Climb to the high country

From the flyleaf: "I was only a boy when I made my first climb to the high country—Mt. Tallac, on the California side of Lake Tahoe," writes Bill Hotchkiss. "Two days on a mountain, the great cliffs, the snowbanks melting out, timberline, a diminished sense of human importance, and from the summit the unimagined perspective of the Sierra, of Desolation Valley and of the higher peaks off to the south. And the *wilderness." Surely the rising tide of technological civilization would never reach this watermark." In these poems, Bill Hotchkiss shares with us his knowledge of this country, a knowledge as probing and detailed as Gary Snyder's of the Pacific Northwest. Also like Snyder, Hotchkiss writes in direct yet luminous language, always sensitive to reflections of the Sierran landscape and its animal and human inhabitants in his own inner landscape. I climbed in a rainstorm as ancient As the peak itself, my body a oneness With the far beginnings of life— The great heights of the mountains, The great heights of the swirling dark clouds And thin forkings and white jets of lightning.... [stanza] These mountains do not cry for tragedy— They cry for peace. They do not need us, Do not want us, Will applaud with claps of thunder When the human race is gone.