...by next Summer. I've been carrying around a setting and premise for a story playing in the Central Sierra Nevada for years, and lately, its demands to get written grew pretty loud after hiking there again last year. The more I investegated the scenario, the more the idea stuck, and characters, conflicts and a story arc started to take shape. Might be my first non-erotic novel after two decades (back then, I wrote fanfics, so nothing to find here). I'll have to thank Al Steiner's story Aftermath for the final push, even though my first reaction after reading it was, "Dang, too many similarities". But then, dissecting the overlaps, I realized that most of those aren't that big besides the setting and some things that are just inherent to that, and my own story would certainly worth writing.
So, without giving too much away, I'll have a bunch of long distance hikers stranded in the Central Sierra close to Muir, Bishop and Mather pass, and they'll have to survive there for quite some time.
I've never been one to do much worlbuilding, but this story actually demands (and gets) it. Characters and events just seem to spring up naturally. Some things I can say from my own experience, having spent almost 40 days in the Sierra Nevada. Some stuff can be searched for on the internet and looked up in books. The biggest hurdle is getting the botany right. Trees and wildlife are easy, I saw those while hiking. But the smaller stuff is harder to figure out, especially when it gets to questions of edible vs. toxic and exact regions to find them. A lot of botany information only crudely mentions stuff like "found mostly in the eastern/western/central Sierra at elevations ranging from X to Y", but there are so many micro climates and geologically different areas that there are many bonatic islands that escape those generalisms.
Long story short, if you have been there and have any tips which plants (edible, usable in other ways, stuff to stay clear of) can be found at which spots in that area between Lake Thomas Edison and Rae Lakes (not down into Owens Valley), I'd be grateful.
It's the one topic that really eats my time, and I often dig into a plant mentioned on the big nature sites and its uses for hours until I realize that, dang, my location is 50 miles off as the crow flies as it doesn't grow exactly where I imagine due to the local rock/soil composition or higher/lower temperatures, and there's no convenient way to get there and back to forage.