VIA DEER CREEK 



By C. Nelson Hackett 



EITHER with fir nor cedar, with tamarack nor juniper 



1 1 does my story begin. No native branch do I lift up that 

 ever the Sierra knew. I extol instead the Citrus aurantium, 

 whose golden fruit made pleasant all our journey from the Big 

 Arroyo to Bearpaw Meadow, though partaken of but once, and 

 it divided. How sweet were the influences shed by that incep- 

 tive orange you of the cult will readily believe when I relate to 

 you the facts. 



We were seated in a saddle of the Great Western Divide, the 

 headwaters of the Big Arroyo on one side and the source of 

 Deer Creek on the other. Below us in one of the last clumps of 

 trees we had lighted our camp-fire the night before, and there 

 we had slept in its smoke through the chill night and had eaten 

 thirst-provoking porridge and bacon that morning. Ray Bailey's 

 party, with which we had come from Moraine Lake, around 

 the base of the Kaweahs and down into the glorious Arroyo the 

 previous day, was just disappearing on its way to the Kern- 

 Kaweah Canon. At that moment Walter Huber, my sole com- 

 panion, loosed his pack and produced therefrom, with all the 

 dramatic surprise of an ex-silk-hat-enter-Mr. Rabbit, a marvel- 

 ous orange. Since that moment its donor has been to me a 

 canonized saint. The aureole is round his blessed pate and the 

 symbolic citrus in his hand shows still in memory huge as the 

 blue-ribboned ones in the convex jars at a county fair. 



The sun was at our backs as we began a descent which was 

 to lower us with neither instancy nor ease from a height of 

 10,600 to 7000 feet. In the beginning it was almost all snow, 

 and all that was not snow was talus. There was a tiny pond, all 

 frozen, where Deer Creek begins, and then a larger lakelet, with 

 winter's seal upon it, too, though cracked and broken. With 

 every step the canon widened, the bare cliffs lifted their brows 

 more awesomely. Suddenly we stepped out onto the brink of 

 the bottomless pit. Black and wet and sheer are the cliffs by 



