make the climb and sit on the sleeping monster’s back and take in the view from the top of the world. At sunset, Thunder Mountain turns scarlet and magenta, changing the pallet of the entire landscape. All day log, it changes moods with the light, not hiding its emotions from the world. A worthy role model.
Within a day’s hike are many small mountain lakes, each with their own unique landscapes of rock, grassland, flowers, forest and birdsong, rises and falls. You never know when the woodland will suddenly open into sunlight bathing meadows of wild daisies, iris, lupin, Indian paintbrush and fuzzy mule ears.
There’s nothing like a mountain storm in this area. Raindrops dancing on the gray water of the lake as beautiful as the sparkles in the sun, clouds in gradients of gray and white billowing, moving, changing the shape of the sky. The thunder rolls through the forests, the timpani drum climax of a symphony.
At night, the bats come out, swerving and turning in serrated flight, their small dark shapes lighting on the water, deftly catching insects and leaving concentric circles that disappear in moments like a magic act.
It is a place familiar to me. A soothing place my imagination can go to in relief of a nightmare. It is a place of song and beauty and life.
What will this place look like after the Caldor Fire has blazed its way through?
