THE SIERRA NEVADA OF CALIFORNIA Before I went to Mexico, I photographed on several trips to the Sierra Nevada mountains. My first fascination was with Yosemite Valley, and then with the Mother Lode country in the Sierra foothills where the California gold rush occurred a hundred years before I got there. Here the photographs are ordered by elevation: first the foothills, then Yosemite Valley, where Ansel Adams' photography was my inspiration, and finally in the High Sierra of Sequoia National Park, off-trail with, of all things, a Speed Graphic in my pack, a bulky camera that shot cut film in holders larger than today's digital cameras that held just twelve pieces of film. (Ansel Adams later wrote of hiking far for a picture of Half Dome in Yosemite when all but the last of the few exposures he could make with such equipment suffered some error. The last became a classic.) In the summer of 1952 I worked on a Forest Service crew in Sequoia Park, and on a day off, I took the Speed Graphic on a solo hike up to the crest in the back country, on the watershed between the Kern and Kings Rivers, a chilly world of fractured granite and stunted trees, so different from the great Sequoias and dense pines where my work was. I had just had my freshman year enthusiasm for Nietzsche, and the experience of being alone and off-trail in that inhospitable terrain seemed perfect, even though carrying a Speed Graphic into the high country, alone, seems unwise to me now. The pictures recall to me, if they cannot convey, the exhilaration I felt being there.