High Traverse

In 1927, Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata traveled to Yosemite and California’s High Sierra for the first time. He was forty-one. He and his companion, Berkeley art professor Worth Ryder, drove a Ford Model T. They brought two beds, fourteen boxes of food, painting supplies, a tent, a saw, an ax, extra gas, and a bucket of water. In Tuolumne Meadows, at ninety-five hundred feet, it was ninety degrees in the day and freezing at night. His thin blanket didn’t keep him warm, so he wore heavy clothes and covered himself in canvas. Sips of sake helped.

Obata was at the beginning of a summer that would change his life—and the arc of painting in California. Art had been his obsession since early childhood, but he was newly invigorated by the Range of Light. Looking back years later, he said, “This experience was the greatest harvest of my whole life and future in painting.”

A seven-hundred-pound cinnamon-colored bear stole his cheese. He caught twenty-five trout in