A moonbow. I couldn’t believe it. I was staring at an actual moonbow! I stood awestruck in the rain and moonlight, halfway between my Jeep and my tent beneath the lava cliffs, a mute witness to the pale, ghostly arc of light that shimmered in the darkness at the foot of White Mountain. At my back, a half-moon shone through a break in the stormclouds, its light refracted by the raindrops falling above my head, creating the exceptionally rare image I saw hovering before me… an albino rainbow. All too soon, though, the drizzle diminished to nothing, and the moonbow dissolved away like a mirage.

With a sigh, I watched it go. Seeing the moonbow here in the Owens Valley helped diffuse my anxiety about what the storms were doing in the high reaches of the Sierras, where the precipitation was undoubtedly falling as snow. Once the massive storm front moved aside, I planned to begin a six-day trek into the John Muir Wilderness. But considering that the ranger station was receiving reports of four-foot snow drifts in the mountain passes, I expected the journey was not going to be as easy as I’d hoped.