Louis Norris

My good friend Sam Swanson once described the high sierra season as “drinking cheesecake out of a fire house”. It’s a lot of something good. It can also be a lot to take in, but you better make sure you get as much of the cheesecake as you possibly can before the hose turns off. I returned to this metaphor from time to time as my friends and I used every second of our time off from work to chase the melt that cascades down the Sierra mountains at sporadic intervals during the spring.   Coming into this season, I was less goal oriented than I have been in previous years. My main objectives were centered around getting outside with my friends as much as possible, sleeping on my Z rest, and perfecting fire-in-pot cinnamon roles (which still eludes me). So much of the high sierra is intangible; water levels fall well outside of the domain that we can control and the added work siphon made my schedule much more rigid than is necessary for the “drop everything and go” mentality that beco...