Park Ranger on Trail of Sierra Ghost

Then it seemed to me the Sierra should be called not the Nevada or Snowy Range, but the Range of Light. And after 10 years spent in the heart of it . . . bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance of the trees and rocks and snow . . . it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains I’ve ever seen.

--John Muir, from “My First Summer in the Sierra”

Jim Long can quote quite a few of John Muir’s words without referring to a text. His love for Muir’s ideas comes not from formal study of the 19th-Century naturalist’s writings, Long said, but from the fact that “you don’t spend much time hiking around in the Sierra without meeting John Muir’s ghost.”

Long, a California state park ranger who grew up in the Sierra Nevada but now lives and works in San Clemente, has more in common with Muir than a fondness for poetic language. At age 14, two years after his family moved permanently to the small mountain town of Markleeville in Alpine County, about 75 miles north of Yosemite, Long picked up a camera and began taking the first of thousands of 35-millimeter photographs.

Today, Long gives 50 to 60 presentations a year of shows he created--”The Range of Light,” “Toccata and Fugue” and “Te Deum”--that combine his slides of the Sierra, taken over the last 25 years, with pieces of classical music. His presentations are made at schools, businessmen’s lunches, senior citizen groups, church gatherings and conservation clubs. Long estimates that about 40,000 people have seen his work since he began showing it in 1980.

Lecture Prices Vary

Long does charge for the presentations (which he puts on during time off from his ranger job), but “on a sliding scale. . . . If the show’s in Northern California, it’s likely to be $300, and if it’s in Costa Mesa and it’s for a convalescent home for seniors, a group of kindergartners or a special education class, it’s likely to be free,” he said. So far, Long added, he has yet to make a profit from the shows because of the high cost of paying for supplies, film processing and equipment.

A short, balding man with a clean-cut, earnest face, Long, 39, turns almost evangelical when he speaks of the mountains. A member of the Sierra Club, he said that “my contribution (to society) is this program. . . . I like to get it to the largest number of people I can” so that “people will see what they stand to lose” if wilderness lands are ruined.

Although land preservation made large strides in earlier years, the erosion of the Sierra wilderness also began a long time ago, Long said. One example of this erosion occurred in the early 1900s when the growing city of San Francisco wanted water, and politicians pushed a bill through Congress to remove a big valley called Hetch Hetchy from protected status as part of Yosemite National Park. The Tuolumne River was dammed, and Hetch Hetchy became a reservoir, Long said.

Another such instance of wilderness destruction occurred about 15 years ago when “a beautiful little valley” on the edge of the Mokelumne Wilderness area was turned into a ski area and condominiums, Long added. Today, he said, there is also a threat of a high-power line being run “through an (Alpine County) area where there are no power lines, where there is virtually no visual pollution now.

“The threats are numerous and varied, and they take many forms,” Long said. “Anyplace there are private lands in the mountains, they could, essentially, be logged at any time. There are places that in past years were used for agriculture but now, in the face of rising prices, it’s easier to turn them into condos. . . . I’m not opposed to all ski areas, all dams or all roads,” he added. But such projects “cut down the boundaries of the wilderness more . . . . There’s certainly room to do more wilderness preservation in the Sierra.”

Pollution in Sierra

Today, two-lane mountain roads are being “modified and improved to accommodate larger traffic,” bringing more people, cars and pollution into the Sierra, Long said, and scientific tests have indicated “rises in the levels of acid rain in lakes at the 13,000- and 15,000-foot levels.” Deterioration problems “are the same with the coast and deserts, as well as the mountains,” Long added. “It’s not just a Sierra problem. . . . Statewide, things don’t seem to be improving. I drive through San Clemente and, on every hillside, they’re building more houses.”

But Long has mostly focused his attention--and his camera--on the beauties, rather than the problems, of the Sierra Nevada. As a child, he “spent summers there since before I can remember” visiting his mother’s family. In 1959, when Long’s father retired as a Navy officer, the family moved permanently to Markleeville.

“I could walk out the front door of my house and be fishing in half a minute. It just seemed like a paradise,” Long said. With friends and his brother, Long frequently hiked through the mountains and valleys around his home, often taking along a camera. Some of his earliest photographs are incorporated into “The Range of Light,” completed in 1980, which mixes a variety of classical music pieces with photographs of many different spots in the Sierra Nevada at different times and seasons. Some of the early photographs also turn up in the recently completed “Toccata and Fugue,” which Long calls a mixture of “clouds and silhouettes from the entire length of the Sierra Nevada,” set to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

The photographs of “Te Deum,” however, were all taken in “one small valley” that Long discovered in 1966 and which he has revisited regularly since. Long’s photographs of the valley are set to a “symphonic prayer” written by the 19th-Century composer Giuseppe Verdi.

The show’s images come partly from surreal glimpses into ice caverns that Long explored and photographed during spring thaws in 1984-85, and partly from the flowers that sprang up after the snow was gone.

Constant Change

“You think of the everlasting mountains, but you don’t realize they do change, constantly,” Long said. “Nothing is static. . . .”

Long has also finished an untitled production that shows how Markleeville and its inhabitants have changed over the last 25 years, as well as another new show called “The Enchanted Gorge” (which Long calls a visual equivalent of “a one-week backpack trip into the Sierra”). In addition, Long said, he is now thinking about themes for several future productions.

Although he left the mountains in 1965 for college, followed by four years in the Air Force, Long said he still thinks of the Sierra as his home. In the early 1970s he returned to Markleeville to work as a lifeguard at a state park before becoming a ranger and transferring to Sacramento, then to San Clemente. But Long returns to the mountains for visits whenever he can, sometimes taking along his wife, Lien, and their 12-year-old twin daughters.

His job as a ranger at San Clemente State Park is “fun,” Long said, but it’s “95% law enforcement. . . . In most of the parks, especially those near large cities, crime spills over from the cities. And it’s not all just little dogs off the leash. . . . I write tickets and take drunks to jail and play cops and robbers with (rowdy) kids. . . .”

He has lived in San Clemente since 1978, Long said, and has found that Southern California “has its beauty” of desert and coastline, but he doesn’t think it compares favorably with the Sierra. Recently, Long spent some time in the San Bernardino Mountains, about which he said: “I had the impression the mountains were dead. It was smoggy, the stream beds were all dry, there were no flowers--and this was in April and May. The great masses of trees seemed to be dying because of the smog. I had the impression that we’ve done these mountains in. But the Sierra is still pristine to a great degree.”

Unlike John Muir, who lived in the mountains for a decade but then settled elsewhere, Long said that he hopes someday to return permanently to Markleeville, where his parents still live.

However, he added, he finds some advantages to living in Southern California, because “I feel that here I can bring the mountains to the people” through his slide shows.