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Hiking the High Sierra with Low Vision

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Low vision, for me, means poor central vision but fairly reliable peripheral sight.

When I hike the High Sierra, I carry several shades of sunglasses, switching them as the light shifts from morning glare to afternoon shadows to forest dimness. For days at a time I walk through granite passes, meadows, and forests, letting the landscape unfold mile by mile.

Long before I lost my central vision, I was taught another way of seeing. As a young Boy Scout, my scoutmaster, a former Marine, warned us not to trust our eyes alone. “They miss things,” he said. “Roots, rocks, holes. Use your feet to see.” On nights of the new moon he would lead us down trails in total darkness, forcing us to feel our way forward step by step. That practice stayed with me.

Sixty years later, on a steep descent scattered with roots and rocks, I discovered just how much. Twice, as I scanned the ground and set my foot toward what looked like safe earth, my foot shifted on its own, landing inches away at a slightly different angle. The placement was perfect. My eyes had chosen one spot, my foot another. And my foot was right.

The surprise was sharp, almost eerie, a reminder that something in me had learned to trust the ground without seeing it. With years of scanning, practice, and attention, I now hike with far greater confidence. In the High Sierra, where every step matters, my feet have become my eyes.

Under the Deck

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The wagon, long forgotten,
waited still beneath the deck stairs,
its wood slats scattered
like pick-up sticks,
softened by years
of dust and weather.

Gramps, with the help
of an old buddy,
pulled it back into service,
stories passing between them
like repeated measurements.

All afternoon, they talked
of grandkids, mostly
how little hands
can turn a house
from dim entropy
into something lit
from the inside,

and how hearts, long quiet,
can be stirred again
by the sound
of a little red wagon
and a young voice
calling out,
asking for a ride.

7.2.25 gmz

Apricots

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The organic apricots arrived.
First, we canned.
Then the award-winning galette,
this time, apricot raspberry.
At last, the cheese and apricot Danish,
tucked into folds of croissant dough 

The bakers, working quietly in their little “bakery,”
paused to give thanks,
to the trees and the fruit,
to the farmers, the weather,
to all the small mercies 

that brought sweetness to their hands.

They relished the poetry of their lives,
just as they were.

How It Happens

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I slide the sheet of raw cookies
into the oven. Douglas fir trees sit still,
leaning into the canyon, wafting scents of maturity.

I missed the timer. The cookies
burned; black and hard
in a matter of minutes.

that same fir forest
caught too much heat.
A single spark,
in a few centuries of growth,
and everything was burnt
and hard. And standing,
to be remembered.

Still in loss,
we reach began again.

This time my eyes stayed home.
This time with the deep breath
that comes after ruin.

The fir cones cuddled
befriended by the fire
cleared mineral rich ground.

When the rains returned,
thousands of seedlings rose as
small green monuments
in the headlands of recovery.

That is how
attention works.
How resolve roots itself.
In their world.
In mine. In ours.

The Pop-Up Cafe

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Where the Water Lingers

The birds—thousands upon thousands—pass in darkness heading north while the weary take refuge for a spell in the welcoming and generous Laguna.

Even as the land dries, a narrow waterway ties the Laguna to its watersheds and, eventually, to the Russian River. Other waters linger too, but in secretive pockets—vernal pools, elusive while out in the open fields.

Today’s walk is for them.

A Familiar Path

We slip past the back edge of a modest trailer park to a worn path, familiar. I keep my trained eyes in motion, scanning for hazards—gopher holes, soft ruts—those quiet hazards of flatland walking. My peripheral vision still serves me well.

To the east, my eyes settle and find rest in the mountains. Mount St. Helena sits in relief, her western face abrupt and stern. On cold mornings, from the next ridge, steam from the geysers can be seen following the wind steadily skyward.

Once, people went there to heal in hot mineral baths. Now the steam turns turbines for the grid, closed to seekers.

Vernal Pools and Old Land

Below those mountains, the Russian River Valley holds simpler patterns. The tall grasses, even after a generous winter, have dried into a palette of muted straw. Valley oaks cast long, knowing shadows. This is old land.

My guide, my wife, calls out a vernal pool. Modest from this distance—barely a shimmer of green, dusted over with minute blossoms. Easy to overlook. Easy, in the past, to lose to development.

I walk gently, heel first, careful not to disturb what might lie beneath: Pacific chorus frogs, maybe a salamander or two. The ground is too wet for sitting, so I use binoculars from the edge, taking in the full reach of it—perhaps two feet deep, and no wider than a living room.

But inside, there’s movement. Fairy shrimp, suspended and ancient, the size of a comma, in clear water.

How is it these pools, so fleeting, carry such weight? What matters here exists beyond our frameworks—beyond human use or recognition.

The Return View of Wonder

I turn back the way I came. I’ve never minded an out-and-back trail. The return reveals the reverse view of wonder. From the oaks, Song sparrows, Bullock’s orioles, King bird—all engaged in their seasonal rites.

Overhead, the larger birds circle high, waiting for quiet. Waiting, perhaps, for our departure from their brief and bountiful café.

No need to pity the frogs. They’ve adapted to the temporary and the invisible. They know when to sing, and when to go still.

Baking Toward the Light: Cookies and Recovery

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I told myself a new oven might lift the fog. That its polished steel and humming heat would turn frustration into something lighter—something with the weight of a few grams of sadness rather than a full pound of despair. I imagined that, with enough patience and sugar, I might bake my way back to joy, or at least to the remembered spark of taste.

Cookies had always been part of my landscape. I baked them for years—not out of habit but devotion. Even after radiation scorched my taste buds and left me navigating the strange topography of recovery, I kept baking. Something in the ritual—the quiet alchemy of flour, butter, sugar—kept me grounded. I kept waiting for the moment when a cookie, just one, might strike the lost chord and bring flavor rushing back.

Now, nearly two years into recovery, there is movement. Subtle but sure. Where once everything tasted like damp cardboard, now I can distinguish edges, feel the slight warmth of rosemary, the clean strike of lemon. My taste, like an old riverbed after a long drought, has begun to carry water again.

Through it all, I baked. Not always well, and not always with hope, but I baked. Franny, patient and loyal, has served as my flavor-tester, my witness to each attempt. I read recipes with a magnification machine that speaks them aloud, a strange partnership between stubbornness and technology. I stage my ingredients before I begin, gathering each one like a settler preparing for winter. I check, double-check. Then I let go. Let my hands remember the mixing, the folding, the way dough should feel between fingers.

Low vision has made the process slower, sometimes maddening. But when the batch comes out right—golden, whole—it validates the part of me that refuses to be undone.

This week I prepared dough for a couple hundred cookies: Ricciarelli, those soft Italian almond clouds, and a Lemon Rosemary Butter cookie, sharp-edged and fragrant. I stretched the work across several days to ration my energy, still precious after treatment. One day for mixing. Another for shaping and freezing. Today, under my wife’s watchful eye, I will bake them. And if all goes well, I will not burn them.

So it goes. Careers collapse into avocations. Sadness finds expression in new disciplines. And sometimes, against the odds, an old passion flickers back to life—not as it was, perhaps, but alive all the same.

Weeding

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Learning to Tend the Garden—and Myself—By Feel, Not Sight

In the slow shift from winter to spring, I’ve found a new rhythm in the garden—less about conquering, more about listening. With my eyesight changed and my tools narrowed, I’ve begun to notice what I once worked too quickly to see.

In the slow shift from winter to spring, I’ve found a new rhythm in the garden—less about conquering, more about listening. With my eyesight changed and my tools narrowed, I’ve begun to notice what I once worked too quickly to see.

In spring, after the long, heavy weight of winter has finally lifted, the ground lets go. Moisture still clings to the roots, and weeding becomes something like house painting—ritualistic, restorative. I’ve come to love it.

I remember painting my new grandson’s room not long ago. Broad, sweeping gestures with the roller, a fine mist of paint rising and drifting like pollen on the air. That roller, the only tool I could manage now. I can’t do the fine work anymore—the cutting-in around the windows, the careful edging along the trim. Once, when I could see, I was the fastest and the best. That’s not just memory speaking; it’s fact. I had the eye, the steady hand.

Now I find the same quiet satisfaction in filling a landscape bin to the brim with the invaders: wild geraniums, the sticky ones that sneak in under cover, mostly hiding among the innocent. I’m given a short list—two or three kinds I’m allowed to pull. It’s a careful operation, something almost meditative. Like a monk tending the sand garden, I tread softly, kneel with head low, mindful of the resident pollinators—those delicate first-year perennials just beginning to claim their place, or the tough little elders, half-buried under brash newcomers.

Franny walks me through, as she does from time to time, pointing out the offenders with little risk of harming her resident pollinators. I listen. These weeds are generous this time of year—they surrender easily. And clearing them away brings back order: the eye can follow the natural lines again, the bees can trace their scented paths, and our black and white cat can stalk through the newly opened trails with the self-importance only cats can manage.

There was a time when I tackled the garden with power tools. Big jobs. Loud jobs. I didn’t weed much then—it seemed too small, too tedious. Now it feels like purpose. I like being of use. I’m learning the slow art of tending, and in doing so, I’m rediscovering the quiet authority of the garden—its power, its patience, and the way it makes room for everything, even me.

Going with the Flow

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Being in the blind community, I’m often told to continue doing what I love to do. Just do it differently. Hearing that mantra hitches on to the ‘old school’ mottos of ‘get yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again’. Those youthful jingles sometimes push us, sometimes encourage and sometimes bite.

With years of High Sierra hiking under my belt I went to Nature to understand how to carry on with my passions in the face of dramatic changes to my abilities. I now hear, ‘look at the creek racing down the mountain. Last year in a massive storm with high winds, a blow down’ of a tree community clogged the creek’s path with debris of loose rock, dirt and branches. What did the creek do? No pondering or hand ringing. The creek kept moving, right? Or, in this case, the creek made a pond and then flowed over the top of the debris.

One of my struggles in adapting my baking style is the rhythm of my moves about the kitchen. Flowing from recipe to gathering and measuring ingredients to mixing and baking. with much experience a cadence develops and is memorized by my soul. In my blood in other words. With low vision the rhythm has slowed and the cadence revised through new steps taken to ensure I’ve not missed an important point in a recipe or that I’ve measured correctly, gathered all the ingredients, mixed just right and baked to perfection.

In conversation, the creek changed its rhythm, adding steps: a pond, overflow over a dam. As an ancient example I tingle realizing the connections as I stand in a fast current in a wild river casting a fly to a spot behind a large boulder. Because I walk the river understanding better its features. Its riffles, eddies, pools and all the rest. The understanding that change is forever and my changes in vision and body function are simple and natural and I must simply let loose and be in my flow. as it changes throughout the length of a river, of a life.

Welcome to Adapting Daily: Walking My Camino

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Hello, and welcome to Adapting Daily: Walking My Camino.

I never imagined I would be writing a blog like this — about adapting daily to life with low vision, a body transformed by cancer treatment, and a heart still full of adventure. Yet here I am, stepping forward, one day at a time, walking my own unique “Camino.”

My path has been marked by challenges: the aftermath of throat cancer, living with peripheral neuropathy and loss of taste, and the journey of adjusting to vision loss. Yet, even in the face of these realities, I still love to backpack, fly fish, bake, stitch, and write. These passions may look different now, but they are still very much alive — and so am I.

This blog is where I’ll share that journey. I will talk about what it’s like to rediscover the outdoors with new tools and perspective, how baking can still delight without taste, how needlework connects me to texture and memory, and how writing helps me make sense of it all.

I’m here to tell the truth — about grief, about adaptation, about humor, about unexpected joys. If you are walking your own difficult path, know that you are not alone. I hope you’ll find some inspiration, companionship, or at the very least, a few stories worth reading.

Thank you for walking with me.

Buen Camino,

Glenn Minervini-Zick