“Like going to a hospice visit.” Recalling the moment, he shivered. He broke off a tiny chunk and carried it back to camp for the hikers to use in their Scotch.

“It was the smallest living glacier that you could possibly imagine,” Robinson told me. Only one corner of one glacier remained-a canted block of ice the size of two Olympic swimming pools. This was a new development, not recorded on any map. He discovered that six of the seven glaciers had melted away completely. After his companions replenished their supply, Robinson hiked ahead, tracing the water uphill. Eventually, they found a rivulet of water. Perhaps because of the altitude, one of Robinson’s friends was feeling ill, and the others worried about how he would fare if they had to make a dry camp that night. Streams that had once carved elegant oxbows in the canyon floor were now dusty lacerations. Arriving at the canyon, with its broad, verdant floor cradled in smooth slopes of granite, he planned to fill his bottles with meltwater from the seven glaciers buried in its headwall.īut as the group hiked they found no water. He is a devotee of the “ultralight” approach to backpacking and prefers to travel without water, instead gathering it along the way, from lakes and streams. At home, in Davis, California, he tracks his explorations on a wall-mounted map, its topography thick with ink. Now sixty-nine, Robinson has been hiking and camping in the Sierras for half a century. They headed into the High Sierra, hiking toward Deadman Canyon-a fifty-mile walk through challenging terrain. Last summer, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson went on a backpacking trip with some friends.

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