Where the Toad Still Sings

All photos by Christian Pondella

Deep in California’s High Sierra, nestled among the range’s towering peaks and ridges, is one of North America’s strangest alpinists.

This is some of the best backcountry skiing terrain in the world, but the little climber didn’t journey up here for powder turns or a summit attempt. He won’t head down to warmer climes and lower elevations at the end of the day. This is his home, and he’s here to sing.

At the moment, however, he and his compatriots are buried under 10 feet of snow, and as our group glides across the alpine meadow, he’s closer to death than sleep.

It’s early April, and while avalanches, storms, critters and splitboarders like ourselves pass by on the surface, the tiny mountaineers’ hearts beat just a few times a minute, fueled by insects eaten last November. They’re waiting on spring: a hard date to pin down when you live above an elevation of 8,500 feet, but the Yosemite toad was built for this.

The Yosemite toad’s ancestors first made their way into the glacier-bound Sierra around 2 million years ago. There, the ever-changing ice isolated them from their lowland cousins until they evolved into a new species entirely: a truly alpine amphibian found nowhere else but the heights of the High Sierra, from Tehipite Valley in the south to Carson Pass in the north.

To survive the brutal winters, toads spend half the year hibernating; for the other half, they’re solitary and silent, small brown creatures living among rocks. But every spring for thousands of years, as melting snow floods high meadows and the birds and insects return, the toads emerge and gather for their one chance to sing.

That’s what brought us here, five splitboarders carrying heavy packs in the depths of the Sierra. We’re not looking for powder turns. We’re here to capture that song.

My path to the Yosemite toad began in 2016 as a graduate student studying spotted owls in the northern Sierra Nevada. It can be a maddening task: The little birds are nocturnal, remote and reclusive, so trying to monitor them in person is inefficient at best. Instead, I wanted to try a technique called “bioacoustics,” which uses an animal’s sounds to answer questions about its ecology.

To do this, my team and I attached small recording devices to trees in potential owl habitat. A month later, we’d retrieve the recorders and I’d analyze the audio. By tracking which units picked up owl calls, I could determine population trends and observe the owls’ response to major fires. The approach was effective enough that the US Forest Service invested in it to expand its owl monitoring efforts beyond a few localized studies.

At a conference in early 2020, one of my USFS collaborators told me about the Yosemite toad. The population is declining, she said, but by how much and how rapidly is uncertain because the toads are so difficult to monitor.

It turns out that the best time to study toads is also the worst time to move through the Sierra: during spring snowmelt, when they’re doing their best to be found. For nearly two weeks, the plain brown males gather in meadows to sing all day every day, while discerning females (slightly larger and covered in dark spots) waddle through the fresh grass and freezing pools and evaluate their options. (Yes, they walk instead of hop!) The soft snowpack also makes travel by any means nearly impossible, yet is still extensive enough to bury the roads and trails to all but a few toad-friendly meadows.

That timing is difficult but crucial. The toads depend on the snowmelt flooding those meadows just long enough for their aquatic tadpoles to metamorphose into terrestrial toads. Too long a flood and fish could survive, which would devour the young. Too short and they can die from suffocation if their gills haven’t metamorphosed into lungs before the water disappears, or die of heatstroke if the shallow water warms so much it overheats their tiny bodies. Either way, during the Sierra’s ever more frequent low-snow years, they die by the thousands.

“Bioacoustics helped us scale up owl monitoring,” my colleague told me in 2020. “Do you think it might work for the toad, too?”

I did. Not only that, it would be a natural confluence of two of my lifelong passions: snowboarding and conservation.

If we used splitboards to deploy recording units in late winter before breeding season and retrieved them on foot in summer, we could avoid the spring slush and perhaps get enough data to better understand where the toad’s last stronghold might be.

I’m based on the East Coast, so my first step was enlisting a local guide willing to lead a trip where snowboarding was the secondary objective. Jason Champion was the perfect candidate. As part of the first generation of Sierra splitboarders, he is also one of the relatively few people who have seen a Yosemite toad in the wild, which happened on a backpacking trip in Yosemite in the early 2000s. The cold-blooded critter didn’t grin or wag its tail. It probably didn’t even blink. But something about the encounter stuck with Jason for decades.

I emailed Jason in the fall of 2020, and six months later, he flew home during the height of the Alaskan heli-guiding season to help me search for toads. “Most clients just ask, ‘Show me the good snow and keep me safe,’” Jason said. “This was different. This had a purpose.”

Though that trip was only a day, the data was promising enough to earn a grant for a bigger trip the following year. In the spring of 2022, Jason again flew home from Alaska to lead our five-person team on a five-day Sierra traverse, placing recording units near Mammoth.

Jason was sick when it was time to retrieve those recorders that summer, so he connected me with Nick Russell, one of his longtime friends and riding partners and a Patagonia Snow ambassador. It was early July at the time and Nick was preparing for an expedition to the Himalaya; a two-day backpacking trip carrying heavy recorder units fit right into his training program. As he and I retraced the splitboard route with hiking boots, I proposed a future Toad Tour in a new area, to piece together a bigger picture of toad populations in places too hard to survey by conventional means. Nick was in.

Like alpinists, Yosemite toads stick to the high country, and the route I envisioned would do the same, linking mountain passes and avoiding the range’s deep glacial valleys. We’d survey one meadow where toads seem to be hanging on and a nearby basin where they haven’t been seen in decades.

The USFS monitoring notes for that particular basin are a grim embodiment of the toad’s status: “Hundreds of tadpoles and six females found in 2002,” it reads. “One adult female in 2005; nothing in 2008, 2011, 2014, 2020.”

In spring 2025, Jason, Nick and I met below the jagged ramparts of the Eastern Sierra along with two new Toad Tour recruits: pro snowboarder and Patagonia Snow Ambassador Forrest Shearer and photographer Christian Pondella, who would document the trip. The others casually packed and repacked their gear in the April sunshine, mentally weighing today’s load against next week’s hunger. I distributed the recorders, feeling good but not relaxed. A six-day trip in the Sierra is hefty even by Nick’s standards, and a recent storm had dumped 40 inches of snow on our route followed by 50 mph winds. It wasn’t your typical spring pond-skimming weather, but at least the snowline was low enough that we could skin directly from the trailhead.

We set off shortly after noon; three hours later, we’d gained over 1,000 feet and turned a corner in the valley. No views back to The World, no residual phone service—full immersion and the relief of being irrevocably underway.

Our packs were heavy, 60-odd pounds, yet I was thrilled to finally be moving along the route I’d scrutinized for months on-screen. I’ve worked for the Sierra and its wildlife for almost a decade, but mostly from a distance. As I leaned against a pine at camp that evening, exhausted, boots unlaced and propped on my pack, I sank into the realness of the place: the rough bark, the beckoning valleys, the darkening peaks, while breathing the too-thin air of a place where a piece of my heart lives.

I’d headed into the trip aware of the illusion of familiarity that social media fosters, where you can learn a lot about someone without ever meeting them. A similar dissonance can build in my field of bioacoustics. I’d collected thousands of hours of toad song before I ever encountered one during a backpacking trip with Nick a few years before. We’d stumbled upon an adult female who’d lingered near a deep pool full of tadpoles. She was silent, as the females always are, her telltale white chin gently moving with each breath. I scrambled to the ground to meet her at eye level, trying to keep a respectful distance yet desperate to see her and maybe be seen myself.

Like Jason, something about meeting the toad lingered with me, and it was a relief to finally reach our first toad meadow of the splitboard trip. It was a reliable breeding zone below our third pass, where the toads seem to be hanging on. I deployed the first two units, double-checking they were recording before snapping them shut and using baling wire to attach them to trees. For all the complexity it takes to get to these remote meadows, this part, at least, is usually easy.

We set up camp nearby but slept poorly, despite two days of hard travel, because all night our tents were battered by a strong east wind. Our next target zone was deeper into the Sierra, where the toads once sang but haven’t been found in over 20 years. First, however, it was time to go exploring. We were three days into the trip and had yet to do any snowboarding, and there were lines all around us that needed to be ridden.

As Nick led us up a steep ramp out of the valley, we noticed another set of tracks punching a near-vertical path toward the saddle above.

“If we were in Alaska, I’d say those were wolverine tracks,” Jason mused. “Nothing else goes straight up a mountain like that.”

“It probably was,” I answered with a huge smile. A camera in Yosemite caught one two years earlier, only the second time the burly carnivore has been spotted in California in 100 years. From the look of the wind-scoured prints, this one had been here just days before.

After marveling at the wolverine’s tenacity, we spread out on the skintrack to finish our climb, each alone with his thoughts and the ever-expanding view until we gathered at the ridgeline without a word.

Nick, Forrest and Christian took off immediately, and Jason and I followed their track between a cliff and a cornice on firm, high-angle snow. Reaching the top of my line, I caught my breath and cleared my mind. I’d trained for the physical side of the trip, skinning up my local resort with 40-pound bags of dog food in my pack, but the mental challenge of making kick turns over exposed terrain was another matter. Getting my board on my feet, however, made all the difference. I dropped past the cliff and through a gap, swooping down into the bowl. At the bottom, I hunkered in the shade of a scrawny pine as the rest of the crew dropped.

The mountains will change you if you let them. Watching Nick, Forrest, Christian and Jason lace turns in the golden evening light, it was obvious these animals were shaped by and for the Sierra.

It was fully dark by the time everyone was settled in camp, preparing for an early start in the morning.

Tomorrow would be a big day. A toad day.

The problem with measuring the toad population in the summer is that it’s nearly impossible to get an accurate count.

By the time the trails and roads are clear enough to access the meadows on foot, the adults are hidden, silent and scattered. So, the monitoring teams are left to count egg masses, then tadpoles, then metamorphs (awkward half-toads whose tadpole tails shrink by the day) as the season progresses. But since a single female can lay hundreds of eggs at a time, a plethora of eggs or tadpoles isn’t necessarily evidence of a healthy adult population. Finding only a few tadpoles late in the season is not necessarily evidence of a declining adult population, either. A single raven, for example, can gorge itself on tadpoles in a matter of hours. I’ve watched them do it.

I’d chosen the day’s target zone because it embodies this challenge: Though USFS crews haven’t found tadpoles since 2002, it’s also so remote that they’ve never been able to survey it at breeding time.

Starting from our base camp at 9,600 feet, we continued eastward into the heart of the Sierra, yo-yoing between 9,500 and 11,000 feet through a series of valleys and high saddles. Five passes deep, we reached the target meadow and deployed the last three recorders. Forrest and Nick mounted the first unit, which was the first and probably only time they were out of their element on the whole trip. In a brief role reversal, we agreed I should take the lead on the last two recorders.

With that, our task was completed. It was time to make the long walk home, free to shred our way back to the trucks.

The view from the top of the deepest pass promised more mountains, more dream lines and more toad meadows, but the clouds were rolling in, the sun was low and we had, as the saying goes, miles to go before we slept. We turned eastward, exchanging curiosity for a group lap through perfect corn before hopping onto our skintrack back to camp. Each pass revealed glimpses of distant golden snowfields, while in the valleys, the nightly katabatic winds were already refreezing the slushy afternoon snow.

We started late the next morning, giving the snow time to ripen into corn before our final turns in a place we’d called home for a few days. Nick and Forrest chose a massive couloir while Jason and I went for a tree line. After that, we headed east with a powerful storm at our backs, passing bear tracks on our way to our original camp. There, the wind died down. The stars emerged.

A final night in the mountains, then a final morning. Everyone was ready to go home, but no one wanted to leave, either. We were exhausted, hungry yet completely satisfied.

And as far as the recorders were concerned, there was nothing to do but wait until July to retrieve them. Wait, and hope.

There is no contradiction in the fact that two of the most memorable lines of my life were on a trip in search of a steeply declining species, because living without joy is as sure a defeat as allowing an extinction. The Yosemite toad lives by the snowpack and will die with it. The same is true of the Sierra ski and snowboard community, or really any snow community, and losing either would make the world a place with a bit more silence and a bit less joy.

That is a world that the five of us, at least, are determined not to see.

Why anyone should care about the very real possibility that the Yosemite toad goes extinct has a few possible answers. But I refuse to degrade the animal by justifying its existence. Any transactional basis for conservation will be subject to negotiation. And then it is doomed.

The toad owes us nothing. Instead, the obligation for justification lies with us. What reason could we give for inaction? Monitoring the toad, with our recording devices or any other means, will not save it. But if the bioacoustic approach works, it will free researchers from time or access constraints and allow them to document the whole breeding cycle over far larger areas, which in turn will give them a better understanding of how many breeding adults remain across the Sierra in general. That knowledge may not save the toad, but it might help us figure out how we can give it a fighting chance.

In July, Jason, Nick and I returned to retrieve the recorders, walking dusty trails and high tundra to the sunny, wildflower-carpeted alpine meadows where we’d left them. The units I’d deployed while kneeling in the snow were now 10 feet off the ground. Against the odds, Forrest and Nick’s unit was still in its tree as well.

The three recorders from the deepest meadows revealed no toads, dashing my long-shot hope that they’d snuck back to those meadows after 20 years of silence. It was a heavy discovery, to say the least.

And then I reviewed the audio from base camp.

For eight days in late May, the toads had been singing. Hour after hour, the recorders had captured them hopefully and loudly trilling just feet from where we’d slept.

The meadows are not all silent. Not yet. Snow falls and the toads still sing.