The Snowboarder's Journal - The Snowboarder's Journal 20.4
THE YOSEMITE TOAD AND INVISIBLE MOUNTAINS OF THE SIERRA NEVADA
Words: Connor Wood 2023-01-24 08:15:03
Will Brommelsiek opted to do a five-day traverse with a 34-liter pack to optimize his experience on the single line we rode from base camp on the final day. However, that meant traveling with a lot of stuff hanging off his back for the rest of the trip. The black box over his left hip is one of the recording units we used to learn more about the Yosemite toad. Photo: Connor Wood
It took a day and a half to reach the first gateway, a 12,000-foot pass in the Eastern Sierra. Having traveled 13 miles and 5,900 vertical feet with 50-pound packs, it was the point of no return. If we dropped west into the desolate heart of California’s High Sierra, we’d be locked into at least another three days of arduous travel along an uncertain route. The wind picked up; a late-afternoon storm blotted the sun. It was the beginning of April and the mountains were in a time of transition. We dropped westward. The walls of the valley swallowed the distant peaks as we descended and from the far side of the pass it felt like we’d burned a bridge. But ahead lay another gateway, one that guarded the exit.
The winding route and excessively heavy packs were both my doing. We were connecting known and suspected breeding areas of the Yosemite toad, a secretive creature that lives only in the central Sierra Nevada. The toad’s populations are declining, but where and by how much is poorly understood. The adult toads are best surveyed during their brief annual breeding period right at snowmelt, when they converge on high-elevation meadows to trill their mating calls, breed, lay eggs and then vanish until winter snows force them into hibernation. This is an inconvenient lifestyle from the perspective of wildlife ecologists like me because it’s impossible to visit more than a tiny fraction of Sierra Nevada meadows at snowmelt for a toad census.
Instead, most biologists have opted to wait for the roads and trails to become passable and then visit the meadows to observe tadpoles and young toads. But this means we know almost nothing about the adult populations. My hope, and the premise of this expedition, was that autonomous audio recording units could help us learn more about them. A small team would deploy them ahead of the breeding season, collect them during the summer, then analyze the audio to estimate how many toads are present across a broad area—a crucial piece of information to determine what protections this species requires.
We had 14 units between the five of us, Pelican cases housing a microphone and six D batteries. I avoided weighing the units before the trip because I didn’t want to know exactly what we were getting ourselves into. At best, they weighed “a lot” and, when you’re carrying two of the units plus food, fuel, shelter and your splitboard while booting up a high pass, it was definitely “too much.” Although if anyone was disgruntled by the extra weight, they kept it to themself.
It takes a particular appetite for adventure and purposeful suffering to sign up for a trip like this. Jason Champion had just returned from running the Alaska glacier camp for the Natural Selection Tour, Will Brommelsiek had also left all-time conditions in Alaska, Isaac Laredo had been teaching avalanche safety courses while working on his guide certification, and Roan Rogers had been splitboarding all season long. I’d spent the winter running hills around my house in central New York and splitboarding in Vermont to ensure that I could keep up.
The next morning, we scrapped a planned fast-and-light day strike along one of the Sierra’s east-west spines. Instead, we skinned north along a treeless moraine with sweeping views of pale granite ramparts to the west, red talus towers to the east and the distant snows of Yosemite to the north. We rode through trees to a possible toad meadow, followed a golden creek through green pines to another potential toad breeding ground and heard birds for the first time in two days. Signs of life. We deployed recording units at both meadows and at a third area farther downstream, trying to offload the gear I’d planned to put elsewhere.
The skimpy snowpack and our heavy gear meant there was simply no safe and efficient way to get to the original target meadows and back in a day, and still make it out of the mountains before running out of food. The Sierra hadn’t gotten significant snow since December. It was a lackluster winter for snowboarders in the region and, without more snow, a grim spring awaited the toads. They lay their eggs in shallow pools fed by snowmelt; not enough snow and the pools dry up before their tadpoles can survive on dry land. During the increasingly frequent dry years, they die by the thousands.
Our stakes were lower, but we too were at the mercy of the elements. Sweating in the glare of the afternoon only to eagerly await the warmth of sunrise, scanning for signs of instabilities and listening for rockfall, testing for lingering windslabs on north aspects and watching for roller balls on south aspects, counting snacks more carefully as supplies dwindled, shaking fuel cans to estimate remaining burn time. The absolute certainty that we would see no other humans until the final day took on a more ominous undertone. And between us and that final day lay the second gateway, a mandatory high-angle descent from a saddle cut by stone buttresses.
I approached it with a sense of unease that bordered on dread. The constant attention demanded by backcountry travel plus the low-grade strain of redesigning the project on the fly fed a sense of deepening desolation with each hiss of my skins, deeper, deeper, deeper into a world where the texture of the snow and the height of the sun are the only things that really matter. My legs still felt good, but my riding was rusty—I’d only managed a few days on my splitboard that season and none of them on 50-degree hardpack with a full overnight bag.
The others, all Tahoe locals, had no such reservations. I’d ridden with Jason the year before; he said the descent would be fine and left it at that. So I followed him up the skin track, reminding myself to focus on the incredible beauty as we crested the final ridge, wave after wave of mountains rolling away in an endless sea of stone. An uninvited visitor too weak to linger, I felt the vast brooding power of the place, a magnificent presence that is neither compassion nor indifference. You cannot ask for omens, only open yourself to the world—a coyote howling minutes after we broke camp that morning, reclaiming the place; a tiny rosy finch flitting past on the climb up the first pass of the trip; a spider scampering effortlessly over the snow as I folded my skins and assembled my board.
I dropped second. Heelside into the couloir, snow variable, pack nudging me toward the void, then, automatically, jump turn, snow softer as I crossed into the perpetual shadow, another jump turn, the walls falling away, the pitch easing and allowing arcing turns in corn snow. Massive release, triumphant shout, full cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, serotonin, the double freedom of riding free towards home.
But the next morning, now five days into our journey, we didn’t want to leave. We turned instead towards a gallery of lines in the cirque above camp. Will and Isaac choose a narrow chute off one of the summits; I led the bootpack up another. At the point where I’d thought I’d turn around for some simple turns, I instead fell behind Roan for a final push. The pitch ramped up quickly, topping out was the only option. I couldn’t reach my axe, just choked up on my poles and tried to trust the first four points of each crampon. With 800 vertical feet of air under my heels, my mind fought my mind, visceral waves of fear crashing against necessity as I willed myself to focus on the minute variations in the snow inches from my face. And then I was at the top, heart slamming, feet wobbly, a huge view south to an expanse I thought I’d never quite see again, atop an aesthetic line I never thought I’d ride.
When Jason topped out—calm, in his element—I dropped, too amped to wait for the snow to soften. Snarl of metal on ice, jump turns easier with a near-empty pack, then picking up speed, dragging my ax on the toesides, washing out a bit on the heelsides, but unwilling to slow down too much after five days of trudging with a crushing pack.
We broke camp, took a group picture, and, with only one unit left, we slogged back towards the lowlands through an isothermal mess, the mountains a volcanic red once more.
The atmosphere lingered long after the trip. That psychic weight of absolute solitude in foreboding mountains balanced by the camaraderie of an incredible crew happy to haul heavy gear on behalf of an obscure toad. A sense of vast possibility and of acute limitation. The temptation to push farther and thus further, the physical distance and vertical exposure an exploration of the mind as much as the mountains. A place where your psyche confronts itself along a tightrope of risk, reward, and necessity. We remember ascending the invisible mountains far more than descending the visible ones.
In late June, I returned to retrieve the recording units. The original crew was all out of commission, but I linked up with another Tahoe splitboarder and we retraced the entire route in a day and a half. In the intervening three months, I’d found myself missing the golden creek the most, that ribbon of life in an otherwise frozen world. And there it was, bigger now as it roared the vanished snow towards the farmland of the Central Valley. There too, from the final pass before the homestretch, was the gateway line and the camp line. Tiny ribbons of snow winding among gray stones towards shimmering blue lakes, transformed by the seasons, enriched by memories. I’m proud of each, one because I did exactly what was necessary and the other because it was entirely unnecessary.
Back in my office, in just a few places in the audio we’d gone to such lengths to collect, I found the peculiar trill of the Yosemite toad. It is a song of dire necessity – sing and mate, or hop silently into oblivion – and yet it has a cheerful exuberance. It must feel good to wake up after months of hibernation. It’s the same raw thrill and total clarity that arrive when you tip forward at the top of a steep line and feel gravity take hold. The time is now, and now is everything.
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