Yosemite’s Sierra Point
How I fell in love on John Muir’s favorite Yosemite trail
Story by Anne Sigmon. Photos by Anne Sigmon & Jack Martin
“So,” Jack said. “When are we going to have a real date?” He reached across the table and rested his hand on mine. Our pulses touched with magnetic energy.
“Not long,” I replied.
That was April 1991, the night Jack and I met over the strains of Wagner at a symphony outing arranged by the Presbyterian singles group. No dewy-eyed novices, we’d both been married before. He was fifty; I was thirty-eight.
After our first “real” date at the French bistro-of-the-moment, after Mozart at the opera, after a picnic with my dogs — my choice — Jack suggested a camping trip to Yosemite National Park with a hike to Sierra Point, his favorite spot.
I hesitated. “I haven’t hiked much.”
That was an understatement. Not counting walking my dogs in the park, I’d never hiked at all.
All my life I’d fantasized about traveling to exotic, physical places — chugging up the Umba River on the African Queen or teetering on the edge of a Columbian jungle waterfall. Trouble was, I’d never had the courage or the physicality for it. Painful experience — including the humiliation of flunking junior high PE — had taught me to shy away from anything that smacked of physical prowess. Already in my late thirties, I couldn’t foresee any miraculous improvement. Now Jack wanted to take me to Yosemite to walk in the footsteps of Ansel Adams. I couldn’t say ‘no.’ A fair warning would have to do.
“I’m not at all athletic,” I emphasized, not mentioning that I was also terrified of heights. My omission seemed reasonable. I didn’t want to scare him off with graphic descriptions of my klutziness just as our relationship was gaining traction.
“No problem, we’ll take it easy,” Jack promised. “You’ll love it.” His blue eyes danced.
On hike day, we set out early, leaving behind wood smoke and coffee smells and the clatter of the Upper Pines campground coming to life. As we crossed the footbridge leading to the John Muir Trail, my white leather tennis shoes crunched on the gravel path and squished in the wet dirt. They also pinched my toes. I snuggled in my parka against the morning chill and the pink-green-blue mist swirling at the base of Vernal Falls.
Excited about Jack, already in love with the mountain, I ignored my anxiety about the physical demands. Just don’t think about it was my mantra.
My twill pants whooshed as we climbed through dry brush looking for the unmarked path to Sierra Point. I couldn’t see anything that looked like a trail — just a mass of boulders surrounded by an impenetrable thicket of Manzanita briars. My shirt caught on the briars, my shoes slipped on the rocks. My manicured nails snapped. I pushed myself to keep up but soon fell behind Jack’s easy stride.
“I’ll go on ahead to check the trail,” he said. I nodded, panting to catch my breath. My heart was kabooming from exertion and altitude when I stopped for a sip of water. The sun blinded me as I craned my neck. Jack was fifty feet ahead and above me, up a steep ravine, half-hidden by a Ponderosa pine. He slouched lazily against the tree glassing for eagles, giving me a chance to catch up. To reach him, I’d have to inch across the creek bed, squeeze around building-sized boulders and clamber, climb, or crawl over a granite rock-fall that hung by the edge of a cliff to nowhere.
Another woman might have stopped right there, might have called him out: Are you nuts? Weren’t you listening? I’m a beginner! Another woman, maybe a woman with more sense, might have turned back. But I wasn’t that woman. I was a striver. Underneath it all, I longed to be the kind of woman who could do this. I cussed and fussed under my breath. Was I fuming at Jack for dismissing my limitations? Or at myself for feeling constrained by them?
Through all the grumbling self-doubt, I kept on climbing. Up and up, through towering pine, spruce, and fir, past blooming dogwood, and — at last finding the trail — up broken steps almost a century old. Following the path of Ansel Adams.
Jack poured on gentle encouragement. “You’re doing great. Almost there.”
The forest smelled of moss and mist and pungent bay laurel. I scooched over a boulder and followed the trail onto an overhang barely wider than my shoe. Pine needles camouflaged roots tailor-made to trip me. My palms were damp; my heart was thumping. I held my breath. After one quick glance down at the Merced River snaking a thousand feet below, I murmured a quick prayer and didn’t dare look again.
My legs felt weak, my stomach was queasy. Still breathing hard — now from fright — I followed close behind Jack as he pushed through a stand of fir trees onto a narrow ledge. I grabbed a spindly pine branch — for what, security? — as I followed him forward. I stopped cold four feet from oblivion, first in terror, then in amazement.
Beyond the fir trees, the ledge broadened into an overhang like a crow’s nest. Suddenly the sun was on my face. The wind whipped my parka around me. Above and below and to my right and left waterfalls roared and tumbled white and wild into the Merced river: Vernal, Nevada, Illilouette, Upper and Lower Yosemite. Granite monoliths carved by eons of glacial creep soared three thousand feet over my head. That ledge seemed like a perch at the base of heaven.
Jack dropped his daypack by a scraggly pine. He held out a hand, and I inched toward him.
My pounding heart began to slow. My fear of heights, the strain of the climb, my terror at teetering at the edge of the precarious trail were replaced by the pure magnificence of this eagle nest view.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Terrifying … magnificent … stupendous!”
He grinned. “Told you you’d love it. This is the only place in Yosemite where you can see four waterfalls.”
We sat at the base of the tree, not talking much for a few minutes, letting the place sink in.
This spot, we learned, was steeped in history. For years, naturalists had searched for a single vantage point to view Yosemite’s five great waterfalls. One of the Valley’s early rock climbers used triangulation to identify this as the likely place. He made the first known ascent on June 14, 1897, and named it Sierra Point in honor of the Sierra Club. It is said that Sierra Point was one of John Muir’s favorite spots. Decades later, Ansel Adams climbed up, according to his notebooks, and took some of his early photographs from this spot. Bridalveil is the only one of Yosemite’s great falls not visible from Sierra Point.
Jack and I drank in the view, followed by a lunch of brie and baguette. In that pre-digital era, we snapped off a roll of film, then balanced the camera unsteadily on a rock to take a photo of ourselves.
Afterward, he flipped through his dog-eared, ten-year-old hikers’ guide to read me the trail description. The steep climb of one-and-a-half miles was described as “four equivalent miles.” I didn’t dispute that.
When Jack finished, I picked up the book and read on, until I saw this warning: “Due to the steepness of the climb, it is fairly strenuous … if you should find yourself off-trail, retrace your steps at once as there are nearly vertical cliffs below almost all the trails.”
As I closed the book, a printer’s addendum in the flyleaf caught my eye. “The Sierra Point Trail has now been closed as too dangerous.”
I looked at Jack. “Just an easy hike, huh?”
He scrunched his face into a you-caught-me pout. “I’m sorry. It seemed easier the last time I was here.” Then: “Are you glad you came?”
I thought for less than a second. “Absolutely.”
And I meant it.
In my sheltered experience of parking lot viewpoints, I’d never seen anything like this, never been anywhere like Yosemite. And I’d never met anyone like Jack.
But one lesson I might’ve learned that day didn’t quite sink in. It was a lesson I learned gradually, after we crashed our canoe in the white water of the Pigeon River in Michigan, after we surprised a grizzly bear fishing on the Alagnak River in Alaska, dodged Rhesus monkeys cannonballing our boat as we inched through a Borneo jungle, and galloped bareback on Mongolian ponies across the steppe.
That lesson: Traveling to the wild with Jack often — no usually — resembles boot camp in exotic places. But I keep coming back, back, back again because over the years I’ve learned: The wonder of wild places with Jack fills my heart; overcoming my own limitations feeds my soul.
“Sierra Point” was originally published in Travel Stories of Wonder and Change ©2021 by Bay Area Travel Writers, where it was honored with a Georgia Hesse Prize.
Jack and Anne were married a year and a half after their first climb to Sierra Point. They celebrated their 30th anniversary in October 2022.
