I haven’t been writing much.

Well, I have been writing, but I haven’t been writing. Dive into my unerasable footprint on Google and you’ll see dozens of my bylines in The Inertia and Santa Cruz Local. I have also been poking at a manuscript (stay tuned). But as far as that urge to write — when my senses reach a state of unquenchable expression that requires the assembly of words, a pen drawn to paper like the magnets clinging to your fridge — that’s been relatively missing since I last wrote in New York.

After five months in Africa to start the year, being around the comfort and familiarity of home has not sparked my creativity in the same manner. In Africa, everything was novel — a step out the door, a conversation with a stranger, a word of a new language, a taste of a foreign flavor. I couldn’t help but write about it.

That urge has been dormant — that is, until a trip to the Sierra Nevada rekindled it. That’s all it took.

Finding the inspiration to write is a tale as old as time. Every great author has thoughts on what rouses their writing.

Stephen King, for example, promotes a methodical, scheduled approach; writers should write even when the inspiration is not pulling them to do so, and they will find their way. Similarly, Haruki Murakami puts himself through a stringent routine of writing, exercise, reading, music, and sleep when he is in the throes of cranking out a novel.

My idol, Jon Krakauer, says he feels most inspired after reading a compelling book. Joan Didion speaks of a “shimmering image,” which she attempts to harness to guide her stories. Khaled Hosseini was a doctor — living a life he says he never felt agency over — before seeing a news clip that sparked a story based on his childhood. Mary Shelley and Ernest Hemingway both said in their own words that inspiration was best drawn from life experiences.

I can relate to the opinions of each of these esteemed authors. There is a balance between finding inspiration and manufacturing it. When I’m traveling, my engine to churn out stories never ceases. In more ‘sedentary’ moments of life, however, writing requires greater proactivity. At those times, I’ve come to appreciate the fine art of identifying intriguing ideas and themes when they aren’t so blatantly in my face, but more subtly intertwined in my surroundings.

A few days in the Sierra Nevada worked wonders, like WD-40 lathered on rusty cogs. My will to write was replenished by swimming in numbing alpine lakes, walking in the shadows of steep glacial valleys, and inhaling the thin, pine-tinged air. I couldn’t help but admire the tectonic forces that mangled two colliding plates into such perfection through my own means: silently turning my observations into poems, phrases, and paragraphs.

Sans paper or a computer, while sleeping beneath a starry night, I wrote some of these very words on my phone, harnessing the fresh creativity pulsing through my fingertips. I left the tent door open and watched shooting stars whiz by, unmolested by the light of civilization (except for the occasional Elon satellite).

A cold night in the Sierra Nevada brought back a flood of memories that fueled my creativity. Many of my fondest experiences had unfolded in these mountains: ditching Mondays in middle school with my best friend to snowboard away from the weekend crowds (I kept buying the 12-and-under lift ticket for $12 until I was 17, courtesy of a late growth spurt); summers at North Lake Tahoe with my dad; getting sick from the altitude at Mono Hot Springs; or rallying my siblings for a backpacking trip over Kearsarge Pass. Even as my closest friends and I grew older and scattered to different cities, the Sierra Nevada remained a place to convene.

Like clockwork, every time I spend a few nights in the Sierra — accumulating dirt under my fingernails, mesmerized by the alpine silence — I start to wonder if there exists a valid motive to leave at all. I start to ponder my life’s priorities and purpose.

But what started as an attempt to appreciate the mountain beauty around me transformed into a thought exercise on what inspires me to write. It’s a useful thread to tug at and explore within myself, considering my Instagram profile very officially declares that I’m a writer. There is no going back now.

I won’t be able to teleport to the mountains every time I need inspiration. As Stephen King emphasizes, you need to find a way to cultivate your own creativity. But at the same time, it’s damn good to have the Sierra card in my back pocket in case of emergency. How lucky we Californians are to have the most beautiful mountains in the world at our disposal. I feel compelled to write.