evolution.

So after a week's worth of research and a few emails to some Flickr contacts down in California, I've nailed down our summer holiday plan.

I know just last year I jotted down in my journal how I liked being able to find a place for us to settle in for a few days. To give J's legs a chance to rest and his imagination a chance to run crazy in amazing backcountry wild splendor.

But this year will be different. This year's plan is more ... ambitious. This year's plan is (dare I say) ... epic.

We'll be out for four nights and five days. The whole week. We'll have to negotiate cross-country route-finding for a couple of days (though there is nothing like being in the high Sierra above eleven-thousand feet just wandering). Climb up and over a questionable col along the thirteen-thousand-plus-foot ridge of the Sierra Crest separating the Bishop Creek drainage of the John Muir Wilderness to the north from the super-remote northern bounderies of Kings Canyon National Park to the south.

The place we'll be going: Evolution Basin.

I've had my eye on this spot for a few years but always thought it out of reach for even my well-adept-at-remote-backpacking eleven-year-old. It's a two-day trip in (whereas Dusy Basin last year was just a day's hike from the trailhead - at least for us). But as I weighed the options of getting into the Evolution Basin - of which there were many from Lamarck or Haeckel or Wallace or Echo Cols to even going the long route over Piute Pass and all the way around Piute Canyon to the southwest (out of the question - that's for people who actually like the long way around which does not for better or worse define myself) - I finally landed on a Class 3 route over a col of the Sierra crest that will drop us more or less directly into Evolution Basin where we'll then have two days in which to wander.

It will be absolutely off the hook. I'm excited about the potential light. And shadows. The alpenglows of the the high Sierra summer are truly indescribable. As the nineteenth century geologist (and first director of the USGS) - Clarence King - put it -

'The Sierra Nevadas crest a line of sharp, snowy peaks springing into the sky and catching the alpenglow long after the sun has set for all the rest of America.'

And we'll be out there.

This trip goes along nicely with my whole personal plan of going even more remote this year, which as of now apparently also includes trips with J. And will help pave the way - as each year I exhaust the more traditional approaches and hikes into Kings Canyon - for future trips that will be more remote and off the beaten path so-to-speak. So next year maybe we'll visit the northern flanks of the Palisade crest and the Palisade Glacier, or the flip-side of the Palisade Basin which last year we merely glimpsed into from Knapsack Pass. Or Sixty Lakes Basin (under the shadow of Mount Clarence King itself) and Rae Lakes over Forrester Pass (a trip I foolishly and over-ambitiously came up with back when J was all of eight and for which we fell drastically short - instead camping for two nights at Kearsarge Basin after a still-heroic climb for an eight-year-old boy over a twelve-thousand foot Sierra pass).

Unfamiliar routes to familiar places maybe. Leaving the trail for the open country of this high alpine environment that - as photographer James Martin wrote in his book Sierra - 'invites exploration.'

J can do it. Heck, maybe we'll even climb Haeckel or Wallace this year on the way to Evolution. We'll see. However it turns out - for four nights we'll revel under the stars (planning it this year around the new moon as well in order to witness the Milky Way from the remoteness of the Sierra wilderness) and bask in solitude unprecedented. And he'll come back with more strength, more humility, more appreciation. Maybe remembering how Thoreau once put it that 'You are rich in proportion to the things you don't need' and the lessons I try to teach him while we're out - how important it is to strip away all but the bare necessities and to appreciate it all.

Yeah. Word. And like I said ... epic.