NONFICTION - Feb. 21, 1993

SKY’S WITNESS: A Year in the Wind River Range by C.L. Rawlins (Henry Holt: $23.95; 326 pp.). It’s straightforward: With “Sky’s Witness,” C.L. Rawlins joins the first rank of nature writers. Not because he’s passionate, like Abbey, or inquisitive, like Hoagland, or strong-minded, like Thoreau, but because (in the mountains of his native Wyoming, at least) he’s so fully there. Although most of “Sky’s Witness” takes place in a single year, Rawlins has lived and worked in the Wind River Range, intermittently, for more than a decade, and his understanding of the place runs deep: emotionally, because it’s been home, and scientifically, because he has studied it as a Forest Service data-collector. Rawlins is no ingenue--a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he quotes Wallace Stevens, Basho and Robert Bly--but neither is he pretentious, finding significance in every other rock and cloud. The rewards of “Sky’s Witness” are more subtle, brought out in the quotidian moments of high-mountain living: sparking skis at dusk when steel edges hit rock; the rituals enabling one to rise from a sleeping bag in below-zero temperature; the camaraderie that develops among working wilderness partners (“Out here we are voluntary peasants: our speech is like black bread and ale”). The book is particularly good when there’s snow on the ground; encountering summer hikers, the author gets crotchety--right along with the reader, because we, too, have come to enjoy Rawlins’ solitude.