Top Rock

Trekking the jagged and often desolate high country, a master of the landscape finds challenge and renewal

By James Lawrence, Photography By David Muench

The White Mountains, a range of peaks just east of and parallel to the Sierra Nevada in California. Separated by the Owens Valley 10,000 feet below, one of the deepest in the U.S., White Mountain Peak (14,242 feet) is less than 300 feet below Mt. Whitney.

The last bit of rocky trail crunches beneath your boots. You’re winded—who wouldn’t be after scrambling up 5,000 vertical feet with a heavy load of camera gear?

The day-to-day worries that chattered away at your mind have fallen aside. You let them go, one by one, with each meadow crossed, each new mountain vista unfolded before you.

Ahead, the joys of photographing your old friend, the granitic cathedrals of the Sierra Nevada. In your mind, on the ground glass, through a viewfinder, you’ve seen these vaulting rock faces so many times.

Yet here you are again, hiking these foot trails. After half a century, all the challenging treks from below, the innumerable timeless moments captured and preserved—why keep coming back?

Maybe it’s the way Time itself loses its hold on your perceptions.

Maybe it’s how rock and bone and spirit fuse into one immutable force of creative inspiration.

Maybe it’s as simple as this: You never feel more fully alive than at the tops of the world.

Named after Samuel Pierpont Langley, the aviation pioneer who nearly beat the Wright Brothers, Mt. Langley is the seventh-highest peak (14,032 feet) in the Sierras. It’s near Mt. Whitney, the highest elevation in the contiguous U.S.

Points Of View
Rivers of Top Rock run through David Muench’s soul.

Alone or with family members, friends or workshop students, he has worked his way up the high passes into the Rockies, Sierra Nevada, Wind Rivers, Hawaiian chain—all the major and minor American mountain ranges—for more than 50 years.

He has no interest in being thought of as an authority on any specific place, though he has trekked and indelibly photographed more grand landscapes than possibly any person alive.

So, by now, you’d think he has seen it all. No way.

There’s no “been there, done that” in the Muenchian worldview.

It’s renewal, the promise of excitement, that brings him back to the high country. “The rarity of the air, the challenge of the situation,” he says.

“Something’s always going on up there.” Some days, the unearthly calm of a clear, cobalt sky greets his ascendance, where sudden swarms of summer flies draw flocks of feasting birds up the mountain flanks. Sometimes, quick-forming black clouds just overhead throw Olympian thunderbolts. Always, there’s something new.

“That’s what high-country work brings: the surprises,” he offers. “And they’re all visible, right there in my images.”

Of his lifetime of mastering landscape photography, Muench simply says, “It has been a long career. Early on, it was a personal thing. I felt the raw achievement; I related to all the energy it took just to get up there.”

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