August 24, 2010
Much has changed in the Sierra Nevada since John Muir spent his first summer exploring the range in 1869, working as a shepherd.

Tina Egan, resting atop 8,740-foot-high Ellis Peak in the Sierra Nevada, is a hike leader with Family Nature Summits, an organization of families and individuals who love the outdoors. Click to enlarge.
But enough wildness remains that when I arrived atop Ellis Peak west of Lake Tahoe one day last month, it was easy to understand Muir’s observation, in his book “My First Summer in the Sierra,” that however fascinating were the individual trees, birds, and wildflowers “most impressive of all is the vast glowing countenance of the wilderness in awful, infinite repose.”
Here it was in July, and a dozen of us hiking this day slogged a good part of the time through wet, still-deep snow, happy to be among the abundant pine and fir species of these mountains.

Children and adults at a Family Nature Summit produce a service project each summer. Here, Renee Johns of Texas, left, and Ariel Levy of New York City, dig a post hole for an interpretive nature trail for children produced at the 2010 summit at Lake Tahoe, Tahoe City, California. Click to enlarge
Facing west from the Ellis Peak summit, which is on the California side of the lake, the Granite Chief and Desolation wilderness areas extended far into the distance, higher snow-capped summits rising behind them. The view was not unlike what Muir might have seen from the same vantage point. It made every step of a long hike with some steep ascents worthwhile.
At a time when the country has so many problems, when people are so divided politically, it was a restorative moment, a reminder that the mountains are, if not eternal, certainly enduring. They are enduring enough to provide perspective, enduring enough remind us that we ought not get too worked up about the temporal. That is one of the reasons we hike, no?
I was participating in a Family Nature Summit, an annual gathering of families, several hundred people in all, who each year choose some very special place in North America to spend a week outdoors, with comfy beds at night and good food and company through the day.
Each day of a summit, parents, grandparents, children, couples, even singles, choose among scores of scheduled activities such as hiking, rafting, kayaking, birding, fly-fishing, horseback riding, outdoor photography and nature study, all of them arranged by age-group. Parents may be kayaking while their children are hiking with trained leaders.
My story on Family Nature Summit vacations appears Sunday, August 29, on the cover of the Living section of The Hartford Courant.


