As the pandemic raged in the summer of 2020, I racked my brain for ways to escape the city, if only briefly, with my teenage daughter. Then inspiration struck: I would introduce her to the magic of backpacking in the High Sierra. Social distancing in the mountain range’s Golden Trout Wilderness would be a cinch, and rambling among the granite peaks, alpine meadows, and glassy lakes would be a balm.
So I traded pandemic doom-scrolling for online gear shopping and managed to snag a wilderness permit. Our 3-day outing would hardly be epic, but the bar was low, and in my mind, the trip took on all the grandeur of a Himalayan odyssey. Sure, wildfires were rampaging across the West, but nowhere near our intended trailhead. And when I read about new lightning-sparked blazes in the southern Sierra as our trip drew near, I remained optimistic. The fires would be contained, I told myself. Everything would be fine.
Spoiler alert: Everything would not be fine. I was soon doom-scrolling again, only this time for wildfire updates. In days, the Castle Fire merged with the Shotgun Fire to create the behemoth Sequoia Complex Fire. I studied fire maps and air-quality reports and held out hope. But eventually I concluded that even if the fire itself didn’t threaten us, the smoke would. I called off the trip. I was crushed.
Our canceled outing was far from a tragedy, I know, but it was a sign of something bigger and more ominous happening across California that summer. The hills, to paraphrase the late writer Joan Didion, seemed to be blazing up spontaneously. Wildfires historic in size and scope were popping up all over. The trend continued last year and shows no signs of letting up. In fact, many experts predict that wildfires will only worsen in the coming years.