Serene Splendor Of Sierra Endures Backcountry beloved by Muir is little changed by Carl Nolte September 4, 1999 - San Francisco Chronicle In 100 years, California has changed almost beyond belief, yet there are still places that seem to have changed not at all. Toward the end of the last century, John Muir made his way from Yosemite Valley south and east above the huge walls of the valley into the drainage of the Illilouette Creek. Above Yosemite, he saw other canyons, other wonders. The backcountry he saw 100 years ago is still much the same, although his beloved Yosemite Valley is greatly changed. The Hetch Hetchy Valley, to the north, which he loved, was flooded for San Francisco's water supply. It broke the old man's heart. Muir would be surprised by Yosemite Valley now, although he must have seen the changes coming. Camp Curry had opened in the summer of 1899, offering tent cabins and meals for tourists from the cities. That year there were 4,500 visitors to the park. Last year, there were close to 4 million. The ills of the larger society have come to Yosemite -- everything, even murder. But once out of the valley, there is still another world. In that other world, in that long-ago time, Muir made his way carefully up the long, wide rockbound course of the Illilouette Creek, then and now wilderness, about 200 miles southeast of San Francisco. It was one of Muir's very favorite trips. He was in search of a living glacier. "It was one of the golden days of the Sierra Indian summer,'' he wrote, "when the rich sunshine glorifies every landscape, however rocky and cold, and suggests anything rather than glaciers.'' Muir had followed the creek up about 15 miles from the rim of the valley, past the rounded domes of Mount Starr King, following the path of an ancient glacier, past granite polished by ice, which "shone, in many places as if it were washed with silver.'' He went up the main creek, turned easterly at a smaller creek, climbed to nearly 10,000 feet. There, in a mountain cirque in the autumn of 1871, he found what he was sure was a glacier on the side of Merced Peak in the Clark Range. "My camp,'' he wrote, "was on the brink of one of the lakes in a thicket of mountain hemlock, partly sheltered from the wind. "Early the next morning, I set out to trace the ancient glacier to its head.'' There, on the side of the mountain, at the base of a snow field, "I discovered a very small but well-characterized glacier swooping down the shadowy cliffs of the mountain to the terminal moraine.'' It was the first of 65 glaciers Muir discovered in the Sierra Nevada. The lake where he camped is almost certainly Lower Ottoway Lake, named for a U.S. Army corporal, one of hundreds who patrolled Yosemite when it first became a national park. There are two higher lakes, well above the timberline, fed by snow, even in summer. "You could say the country has hardly changed,'' said Jim Snyder, park historian. "It is still in many respects the way the soldiers left it,'' said Sheldon Johnson, a park ranger naturalist. Johnson, who is African American, notes that in the summer of 1899, the soldiers patrolling Yosemite were from the 24th Mounted Infantry, black men called "Buffalo Soldiers,'' many of them veterans of the Spanish-American War. The troops rode out from the Presidio of San Francisco every spring, in columns of two, across the San Joaquin Valley, up to the foothills and into Yosemite country and back again in the fall. Everyone who has ever been in the Army knows this was good duty, away from the spit and polish of garrison life at the Presidio, to live in the field, patrolling, looking for poachers or sheepherders. Muir welcomed the soldiers as protectors of the park. Along the Illi-louette is found evidence of other peoples as well, even now. There are pieces of obsidian, arrowheads. The way up the Illilouette and over to the eastern side of the mountains is an ancient trade route. But, of course, there are changes. Snyder points out a trail that was built in 1939 and 1940 from the Merced Peak country over Red Peak Pass to the headwaters of the Merced River. This is a high pass, 11,180 feet, snowbound most of the year. "They used to have a lottery as to when it would open,'' said Snyder. "Some years there was so much snow it never opened at all.'' The soldiers of long ago also made maps, especially Lt. Nathaniel McClure. "They explored the country,'' said Snyder. "They mapped the land. They went over some god-awful places you wouldn't go now.'' It is much the same, and yet it is not. The glacier, such as it is, is smaller now, Snyder thinks. The climate has gotten warmer. "Muir never measured that glacier, and in some years it appears as if it is mostly gone. The glacier on Mount Lyell was measured, but it shrank pretty fast. For some time, it was advancing and then it started to retreat.'' Scientists, he said, have gone back to Lyell to measure the glacier late this summer. And in the Merced Peak country, "there are more trees now,'' Snyder said. "Fewer mountain sheep.'' The mountain sheep, which Muir greatly admired, seem to be hovering on the verge of extinction in the Sierra. But, said Snyder, there are more mountain lions, and the bears range almost to timberline for food. "Backpackers,'' he said. "The bears are interested in the food they carry.'' There are fish in the small lakes, which in Muir's day were barren. The Army planted them. A Col. Benson stocked the lakes. His men carried the fish in coffee cans from one lake to another. "He was into that, big time,'' Snyder said. In July, two reporters took a trip up the Illilouette and camped at the lake Muir remembered. In two days at the lake they did not see another person. In late August, a reporter and a photographer hired an airplane and flew up beyond the San Joaquin Valley, past the reservoirs in the foothills, past Yosemite Valley, up Illilouette Creek and to the mountain where Muir found the glacier in the last century. There were fires in the forests below, but they had been started by lightning, natural fires. There were no houses, no sign of human beings, no sign they had ever been there. Looking from the plane down at Merced Peak, 11,726 feet above sea level, it was as if California had never happened.