Norman Schaefer has been walking and backpacking the Sierra Nevada for over four decades. He has hiked from Lake Tahoe to Yosemite National Park, the John Muir Trail from Yosemite Valley to the summit of Mt. Whitney, as well as the region north to Sequoia National Park—plus all points between. Written from 1994–2009, these wry, but wise, poems feel part of an ancient mountaineering tradition that connects wilderness to the landscape of the spirit. Rarely does one encounter poetry which seems so vividly distilled from this practice of wandering and inquiry. “The poems in The Sunny Top of California are virtually all from the long, high, almost invisible from outside, California Sierra Nevada. Many of them show the influence of classical Chinese poetry and a bit of Han Shan, the ‘Cold Mountain’ poet. Even so they all have Schaefer’s own stamp. They are physical, muscular, gritty, and full of fresh air. I know of nobody else who catches the feel of the high country rocks, trails, and winds, with the immediacy that Norman does. Some are at night, cold, and hungry, but they are always quietly joyful.”—Gary Snyder, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, 1975   Famed science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has compiled a gift for lovers of mountains and poetry both.  Over the course of his life, Kenneth Rexroth wrote about the Sierra Nevada better than anyone. Progressive in terms of environmental ethics and comparable to the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Aldo Leopard, Annie Dillard, and Gary Snyder, Rexroth's poetry and prose described the way Californians have always experienced and loved the High Sierra. Contained in this marvelous collection are transcendent nature poems, as well as prose selections from his memoir An Autobiographical Novel, newspaper columns, published and unpublished WPA guidebooks, and correspondence. This volume also contains Robinson's introduction and notes, photographs of Rexroth, a map of Rexroth's travels, and an amazing astronomical analysis of Rexroth's poems by the fiction writer Carter Scholz.