When a trout jumps in the snow-fed lake beneath a rim of craggy peaks, the splash interrupts hours of stillness in northern California's Trinity Alps.
If you just said 'Where's that?', join the crowd, which, incidentally, would not be joining you in the Alps.
Few, even elsewhere in California, know about the 210,000-hectare government-protected wilderness area, even though its scenery has been compared to the ever-packed Yosemite National Park, in the same American state, and to the Swiss Alps - hence the name.
With so few people and so many snowcaps, even in July, during a wet year, visitors could be forgiven for imagining they were in far-more-remote Alaska. The Trinities, which lie between Mount Shasta and the Pacific Ocean, remain quiet because they're more than four hours' drive from any major city. To the time-poor weekend traveller, they might as well be in Alaska- or Switzerland, for that matter.
According to Steve Gut, an information assistant for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, an average of 9,000 people do find the Alps every year, and in them they indulge in backpacking and horseback riding, which are among the few activities allowed by its protective keeper, the United States Forest Service. By comparison, Yosemite, which lies just two or three hours from San Francisco, sees four million visitors per year.
The region all but doubled in size in 1984, following the enactment of a new wilderness law. Now the state's second-largest wilderness area, it claims 965 kilometres of marked trails, evergreen forests as low as 610 metres above sea level and Thompson Peak, at 2,744 metres its highest mountain.
After exhausting drives along interstates and mountain roads curvy enough to cause motion sickness, campers hike into the wilderness with packs looming over their heads from pine-shaded, car park trailheads at the ends of one-lane dirt roads. Some hike in just a couple of miles, others up to 25 kilometres. Almost all head towards lakes lying at between at 1,800 and 2,100 metres above sea level.