THE 8000-FOOT public campground, shaded by yellow pines, was loud with the clamor of Lehman Creek and its many tributaries that wander past tables and stoves and improvised rock fireplaces. Tall cane-like grasses, yellow mimu1us and blue penstemons were lush along the crooked little stream. The scent of wild roses filled the air.
A sign reading Ste1la Lake, 5 Miles--Wheeler Peak, 7 Miles," ushered the Sierra Club knapsackers onto a path cut through rose thickets, young aspen and mountain mahogany.
A feathery cloud enve1oped many of the mountain mahogany trees - a myriad of cycle-shaped wings on which the seeds would shortly escape. Yellow-brown eyes looked up from the dephts of creamy mariposa tulips. Grasshoppers clapped their wings, hopping from tall grass to gray sage to scarlet penstemon.
It was the Fourth of July week end, and we were in eastern Nevada on the flank of 13,000-foot Wheeler Peak, heart of the proposed Great Basin National Park - an alpine island in the midst of a vast ocean of desert.
In September, 1955, writer Weldon Heald of Tucson rediscovered a live glacier, complete with bergschrund, crevasses and fresh moraines, in a basin hidden under a lowering cliff on the northeast face of Wheeler. Heald named it Matthes Glacier after Francois Emile Matthes (1874-1948), one of America's most distinguished geologists and a world authority on glaciers. The ice mass, roughly triangular and about 2000 feet at its greatest
This icy remnant of an age long past has become the center of a movement to set aside 145 square miles of the Snake Range, including Lehman Caves National Monument, as a national park. Heald and fellow supporters of the park idea point out that the Wheeler Peak area, with its glacier, lakes, caves, easy stream-side trail passing in seven miles through five life zones, and its spectacular views of the surrounding desert, is a worthy candidate for national park status.
The Sierra Club members making this hike all carried these items
in their back packs: sleeping bag, some type of shelter
(from a mere sheet of plastic yardage to tents), dehydrated food, cooking and
eating utensils, sweaters, coats or parkas, matches, first aid and toiletries.
We had boiled down our needs to the bare minimum. My husband, Niles, 20
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