Borrowed Times

Hiking Light at the Painted Hills

2011-11-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

Hikers know all about traveling light. We look for the lightest gear that serves multiple purposes, and study ways to cut ounces without sacrificing comfort, safety, or durability. But there’s more than one way to travel light, and hiking the Painted Hills is one of them.

I’d planned this trip for months, but something always got in the way. Then, in July, I found a short window of time and loaded my truck for two days of driving, hiking, and camping in the central Oregon desert. I left Portland in the morning, drove over Mt. Hood, and continued on through the Ochocos, a beautiful range of ponderosa and deep grass. By early afternoon, close to the small town of Mitchell, I turned off the highway towards the Painted Hills National Monument.

I hadn’t done much desert hiking previously, and didn’t know what to expect. I ate lunch at the small park near the visitor’s entrance and studied a map of the monument’s short trails. On paper, exploring looked deceptively easy, but I knew that this would be more than the sum of miles and elevation gain. And it was.

If a deer leaps in front of your car when you’re driving, you react immediately – a jolt of adrenaline, a little fear, an instant decision between swerving and braking – followed, afterwards, by a little rush. When you first see the Painted Hills, it’s a bit like that.

I didn’t drive far before encountering the star of the show – a huge, exposed hillside of volcanic ash millions of years old, compressed into layers of bright red, yellow, gold, brown, and black. The hill rose above a dry sage-brush flat, and stretched beneath a deep blue sky over distant hills full of summer grass and juniper.

For the rest of the afternoon, I wandered in splendor. At the Painted Hills Overlook I walked up the short trail for close-up views. Colors shifted in scales, growing in intensity in the sun, or falling mute in the shadows of clouds. The hills were an orchestra playing a unique symphony, with measure upon measure of light built up and reflected from the banded ash. Strange scars from rock-fall led like lyrics through the gradations of color, and the longer I watched, the more I felt the hills were unbearably old, unfathomably subtle, wearing wisdom as a spectrum of ever-changing light.

Eventually I returned to my truck and drove on to the Painted Cove, where a short boardwalk winds around a single red painted hill. As the afternoon grew long, the depth of the color grew deeper, contrasting wonderfully with dark green junipers and bright yellow blossoms of rabbit-brush.

After soaking in Painted Cove, I walked around Leaf Hill, an outcrop full of fossil leaves, then returned to the Overlook and hiked to the top of Carroll Rim for expansive views of the Painted Hills. The steep trail soon crested the ridge-top, passing through rim-rock and odd basalt formations.

The views changed constantly along the length of the rim, with patterns of evening light and shadow dancing on the hills. Basalt speckled with ancient lichen lent a timeless feel to the scenery. This was once a volcanically active region, with lavas pouring across the land and ash falling into tropical waters. I’d catch a glimpse of the inhabitants of this dynamic landscape later, but on top of Carroll Rim, in the sun, with the Painted Hills below, I felt part of something very old still moving towards some unknown purpose.

T.S. Eliot may have felt the same when he penned “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

It was time to go – if I wanted to make camp, I couldn’t watch the sunset. I hiked back down the trail and left the Painted Hills. It wasn’t a sad moment. In fact, it was exciting. I was on my way to the John Day river, where I’d sit at a fire, stare at the stars, drink bourbon, write in my journal, and remember the hills. I especially looked forward to remembering the girl.

If the Painted Hills were ancient and filled with light, the girl was youth incarnate and made of light. As I made my way through the Painted Hills, she and her family leapfrogged viewpoints with me. At the Overlook, she burst from the car and ran up the trail ahead of her family; she was eager and strong in the sun, with long black hair streaming from under a straw hat, and smooth tanned limbs flowing from a blue country dress. In her late twenties, she was beautiful, and if anything were more beautiful than the light on the hills, it was her.

It was like a doe had leapt in front of my truck.

We have immense capacity for love. Many of us will fall in love many times. In all those different times, we carry an ideal in our hearts – a type, a perfect representation of all that we seek in love. That true life never mirrors this ideal hardly matters; what matters here is that this young woman was emblematic of my ideal. And as a symbol – because I never exchanged more than a few words with her – she remains that ideal, unobjectified but unknown, and still pure. I did not fall in love with her – I fell in love with the idea of her.

When I returned to the parking lot at the overlook, a Native American man with a long braid and strong features sat on a bench in the shade. As I approached, he asked, “Have you seen my tribe?” His family (I learned his daughter’s name) had passed me on the trail, and Donny (not his real name) and I began a long conversation. He was taking his family traveling and camping, getting back to the natural world. It was a healing trip. He’d flown his daughter home from a bad spot on the east coast. He told me all about her, about how when she was young, she’d wake him in the mornings, begging to go fishing on the Sandy and the Clackamas. Naming those rivers – for naming is a powerful spell – led to the discovery that Donny and I live near each other in the same city. It’s a small world.

Later we met again at Leaf Hill, and Donny introduced me to his family. His daughter was shy, her eyes dark and guarded, yet she moved with confidence, in her element. In contrast, his younger sons displayed outward annoyance and the look of wanting a television and a video game. I wished them all a good trip, and drove on to Carroll Rim for that wider perspective.

None of this is a good explanation of how I felt at the Painted Hills, nor is it a good description of Donny’s daughter and why she stood out in such relief. As I said, I don’t love her. I can’t; I don’t even know her. And I can’t exaggerate or make this complicated, because it’s surprisingly simple. Donny’s daughter moved as if she belonged there, as if her presence was necessary. She was just one more beautiful aspect of a beautiful landscape. She was all-to-human, frail, and fleeting – and the world she moved through was stark, elemental and enduring. And there was power in that.

Later, in the BLM campground at Spray Creek, by the shores of the John Day river, I watched the sun set and the stars come out, and I tried to express my thoughts and feelings in writing. I still haven’t succeeded. I’m working as slow as the Painted Hills, and the light isn’t done with me yet.

Cooper Spur Journal

2011-10-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

October 17th, 2011

Cooper Spur shelter. Went almost to the top, turned back just shy of last ¼ when wind gusted cold, cold, cold. Otherwise warm, should be wearing shorts – sunny, not a cloud in the sky except north over snow peaks [Snyder’s term]. Late start, northeast face and Eliot Glacier in shadow at 2:30pm – these short days…

A lot of hover-bees… And green tea with ginger. Snowfall a few days ago, patches on trail – icy snow mixed with rock. Not much to worry about, more a fun challenge.

The Eliot looks incredible from the edge of the spur. Footprints lead up snow slopes between huge piles of rock, which tower over splintering crevasses and ripples of fallen stone. Along the moraine, fluted edges, patterns of rock-fall – can hear it, sometimes see it, stones clattering down the face from high.

I forget until it’s over the initiation – long approach roads, time, weather, then climbing, breathing, sore legs – how can I be so out of shape? – must quit smoking.

In minutes the sun will sink below Crater Rock. This whole side of the mountain shaded and cool.
Will go out again tomorrow, maybe the last hurrah on the mtn. If this be it, it is a beautiful day. What a weekend to end the season – maybe now I can accept the rain, muddy trails, dark forests, full streams, salmon, slugs, moss, fern, the world reduced to green and gray detail.

But not yet – I will sit on this rock for another 15 minutes or so – massive block of dacite speckled with lichen – how old the lichen, how old the stone? – what weather has this high alpine plain weathered?

There are long passages of time beyond reckoning, beyond the seasons and the rock-fall, the cycle of snow and snow-melt. The shadows grow long.

Down in Tilly Jane it will be dark soon – active canyon, heather, hemlock, tiny streams – things move faster there.

Spiderwebs catch the last light, drifting in the long afternoon. Boulders. White bark. Also drifting.
Amazing how silent it is up here.

The sun is about to go behind the mtn. Time to go – for now.

More Photos Here

Returning to Earth: Elk at Bayocean Spit

2011-10-02T17:18:00.000-07:00

I've had some memorable encounters with elk. In 2005 I woke in Eden Park in September when the stream was frozen and my hands were numb, and before the sun rose I watched elk pound up a steep talus on the side of Mt. Hood. In 2006 my friend and I paused while hiking in Enchanted Valley to watch a herd pass through the riparian forest, sun-dappled and brown. In 2010, another friend wrapped herself in firelight at the foggy coast and stirred the ashes shaman-like with an elk bone she found while scavenging firewood.

And last April, at the coast with my brother, we crept up to a herd of elk grazing on the dune-grass plain at Bayocean Spit.

The morning was bright and cool from recent rain, with a fresh wind off the ocean. I was surprised to see elk in such open territory and so close to the beach. A forest of shore-pine and Douglas fir lies further north, and that’s where I’d expect to find elk, not out in the dune-grass.

But there they were, twelve or fifteen cows in the sandy dunes to the south. In the sun, their tan backs and sepia heads blended perfectly with the landscape, looking at a distance just like tussocks of grass. Only when they moved could we see them well, well-muscled and tawny-rumped, with long dark hair hanging from thick necks.

We walked the beach south for several hundred yards and cut back inland behind the herd, so that we faced north, away from the sun. The herd knew we were there and slowly moved away while my brother crept closer with his camera. Eric and the elk slipped quietly through the grassy hollows, Eric with his finger on the shutter and the elk with cautious movements interrupted by grazing or the cast of a critical eye.

I watched from a tall dune: Eric, the elk, waves of heat above the grass, a patchwork of logged hills and billowing clouds across the bay. The elk disappeared into the land like ghosts returning to the earth, and Eric slowly headed back. I heard the sound of surf. I heard the cry of gulls. Taken together, it became a blessing.

South Sister Thunderstorms

2011-09-28T23:52:00.000-07:00

In late August I drove up the Cascades Lakes Highway from Bend and the weather turned from fire-ban hot and dry to lightning-strike thunder and rain. I barely had my tent set up at Soda Creek campground when rain began to fall, huge drops that pelted the ground and splashed mud over the base of everything. Lightning strobed through the trees and thunder exploded like a marching band of heavy metal drums. Soon my tent was staked above a puddle, and I was huddled under a tree, trying to stay somewhat dry as thunderstorms broke over Mt. Bachelor and rumbled overhead.

Soda Creek campground is a beautiful place, on the edge of a meadow between Sparks Lake and South Sister. The creek runs clear and strong through the meadow, and from its edge, there are superb views of South Sister and Broken Top, as well lava flows, stars, deer, and storms. The storms didn’t let up – even after I went to bed, my tent lit up with lightning, and I’d count the seconds for the thunder.

When I arrived, I didn’t know that the storms would last all night. I kept a tidy camp and lit a small fire, but kept it hot enough to burn through the rain and cook dinner. The storms passed in waves. One moment the air would be clear, with no rain, and I could wander to the meadow to watch the cells collide over the peaks. At those times, the sun shone through cloud-breaks with rich warmth, drenching the grass and trees with light. The next moment, lightning would flash behind me and I’d retreat to the camp before the next bruising thunderhead raced overhead, bringing rain, darkness, and probing lightning strikes.

Flash. Boom. No time between them – and no sense of security huddled under a tree. At one point I sat inside my truck, but my wet clothes turned the cab into a sauna within minutes, and I went back out in the storm. I thought about the backpackers who were camped up on the mountain at Green Lakes Basin and Moraine Lake, and how it must feel to experience this trapped in a tent in alpine country. I thought about how people throughout time have been inspired by thunder and lightning storms, how those elements have passed into myth, how they’ve inspired gods. I thought about the possible weather the next day, and questioned my plans to hike high on South Sister.

Back in the meadow, the sun set in spectacular fashion. Nature was on display, modeling everything she had. Cells continued to roll through, from Bachelor to South Sister, from Bachelor to Broken Top. Between the storms, light poured through the gap where the highway turned south at Devil’s Lake. The meadows grew golden in the low angled light, then fell into shadow as the peaks hoarded the last sun on their snowy flanks. Behind South Sister, sunset fires burned.

Whiskey burned, too. If you’re standing in a storm you might as well drink right from the bottle. I didn’t have that much, but that’s because I also had beer. And a little liquid courage goes a long way in a liquid downpour. After nightfall I realized that as challenging as the storms had been mentally, they had pushed me to remain positive and to be accepting of the circumstances. And when the storms decreased in intensity, in duration, and in proximity, I started to miss them. I threw more wood on the fire.

The clouds began to thin, the storms became more isolated and infrequent. As night grew deeper, a few stars spackled the breaks between clouds. The Big Dipper, Ursa Major, ploughed through the clouds and poured some sort of cosmic energy onto South Sister. But lightning still flashed on the slopes of Mt. Bachelor, and far behind the jagged summit of Broken Top. I crawled into my tent, shed wet layers, laid out my dry clothes and slipped into my sleeping bag. This would turn out to be a very different trip than I envisioned if the storms kept up through the next evening.

Hikes Past: Memaloose Hills

2011-09-25T20:03:00.000-07:00

I’m looking at the weather forecast and for the first time in a while, it’s supposed to rain throughout my weekend, all across the state. I’m sure I’ll go hiking, but it won’t be the clear, brisk fall weather I hoped for. Feeling nostalgic, I’ve been thinking about a warm, sunny hike from back in May. At the time, the Memaloose Hills near Mosier were in full bloom, with acres of balsamroot, lupine, and paintbrush splashing the spring grass with color.

Sadly, Russ Jolley, author of the incomparable Wildflowers of the Columbia River Gorge, recently passed away. Along with Friends of the Columbia Gorge founder Nancy Russell, Jolley successfully fought to preserve the Memaloose Hills within the Columbia River Gorge Scenic Area, and open the land to public access. Today the hills are owned by the Forest Service and yet remain little known, despite a superlative wildflower display without the crowds drawn to nearby Rowena Plateau or McCall Point.

I hiked the Hills for the first time this year, and the wildflowers were incredible. The trail leaves the old Columbia River Highway and meanders through oak to a stream crossing. A side trail leads to an open meadow filled with balsamroot and a view from McCall Point in the east to the cliffs of the Gorge in the west. Back on the main trail, the path approaches private land before heading uphill through flowers to the summit of the southern-most hill.

The air was filled with the scents of spring, the hum of bees, and the shadows of raptors gliding above the fields. Mt. Hood stood on the horizon, mantled in snow. The sky was a dome of deep blue. And the wildflowers were as thick as I’ve ever seen.

When I hiked in, just before the creek, I spotted movement ahead of me. Five deer wandered a nearby meadow, unconcerned with my presence. I watched them for a while, then continued on. On the way back, I walked quietly towards the meadow to see if the deer were still there. They were: four healthy-looking blacktail does, sleek with brown coats and big eyes and ears turned towards me. The fifth doe was sickly and thin with a matted coat, and traumatic eyes. It must’ve been a hell of a winter for that one.

I spent a few hours among the deer and flowers and then jumped in the truck to head to an afternoon hike at Stacker Butte farther east. The weather stayed clear all day – not at all like the gathering clouds this evening. It feels like autumn now, with today’s rain, but though autumn is probably my favorite season, I’m not ready to give up the sun. Fall is a time for ritual and celebration, remembering and reflection. But I’d like a few more nice days in the mountains. There’s nothing quite like hiking Cooper Spur or Indian Heaven when the air is clear and crisp, there’s frost in the shade, and the meadows and alpine trails are lined with amber and scarlet huckleberries and mountain ash. Something to hope for, I guess - though, if it keeps raining, I can always go back to Memaloose, and hoist a beer for Russ.

Trail Info:

Distance: 3 miles

Elevation Gain: 450ft
Region: Columbia River Gorge - East
Information: No fees, no facilities. Watch for poison oak.

Recommended Guidebooks: Curious Gorge, 3^rd ed., by Scott Cook; Wildflowers of the Columbia River Gorge, by Russ Jolley.

Directions: Drive I84 to Mosier (exit 69) and continue west on the old Columbia River Highway. After 3 miles, park in the Memaloose Overlook pullout. The unsigned trail begins across the road.

More Photos Here!

The Day I Lived Through a Volcanic Eruption!

2011-04-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

On clear days in Portland, Mt. St. Helens is a truncated cone, snowy white in winter and spring and turning to a smoggy purplish brown in summer and fall. But looking at the mountain from the north, at Johnston Ridge Observatory, the volcano is alien and terrible, a chasm filled with steam and smoke rising from wreckage like a beast from Mordor. The spires of the crater rim overlook a breach that opens onto devastated fields, the scale of which distance magnifies rather than diminishes in power.

In October, 2004, Mt. St. Helens came to life again. A series of small eruptions and lava flows formed a dome inside the crater, surrounded by Crater Glacier, the northwest’s youngest. Although these eruptions were confined to the crater, they continued for several years, prompting authorities to limit access to the mountain. Two years later, the volcano was still actively erupting lava, the dome continued to grow, and occasional plumes of steam and ash rose above the crater rim.

October 21^st, 2006 was a cool, clear day. Along with other students in Portland State University’s geology department, I was at the mountain, studying the debris flow along the Toutle River and witnessing the lingering destruction caused by the 1980 eruption. Our second-to-last stop was at Johnston Ridge Observatory, directly facing the crater and only five miles distant. From the paved trails at the observatory, we could see across a shattered landscape into the crater itself.

The land has something of a Shakespearean tragedy to it, suggesting “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.” Facing north and west, I looked over miles of barren hills where once a forest stood. Today there is nothing there but stones and stumps, and blasted trees lay against the ground in neat rows as in a cemetery. Deer and elk, bear and mountain lion once roamed these slopes, shaded by old-growth hemlock and fir. You used to be able to hear running water among the dappled forest sunlight. You used to be able to hear the haunting calls of spotted owls and listen to the insistent tapping of pileated woodpeckers. If you sat still long enough, you used to be able to catch the iridescent greens of hummingbirds and the yellow flash of tanagers.

Now the land’s silence on a clear sunny day is unfathomable and deep. It does not draw tears or catch your breath, because it exists in long moments of untethered wonder. Listen, it seems to say, to the songs that are gone.

I looked away to the south, to the source of this absence lording over it. There was Mt. St. Helens like a tyrannical father in repose, wreathed in smoke and silence, full of brooding violence and swift judgment.

Steam rose from the dome and filled the crater – although I was too far away to see it, the slow eruption continued, with fresh lava pushing the dome skyward, melting the glacier and surrounding the crater rim with a gauzy haze. The valley before the breach was filled with hundreds of vertical feet of debris blasted from the guts of the mountain, a graveyard plain of pumice and pulverized rock scoured by mudflows and clouds of super-heated gas, layered with ash and split by stinking fumaroles. It was almost entirely lifeless, with only a few pioneering trees and hardy tufts of grass covering the slopes above tortured gullies and young river channels.

It was a very different view that day in 1980 when vulcanologist David Johnston watched the entire north face of the mountain slide towards him, leaving him just enough time to radio “Vancouver! Vancouver! This is it!” before the lateral blast of the eruption swept a thousand feet up and over the ridge that now bears his name.

It’s hard not to feel this landscape in your throat.

Inside the observatory, after viewing a film about Johnston, the eruption, and the aftermath, the curtains in the theater rose to reveal windows with a direct view of the crater and the scoured landscape in front of it. It was a forceful moment, as my film-oriented academic understanding of the eruption was again replaced with a gut-level, instinctual comprehension of the scope of the event.

We left the observatory in mid-afternoon and drove to Coldwater Lake, spreading out to hike along the shore. Even here, on the far side of Johnston Ridge, the power of the mountain was evident. Barren brown ridges, still covered in matchstick-like trees blown down by the eruption, surrounded the deep blue waters. Along the shore, alder and other shrubs – still the first wave of succession – grew thick and low, obscuring the view of Mt. St. Helens above Johnston Ridge.

I was near the front of the group with Professor Scott Burns when, at 3:13 pm, shouts filtered up from the rear: “Professor Burns, come quick!”

Turning around, I expected to find out that someone had hurt themselves, or had seen something unusual. It was the latter. At a clearing near the lake’s outlet, the alder parted for a view of Mt. St. Helens, and from the volcano’s jagged rim a dirty white cloud expanded in the air like a time-lapse thunderhead gathering strength. The volcano was erupting.

A bus-load of geology students went into full geek mode. Professor Burns began an impromptu lecture as the ash-cloud gained height and spilled out of the crater. For the next ten or fifteen minutes, the plume – filled with gray ash and white steam – rose two thousand feet above the mountain and spread west in the wind. But the eruption was short-lived, and as the plume began to disperse, we wandered back towards the bus.

It’s hard to say what it was like to witness this. I found out later that a magnitude 3.5 earthquake shook the nascent dome, collapsed a spire of rock, and caused the small eruption. I never felt the quake, and I was never in danger; the eruption never truly left the crater and ejected only steam and ash. But it was exhilarating all the same – and yet, rather anticlimactic.

I’d previously seen ash clouds from minor eruptions all the way from Portland, but I’d never been so close. And while this eruption was hardly anticipated, it felt removed. I stood on the cool shore of a large lake, with a fresh breeze shaking the alder leaves, and watched what might as well have been a cloud for fifteen minutes. There was no explosion, no ash-fall, no tremor in the earth. It’s hard to feel endangered at such a distance, especially in a crowd of professors and college kids more excited to take photographs than to consider the rarity and meaning of what they were aiming their cameras at. To take a photograph is said to steal a soul; in times like this, I’d argue that it steals your own.

As a group, we’d grown up on the 1980 eruption. Even if we weren’t alive then, or weren’t living in the northwest, we’d still studied that event and had, just half an hour before, been at the edge of the precipice. That was fresh in our minds, but hidden somewhat behind ridges of stone and familiarity. My background knowledge somehow dulled the emotional impact of what I saw – it removed the mystery, the edge. I can’t speak for everyone, of course, and I’m not saying I wasn’t excited. All I can say is that my excitement was more of an academic sort, full of intellectual perambulations quite opposite the hysterical running a larger eruption would’ve produced.

In short, and in retrospect, I’ve been looking forward to writing this story because it’s almost more exciting to tell it than it was to be there – I saw Mt. St. Helens erupt! I lived through a volcanic eruption! Have you ever lived through a volcanic eruption? I was just a few miles away as the ash cloud rose higher and higher!

It wasn’t any of that. To portray it that way is to live through the photographs I took, and embellish the story at the expense of the experience. My experience at Johnston Ridge was more powerful than my experience of the eruption, which was strange and significant precisely because of its lack of significance. And yet…“It would’ve been a trip,” Professor Burns said, “to have that happen when we were up there at Johnston Ridge.”

What Did I Just Crawl Through? Adventures in Mt. St. Helens’ Lava Tubes

2011-04-02T15:30:00.000-07:00

I’m only about six feet in. It’s dark, extremely dark, and I’m on my hands and knees. My knees ache from the rough surface and my elbows knock against rock. In the darkness, something clamps around my foot, and I hear the voice of a young woman behind me: “Sorry,” she says, “I can’t see where I’m going.”

Ahead of me, I hear more voices, and the sudden strobe of a camera flash illuminates the narrow round walls of the tunnel and the dark silhouette of a man in front of me. We’re in a lava cast: a straight, cylindrical void formed when lava flowed over a forest and solidified, leaving behind the cast of a tree that burned away nearly two thousand years ago.

When I was a student at PSU, I signed up for every available geology department field trip I could. This particular trip, to Mt. St. Helen’s south side, took me underground through the tree casts of Trail of Two Forests, and in the eerie formations of Ape Caves.

A mountain known best for its deadly 1980 eruption, Mt. St. Helens is young, erupting repeatedly over thousands of years. About 1,900 years ago, the volcano’s only known eruption of fluid basalt poured down the south flank of the mountain and created a formation known as the Cave Basalts. This flow left two outstanding geologic features: the lava casts at Trail of Two Forests, and Ape Cave, a short drive closer to the mountain.

The Trail of Two Forests is a brief, beautiful boardwalk hike that loops over a layer of moss-covered basalt. The lava that solidified here had the viscosity of molasses, and as it surged through the ancient forest, the surface cooled into a ropey pahoehoe texture visible through breaks in the moss. The flow cooled quickly enough to leave behind tree casts: from the boardwalk, you can peer into round wells where trees once stood, and crawl through the horizontal shafts where lava swallowed fallen trees. The smooth sides of these casts are etched with the impressions of tree bark and the contact between cooling lava and the burning, charcoal tree.

Dark, confined spaces make me nervous, and the narrow confines of the tunnel, just big enough to crawl through on hands and knees, made me very nervous. But after going through once, emerging with scraped up elbows and bruised knees, I was ready to go again. I convinced two students to return to the tree cast after lunch and crawl through with me, this time with a camera. I’d lost my apprehension, and I felt exhilarated, ready to go on to Ape Caves.

Ape Cave is the longest lava tube in the continental United States. When lava cooled near the surface of the thick flow, it solidified into a crust, forming a subterranean tube that carried molten rock underground for miles. A boy scout troop first explored the cave in the 1950's, naming it after a local outdoor group called the St. Helens Apes. The hiking club took their name from a 1924 incident in nearby Ape Canyon, where a group of miners claimed to have been attacked by a family of Bigfoot. I didn't see any sign of sasquatch, but there were plenty of hominids present as a bus full of geology students pulled into the parking lot.

With a total length of over 13,000 feet, and with several sections requiring at least a gutsy willingness to scale difficult walls and rubble fields in the dark, we weren’t going to see the whole thing. Instead, we descended a wooden staircase through a skylight at the main entrance and followed the lower cave to its debris-blocked end. From the skylight – essentially just a hole in the cave’s collapsed ceiling – the lava tube descends gently into darkness lit only by flashlight and headlamp.

Ape Cave contains many features not found in caves formed from water erosion. There aren’t any stalactites or stalagmites, which require water and minerals to form. Instead, the walls and ceiling are smooth, and covered in an iridescent bacterium known as cave slime. The black and white zebra stripes are caused by water vapor condensing from the breath of people exploring the cool cave – Ape Cave remains a fairly constant 42 F year-round.

As the daylight filtering through the main entrance fades, strange patterns and formations loom from the headlamp darkness. The cave wall is collapsed in one section, revealing oxidized bedrock baked red by the heat of the lava behind the smooth, crust-like wall. The ceiling closes in and opens again, like walk-ways above the sandy floor. Known as the “railroads,” these protrusions were formed when the lava tube was half full, and the surface of the lava began to solidify over the flow. At points along the tube, the floor is covered in boulders that have fallen from the ceiling.

Called breakdown, the larger boulders sometimes wedge between the railroads extending from the walls. The most prominent, an oxidized boulder nicknamed the “meatball’ by cavers, is fused to the extended walls by the heat of the molten flow. The mostly sandy floor alternates with rocky rubble from minor wall and ceiling collapses, and smooth stone eroded by water running through the cave in the near past. Moisture in the cave drips from the ceiling, further eroding grooves in the stone floor.

Everywhere the walls are brown, gray, black, white, glistening and smooth and when the lights are turned off, always silent… In the darkness, cupolas open overhead and the dim blue LED light from my headlamp filters into nothingness.

Elsewhere in the tube, the ceiling drops lower and begins to resemble the hall of a gothic cathedral or monastery, with a pointed arch extending into a dimly lit cavern, a ceiling patterned with cracks and water-formed lines that appear intentionally designed. The dusty floor here has levees, small ridges running parallel to the wall, as though to keep a flow of water between the wall and the floor.

At the end of Ape Cave, the ceiling drops so low that to continue, I crawled on my belly like a lizard, with my arms and legs splayed out until I reached the final, tiny chamber. With just three people the chamber quickly became claustrophobic, and it began to fill up as a line of students, tourists, and hikers on the other side waited to crawl through and blocked the passage out. Shouting through the narrow tunnel, I stopped people from entering the tunnel long enough to crawled back out, where the darkness and air were far more expansive than the flashlight walls and heavy air at the end of Ape Cave. I walked slowly back to the entrance, and when I ascended the stairs and left the cave the sunlight was dazzling, and the sight and smell of the thick verdant forest made me feel as if I’d woken from a night of troubled dreams. I’d only been underground for an hour, but it felt like more, like the first day out after a prolonged illness.

Standing deep within Ape Caves, you gain a sense of how powerful the Earth is. It’s difficult to fathom the force and power of the molten lava that once flowed through the cave at a thousand degrees or more, but in the darkness it’s easy to let imagination and even fear run wild. And at Trail of Two Forests, the new forest overlying the ancient basalt flow that destroyed a forest and left casts of the trees that died there demonstrates the resiliency of natural forces and the interplay between creation and destruction.

As William Stafford said, “The answers are inside the mountains.”

Scrambling Around the Labyrinth

2011-03-18T15:03:00.000-07:00

A warm, fair day in February usually means crowds at Catherine Creek. I figured I could get away in the Labyrinth, a rugged area of imposing rock outcrops and hidden dells traversed by a maze of hiker, biker, and game trails.

I started out hiking near a young couple with two young children. I passed them, and then they passed me while I fiddled with my new camera. It seemed they were always nearby, and the point was to get away.

Pretty soon, though, I approached a massive outcrop of 50ft tall columnar basalt, sheer on every side but one, where a curtain of steep boulders reached to the very rim. I scrambled up to the base of the talus. A trail to the top suggested itself – at the very least, it was the beginning of a route – and my eye followed a line up the rocks and along the columns to the top. But I was alone, and at that moment I recalled a story I’d read of a climber’s death in a similar, albeit larger, boulder-field, and I thought about Aron Ralston, the guy who’d been pinned in a Utah slot-canyon and amputated his own hand to free himself. I thought about spraining or breaking a bone and having to negotiate my way down the boulders while injured. I visualized the loose boulders shifting without warning, crushing or trapping my leg or arm, or avalanching downhill with my body cushioning the fall of half-ton rocks. Hell, it would hurt just to fall on that surface.

Finally, I thought about the brilliance of placing my hands out of sight on top of boulders where rattlesnakes might be sunning themselves. One last look and I turned around, picking my way back to the trail.

Then that same family, kids and all, appeared below and started to hike a small game trail towards me. I spun around, walked back to the talus, and began to climb.

At first the going was easy and I felt that if it got harder, I could just turn around. But I was quick and balanced, sure-footed, the boulders were more firmly entrenched than I’d feared, and I never had to put my hands where I couldn’t see them. I reached the basalt columns. The route continued up a little until it ended at a five or six foot wall that was easy to pull myself over. I was on top.

I was on top, and I’d been here before. An ancient pine, silver and shattered, lay across the rock. A young ponderosa, squat and bushy, shaded a field of hand-sized stones covered with dusty orange and chartreuse lichen. Grass waved in the wind and I had a 360 degree view overlooking the Labyrinth and Catherine Creek, with the Columbia stretching east towards The Dalles, and the gorge stretching away west. All of this was familiar: I’d eaten lunch or taken a rest on many an outcrop such as this, and I knew that at the opposite side of this particular outcrop, the ground sloped gently down to meet the rising hill, and a game trail led back to the main trail. Breathing hard and pleased with myself for not giving up on the climb, I turned and looked down the talus. It was clear I’d misjudged the height by a factor of two – the family sat in the grass far below, perhaps a hundred feet or more, and the steepness of the boulders in the full sun was dizzying.

For a while I wandered slowly along the edge of the outcrop, over the jointed tops of smooth six-sided basalt columns, some peeling away from the rest, leaning outwards in denial of gravity. Away from the edge, the columns disappeared under a skein of angular stones decorated with hieroglyphic lichen. Climber’s bolts at the very edge of the columns reinforced my belief that I’d followed an actual route up the boulders, and that it hadn’t been unsafe. Unfortunately I didn’t pause to question why climbers would climb the talus to reach the bolts, rather than just walk up the other side.

I backed away from the edge and found a place to sit for an hour. I poured a cup of tea and soaked up the expansive view, then ate lunch in the steady breeze. Afterwards I wrote in my hiking journal:

Climbed to the top of a great stone
outcrop, wind gusting ecstatically,
clouds old friends scattered in the sky –
rare blue, pale egg color fragile and new.
Across the river small fires burn.
One spark leads to spring.

Not even good for a first draft, but promising on a still-winter day when it was almost too windy to write. I stowed my gear and got ready to head down.

As I followed the edge I peered over into the small valley below. The trail was a sharp brown line swaying along the hillside. Tiny hikers walked along it, and beyond them, a small creek ran among leafless oak trees. The outcrop was a hundred yards long and higher in the middle, and I couldn’t see the far end until I reached it.

A fifty foot drop. Vertical basalt columns. Air and space, filled with wind. No gently sloping hillside, no game trail, not even a pile of rock to down-climb. I was wrong. There was no way off the top of this outcrop except by the way I’d come up.

Hurrying back to the talus, I thought of all the things that could go wrong on the descent. And I quickly discovered I hadn’t paid enough attention during the ascent: I didn’t know where I’d climbed over the top.

When I came up, a series of natural hand and footholds had aided me. I’d intended to use them on the way down, but things looked really different from above. Dropping a few feet from a hanging position isn’t dangerous, unless it’s a drop onto rocky, uneven ledge six inches wide at the top of a 100 foot fan of boulders sitting at the angle of repose.

At this point I wasn’t scared. Obviously climbers came up and down this route, and I’d come up it with no problems. But going down was far harder than coming up. I studied the cliff until I was sure I’d found the line, and that led to where I needed to drop over the edge. I carefully lowered myself over, finding footholds and descending until I stood at the top of the boulders, and I cautiously moved to the columns, scouting the least steep route down the boulders. The problem was, it all looked far steeper than on the way up, and once I committed, I discovered that the boulders were not, in fact, wed in place, but were all loose and shifted under my weight.

If I faced the slope, I put too much weight on my hands while testing my footing. If I faced out, I put even more weight on my hands. Nothing felt right, or sure. Even though I moved slowly, always with three points of contact, every time a boulder shifted I froze, willing my body to balance. I thought about what would happen if I knocked a boulder loose, or what I would do if I felt the burning sting of a rattlesnake’s bite. I pirouetted down the slope, sometimes facing out, sometimes in, never comfortable, always nervous, in a heightened slow-motion dance with gravity and growing fear.

It took forever but I made it to the bottom. My quads burned with lactic acid, my knees felt weak, and I was cold in the sun. I covered the last few yards to the game trail, sipped some water, and took a deep breath. It was still early in the day and I was on solid ground. Before heading off deeper into the Labyrinth, I looked back at the solitary ponderosa on the rim, high above the boulder field.

It didn’t look that steep. Not really.

Distance: 5.8 miles roundtrip

Elevation Gain: 1200 ft

Region: Columbia River Gorge (OR)

Information: Curious Gorge, 3rd ed., by Scott Cook; www.Portlandhikers.org

Directions: From Portland, drive I84 to Hood River, cross the river, and drive east on SR14 for 5.7 miles. Turn left on Old Highway 8 and park immediately at the corner. Follow the abandoned highway west, and just past a road-cut, locate the obvious trail leading uphill to the north.

Take Nothing But Photographs, Leave Nothing But Footprints

2011-03-12T15:21:00.000-08:00

"We talk far too much… By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills.”

Goethe

There was no sound but the sound of my boots in fresh snow, and the wind gusting through the forest. The snow fell with a hush that was softer than silence. It covered the trail, the vine maples and ferns, and coated the trunks and limbs of trees. Through breaks in the forest, I saw the dark ridges rise from the hidden river, slowly into snow-covered cliffs and conifers weighed down with winter. As I hiked towards Wahkeena Springs, patchy snow glazed the trail, and snow began to fall hard and harder as I climbed the final 800’ towards the tree-enclosed summit of boulders at Devil’s Rest.

Snow purifies not by hiding, but by revealing. Four miles of hiking and a half-mile climb had worked off the distractions of home. There were no tracks ahead of me, and on the way back, fresh snow and drift rounded the edges of my boot-prints. The forest was calm and serene, with snow coating the young trees and scars from the last century’s logging. Clouds drifting in and out obscured the river’s trade, the highways and barges, the railroad tracks and the clear-cuts on distant hills.

The logging and the roads and rails were hidden, but I saw them through their absence: I did not see them visually, yet when I looked at the forest so different with snow, they suggested themselves in my mind. I felt that these things, these supposed imperfections on the purity of nature, signs of the world hikers strive to leave behind, weren’t even hidden, or in the process of being revealed – they were merely a part of the whole.

A brief moment in the snow at Devil’s Rest was a brief moment in front of a mirror.

When I moved on from my reverie the snow still fell through second-growth forest, a stand of former timber left to mature at its own natural pace. The clouds sweeping up the ridge continued to screen the traffic and muffle its noise. And because I was not hiking wilderness, snow piling on old stumps and chainsaw-cut rounds of downed trees was allowed to be beautiful.

Hikers know the art of packing the critical, and also the weight and utility of it. Whatever is too heavy or isn’t useful gets left at home. At the summit of Devil’s Rest I set down my pack and poured a cup of hot green tea.

I stood for a long while in the silent young forest, watching the snow fall, breathing in the cold sharp air. Soft light filled the spaces between trees and the mossy boulders capped and crusted with snow. I was warm under synthetic layers and the warmth from the hot tea spread from my center to my limbs. I rested. I took photographs of my pack and gear in the snow. My pack was filled not just with the ten essentials and an extra sweater, but also with food and water, a journal, and a well-worn copy of the Dhammapada.

I had everything I needed.

The clouds began to lift and I left the summit with a lighter pack than when I arrived. The snow stopped falling, and yet as I descended Devil’s Rest there was no sound but the sound of my boots in fresh snow, and the wind gusting through the forest.

Distance: 8.6 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 2550ft (est)
Region: Columbia River Gorge (OR)
Information: Most guide books; PortlandHikers.org.
Directions: From Portland, drive I84 to exit 31, Multnomah Falls. Alternately, take exit 28 (Bridal Veil) and follow the old highway east to either the Wahkeena or Multnomah trailheads.
More Photos Here!

One Shot Wilderness: Without Weight

2011-02-12T13:19:00.001-08:00

Sometimes, the only thing I can be sure of is that it is always and forever right now.

The first photograph was taken from under the shade of forest, mid-morning, about a mile up the trail on Eagle Creek. The second photograph was taken a step or two later, just as the sun escaped from behind the moss-laden limbs of a winter maple. How swiftly mood changes, rising like the temperature when the sun strikes you. The view up the canyon washed out in the light, refocusing on the path and the shortened shadows. Distance shrunk and focus expanded; I became aware of steam evaporating from sunlit moss, of the subtle greens tips of pine needles, on the weight of winter exhaled in a bright moment of easy breath.

It was like this all day at Eagle Creek – a thousand changes happening without weight, or, when noticed, noticed in sum, every detail magnified and whole, like nature getting off work and slipping into something more comfortable. Sun into shadow and back again. The creek singing from its bed, suddenly silent, suddenly always there. Ice on the trail followed by soft earth. Cathedrals of trees opening into long vistas and closing again in meditation. Breeze, then stillness.

Later when I turned around – for there’s only one way in and one way out of Eagle Creek – the sunny grove I meant to take my lunch in was thick with shadow. Below me, the creek cut through the basalt as it has for centuries, and the sun sank into the trees at the edge of the ridge-top.

A thousand changes happening without weight, always and forever right now.

British Soldiers

2011-02-09T11:32:00.000-08:00

Winter in Tryon Creek State Park is bleak. The trails are muddy, the light crummy, and the foliage thin. Leafless vine maples bend their limbs under dark young firs, the fallen cottonwood and big-leaf maple leaves turn to mush under ragged bracken, and along the creek brown grass tangles with mud and the winter-washed banks. Winter is a time of waiting, and only the moss, lichen, and licorice fern seem to hold any promise of spring. And even then, only on rare days when the sun is shining and light fills the canyon.

Tryon Creek is not, by any stretch of the term, wilderness. It’s less than 700 acres of second-growth forest, entirely surrounded by urban areas, and used by just about everyone: walkers, joggers, hikers, equestrians, bicyclists, students, and artists. The trail system is extensive, but at less than a seventh the size of Forest Park, it can be a crowded place. Nevertheless, Tryon Creek has its charms.

One of those charms is the multitude of cedar stumps throughout the park. Relics from logging operations that began in the 1860’s, and development that lasted into the 1960’s, the stumps – many with springboard notches still evident – contain miniature ecosystems rarely noticed by the suburban joggers and dog-walkers. This photo is from a recent trip I took to Tryon Creek in order to play with a new camera and to get out of the house – and to check on British Soldiers.

British Soldiers are lichen that produce red fruit at the end of a short stalk. Because lichen grow slowly and live long, they’re excellent indicators of environmental change, including that caused by pollution. Last year, I found a ton of British Soldiers in the stumps, along with a lot of small mushrooms. The hollow cores in the stumps provide protection against wind, rain, sun, and other environmental factors, and each is unique as an individual ecosystem. Because of the confined space, each of these ecosystems is subject to radical change – a large branch falling from a tree is but one branch in a forest, and hardly noticeable relative to the effect that same branch might have if it destroys a single stump.

There’s one particular stump – I’m keeping its location secret – that has a high number of British Soldiers. And this year, almost exactly a year after I last visited, the number of British Soldiers in fruit was much lower. I didn’t do a count, so I have no hard data. Call it a subjective guess. From photos, and from memory, the amount of this lichen was radically reduced.

That subjective comparison, in itself, is meaningless. There’s no way to draw a conclusion without real data based on long-term observation. Because these ecosystems are so sensitive, a huge number of factors come into play. Weather is just one; the difference in precipitation and temperature swings widely from year to year with equivalent impact on lichen growth.

Because of this uncertainty, I’m not worried about the apparent reduction in British Soldiers this year. I’m well aware that people might consider the very idea of being concerned about lichens a sign of mental instability. But next winter, I’ll probably find myself leaning into the rotten core of an ancient hemlock, taking close-up photographs of tiny lichen and wondering what it all means.

One Shot Wilderness: The Frozen Gorge

2011-01-12T23:31:00.000-08:00

After a month and a half of rain and holiday madness, I was ready to get out. The weather cooperated on the first Tuesday of the year, and I found myself driving down I84 into the Columbia River Gorge, staring at the steely river flecked with whitecaps, and thinking about where I wanted to go. I decided to hike up Multnomah Falls, and from there, continue up to Devil’s Rest for some hiking in light snow, or on to Angel’s Rest for some wintery views. Neither was destined to happen.

At Multnomah, a ranger had just closed the trail beyond the Benson Bridge because of ice. My return route – which doubled as an alternate entry-point – was closed because of a washout. It felt too late to continue east, so for my first hike of 2011, I elected to tour the waterfalls and stretch my legs between Horsetail Falls and Oneonta Gorge. I only hiked a few miles, but the frozen falls were spectacular, and I must have been an odd sight when I returned to my truck whistling a Phish song and tapping out the beat on my trekking poles. Not a bad start…

Multnomah Falls: Lower Splash Pool

It wasn’t the iciest day I’ve seen in the gorge, but even a little ice adds incredible accents to familiar sights. Multnomah’s upper pool was much icier than the lower, more elemental and less alive, with ice forming patterns on black basalt and an overwhelming sense of stasis, as if winter’s grasp was complete and enduring. I much prefer how the ice in the lower pool contrasts with the green moss and fern on the cliffs, and the glacial blues of the water. Despite the cold, there’s a fragility to the ice and the still-verdant walls that speaks of spring and movement. I often use Multnomah Falls as a trailhead and I take it for granted, hiking past the crowds as fast as I can. But it retains the capacity to stun with beauty, and I was amazed that one single waterfall could create such a range of physical form and emotional response. I guess I’ll have to pay more attention in the future.

Ponytail Falls: Icicles

I admit I get nervous under Ponytail Falls. While navigating the boulders behind the falls, it doesn’t take much imagination to think about how swift your death would be if the ceiling collapsed. Or how agonizing, if you somehow survived, injured, trapped.

It’s almost worse in winter, when icicles form underneath the overhang. Ice forms where there’s water, and where else does the water come from but cracks leading up to the creek? If the ceiling has cracks in it, what am I doing underneath it?

Taking pictures of beautiful six-foot icicles, that’s what. Unfortunately, there weren’t many when I hiked here; according to a photographer I met, they’d all been broken by thoughtless tourists two days earlier. If that hadn’t happened, there would’ve been a good chance that some of the icicles would have reached the ground, and the entire ceiling would have been a glittering winter hall of pillars and spears.

And I’d have spent much more time taking photographs under the falls, ignoring the steady, erosive roar of falling water and taking my chances with the slow inexorable march of geologic time.

Oneonta Gorge: Logjams ands Licorice

Entering Oneonta Gorge is like stepping back into time. The place is Jurassic – it reminds me of the Olympics, or the redwoods. The creek cuts a high, narrow canyon back through a thousand feet of basalt to a hundred-foot waterfall. To get to it, you have to climb over boulders and a tremendous logjam, and swim through pools of cold water clear to the colorful pebbles and gravel at the bottom. Moss and fern drape the canyon walls, home to endemic species of plants found no where else. Overhead, fallen trees carpeted with moss crisscross the canyon rim, and dark holes in the rock mark where lava flowed through an ancient forest and solidified.

Needless to say, I didn’t go swimming, and I didn’t get far into the canyon. I remember you used to be able to reach the logjam without getting wet, but I haven’t been to Oneonta in a few years, and creeks have a way of changing things quite rapidly. So I spent a lot of time studying the patterns of ice on the rock and moss, and photographing licorice fern encased in ice. Ferns have vascular systems like all other plants, yet reproduce with spores, which makes them halfway between the most primitive plants and more recently evolved flowering plants. Licorice fern is an epiphyte that grows in winter, with a rhizome (essentially a root) that tastes like you-know-what. Native tribes used it medicinally to fight colds, which might explain how the fern can survive being encased in ice – an ability that would certainly have come in handy over the millions of years ferns have been around. Unless it can’t survive in ice – and then never mind.

This is far from the best photo I’ve ever taken but it gives some idea of the wonder Edward Abbey wished for “behind the next turning of the canyon walls.”

Latourell Falls: Lichen

Chrysothrix chlorina gets a somewhat negative review in Daniel Mathews’ Cascade-Olympic Natural History: “This degenerate form of lichen growth is just a granular layer of fungi and algae bundled together in little clumps.” Maybe so, but it forms a beautiful chartreuse contrast to Latourell Fall’s icy white and stone black amphitheater.

Latourell is a gift I seldom open, because it’s a very short walk from the road-side trailhead and only a short hiking trail loops above it. It’s a shame I don’t stop more often, because Latourell is one of the Gorge’s most breathtaking falls. And it wears winter like a crown.

A graceful ribbon of water plunging 224 feet; basalt cooled into columns like a foundation of recessed pillars; trees sheathed in ice, a bridge hung with icicles, dark evergreens sentinel above. It’s the kind of place that feels remote because it begs of the remoteness in your heart, and draws it out with a quiet comfort. It’s lush in summer, but wispier, more transient; in winter, Latourell is a chandelier among lesser lights.

Among those lesser lights are the pioneering concrete bridge built over Latourell Creek in 1914 by Samuel Lancaster and KP Billner. Lancaster himself said, “The falls at Latourell can be seen from the bridge pouring their shining waters over the wall of basalt cliff where the rock is formed into pentagonal shapes which hang down like icicles. The Giant's Causeway of the Irish Coast is well known, but it offers no better example of rock crystallization. The roadway forms a suitable frame to the beautiful picture and adds a charm to the landscape.

And then there’s C. chlorine, the degenerate lichen, centuries old, far older than the bridge and Samuel Lancaster’s ambition, offering a much more exquisite frame to the natural ambition of water and stone.

Favorite Books of 2010

2011-01-10T00:20:00.000-08:00

My top 5 books published (in any format) in 2010 are on the Powell's Books website, with my short review of Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless:

"Much like the man himself, Werner Herzog's journal from the filming of Fitzcarraldo is hallucinatory and horrific, lovely and poetic all at once. This is a book about madness and obsession, about depth and illusion, about a place where nothing is as it seems. Filled with darkness and light, it's the story of a vision so contradictory and shifting it becomes life itself. I've stayed in Iquitos on the Amazon, and this is by far the most honest, accurate description of the place I've ever read. In fact, I've never read so honest a description of any place."

The review doubles as a shelf-talker and is designed to draw sales, though the book deserves a lot more attention. It is moody and atmospheric, remarkable for how it says what it says as much as what it says. Herzog's perspectives and focus constantly shift and there is a sense that whatever fragmented narrative there could have been has been positively and willfully exploded into anecdote and allegory. But somehow it works, and even if Conquest of the Useless isn't easy reading and is often maddeningly self-centered, it's maddeningly entertaining.

2010 somehow seemed to miss out on really good new books, in terms of my own reading interests (an admittedly small sample size). And one annoying trend continued: new works by my favorite authors just didn't quite live up to their potential. Still, I read a ton of books this year, discovered quite a few new authors I like, and I enjoyed the new books by David Abram, Paul Auster, Craig Childs, and Per Petterson. There are still thousands of books out there, and many, many authors still to discover. Whether you’re cracking open a book or hitting the trail, the journey never ends.

The Enchantments, Day 4 - Sturm und Drang

2010-12-27T23:51:00.000-08:00

In the forests below Colchuck Lake, I finally reached my breaking point, and told Mike to fuck off.

I’d had enough. The previous day’s descent of Aasgard Pass had been difficult and tiring. Finding and setting up camp in the dark, with no water, was frustrating. And keeping my cool with Mike’s attitude was impossible.

Except – it wasn’t Mike, or Aasgard, or thirst, that I struggled with. My inability to manage my own stress was a direct contributor to the argument in the forest. And that’s why it’s taken me so long to write about the last leg of the Enchantments: we were all on our last leg, Derek literally, and tensions were high. And when the fault lies with your self, it takes a while to figure out exactly what went wrong on the mountain.
It’s easy to get lost even with miles of visibility. Triangulation isn’t simply finding your position between high points; it’s finding your position between mind and body, between each footstep, and between friends. There were three of us, and between us we shared a cold, a sore knee, and blistered feet. Our goals were the same, but our trajectories differed. Bright snow filled the Enchantments’ upper basin, but overhead, dark clouds danced in a late afternoon sky. “The map,” said Alfred Korzybski , “is not the territory.” Indeed – some things just aren’t found on a map.

The upper basin, however, is found on a map, but the sheer isolation and beauty of the landscape is not. The uppermost major lake is, in fact, called Isolation, and the route led over snow and ice-covered lakelets towards Dragontail’s gray-shadowed escarpments and Aasgard Pass. Fields of sun-rippled snow lay between the gentle slope of Little Annapurna and the rugged thrust of the Enchantment Peaks, and to the north and east, Prusik Peak stood sentinel over the lower basin and the deep glacial valleys falling from the heights.

It was here, at the edge of this place at the edge of the world, that my last moment of wonder turned irrevocably towards thoughts of the outside world. No longer connected to the land, I stood separate, considering the warning in the clouds, the steep descent ahead, and the comforts of a lakeshore camp. I followed Derek up the slope, each step a choice among the crests and troughs of sun-melted snow. Mike followed behind us, and as the distance between us grew the wind muffled our shouts and brewed disagreement.
An outcrop of stones. Wind, and running water. A few hundred yards away muffled sounds of conversation – the group of hikers from Inspiration Lake rested and played on a patch of snow-free ground, and practiced glissading down a nearby slope. Not hearing Mike’s yells, and looking for a place to stop, Derek had pushed on ahead, opposite the direction we needed to go. Stress was building. We’d climbed 1,700’ and 4 miles through snow and across hard granite, warmth giving way to cool wind and a brief drizzle. The terrain ahead was completely covered in snow, hiding a series of small lakes rapidly melting out. It was getting late and we were tired, with a challenging descent ahead.

The quarrel didn’t last long and we set out on the snow for the pass, still several hundred feet above and a mile and a half away. The last trees disappeared behind us and the sun cast cloud-shadows across the snow and the bare mountains, the black and gray peaks and dagger-like ridges cutting into the billowing sky. Granite outcrops offered occasional cairns, but mostly we followed a path of footprints through the wild and remote landscape. The sun was bright and warm, and I felt the tug of adventure that begged to set up a camp and spend another day exploring this magnificent country.

Still we climbed higher towards the pass, the long curve of Dragontail a thousand feet above, scales of snow and rock falling into tumbled heaps above turquoise lakes half-melted and filled with ice and dark depths. At last the pass appeared between opposing peaks, a bright orange tent nestled between boulders the only sign of life in a stark, and starkly beautiful, world of mountain and sky.

Here again our maps failed us. Aasgard is no simple notch between mountains, but a wide shelf strewn with boulders and meadows where the snow had melted into wet heather. User paths wound between the slopes and a highly visible trail ran above Tranquil Lake, at the right side of the pass. Unsure of the trail, Derek climbed up to the left while I followed a goat path in the snow past depressions filled with their scat. We came together at the top and gained our first look at our descent, a huge scree and boulder slope at the head of Colchuck Lake, over 2,000’ below.

Dragontail loomed overhead to our left, with ridges continuing southeast towards Lake Stuart in the neighboring drainage. The mountains in front of us became a series of ridges disappearing into the evening distance, with Cascade volcanoes hovering on the horizon untold miles away. Clouds filled the sky, breaking the light into thousands of beams and softening the wooded mountainsides and crags. Colchuck lay like molten glass below, turquoise with melt-water and surrounded by high ridges that broke and fell away in steep curtains of rubble.
But it was the pass that captured our attention, and the weariness in our legs that held our focus. From where we stood, the trail was no where to be found. We could see down the steep, boulder-strewn scree to the lake, but no path stood out, and the features on the map – a stream, a small pond – weren’t in sight. It took some exploring to find the first cairn, and by that time, the sun was on the way down, we’d spotted yet another mountain goat, and encountered a grouse with several chicks in tow. It was after 6:30pm – the lake was .9 miles and 2,200’ downhill, at a total slope at or exceeding the angle of repose, and we expected to reach it soon.

Aasgard had different ideas.

Initially we had it fairly easy. The trail was a boot path between rocks, descending on multitudes of tiny switchbacks and precarious footing. The ground was sandy, rocky, and unfirm, and steep to the point that momentum carried me forward when I needed to stop. Occasionally my feet slid forward in sand. Keeping balance required constant attention. I leaned heavily on my trekking poles, but in many spots we down-climbed through boulders and used our hands as much as our feet. Mike led the way through the cairns, and I was in the back. We spread out so that a fall or a dislodged rock would only affect one of us. Mike knocked loose a rock the size of a bowling ball that fell, gathering speed and bouncing down the pass like a bullet ricocheting off the stone.

The upper third of the descent was hard, but we made good time. Derek suddenly stopped and pointed – he’d seen a marmot, on a boulder out of sight from me. I tried to hurry down but the marmot was gone when I got there. “I never get to see a marmot,” I joked – levity was still possible, and it was true – I’d never seen a marmot in the wild.

Yet, not long after, we encountered another marmot, and this time I was able to watch it for several minutes before it scampered away. We never heard it whistle – instead, we heard the rollicking boom of thunder.

A storm held its distance over Lake Stuart and Eightmile Lake. The clouds didn’t appear menacing, and weren’t piled up in a cumulonimbus, but the storm made plenty of noise, foreboding and violent in my mind. I grew nervous. We weren’t half-way down, and we wore yaktraks for extra traction and carried trekking poles – lightning was a real possibility, but we couldn’t safely go any faster. To share my fears I spoke with Derek about lightning until Mike finally called up “we’re not going to be struck by lightning!” I made a half-snide, half-defensive comment back but kept my thoughts to myself from there on.

The storm never drew closer, but about two thirds of the way down, we lost the trail. From above, we could see obvious sections of trail, but there were no trails connecting them. Rain and rockfall routinely obliterates the trail, and hikers and climbers continually reroute it. Old cairns still mark old ways, and we followed them down as best we could, slipping, sliding, crawling, climbing, and scrambling over the loose rubble until finally, after two hours, we drew close to the lake where the stream cascaded over rocks. We knew we had to cross the stream, but we’d lost the trail completely. More than likely, we descended below the trail, which makes a gentle rise above the stream before climbing more directly up.

Near the lakeshore, it seemed a good idea to bush-wack through the slide alder to regain the trail. A half-hour of that got us no-where, at the cost of many scrapes and whippings. By this time, the light was fading and we’d stopped talking. We found one old campsite, but in my opinion it was too small for three tents, so we moved on.

Eventually, we located the trail, but our elation was short-lived. Earlier, another backpacker told us that the bottom of the trail was “bouldery.” Having just descended Aasgard, we didn’t think he meant a quarter to half-mile field of house-sized boulders weighing hundreds of tons or more, which required hands-and-feet climbing and scrambling to negotiate, on rubbery legs weak from fatigue. It would’ve been fun under other circumstances, but I was beyond fun. All I could think of was pitching my tent, eating food, and getting a good night’s sleep. I was ready to be done, but we weren’t done yet.

Mike still had a cold, Derek’s feet and knees were blistered and strained, and I was frustrated and grumpy. It was past sunset, and we hadn’t found a campsite yet. We hiked the length of the lake to find that every site was full, and that’s when Mike and I began to argue. We walked in deteriorating light, and though I could see decently with the light from the sky, I was tired and I began tripping on roots. I asked Mike to stop so we could get out head-lamps. He wanted to preserve his night-vision. After a while, I was fed up and stopped to get my headlamp, anyway. We walked back the length of the lake and finally, close to ten o’clock, we found a flat spot just off the trail. I got there last and threw down my pack in anger.

My take was that Mike was being selfish – he wasn’t thinking about the condition I was in. We were hiking around a dark lake, trying to find a campsite, and he wanted to keep his night-vision? His perspective, though, was that he could see fine – and he was as tired as I was, was as eager to find a campsite, and he had a cold. When people are stressed, communication breaks down, and the smallest assumption, accurate or not, becomes inviolate in your mind.

No one ate dinner – we just went to bed and didn’t stir for 9 or 10 hours.

In the morning we found we weren’t even in an established site. Hikers on their way to the pass told us we’d been quiet, and were uniformly surprised that we’d descended the pass the night before. In fact, every single person or party we met who hiked Aasgard went up it, not down.

In the morning, Mike led out, and we wandered back and forth along the shores of Colchuck Lake, unable to find the trail down. I was sore and thirsty and twice I bashed my head into the same branch, where it hung awkwardly at a rocky step. Mike had mistaken a smaller lake for Colchuck; brought us to the trail and turned us around, thinking it petered out; and finally, after relocating the trail and hiking a mile down while out of water, he’d left Derek and I at a waterfall while he continued to descend in search of an easier source of water. The further we hiked, the more annoyed I became, and the more frustrated I grew with his attitude, which at the time I found arrogant, selfish, and controlling. And I couldn't let it go, or deal with it effectively.

When I told Mike to fuck off, I felt I was completely in the right to do so.

Of course, I was wrong.

We were both tired, sore, frustrated, eager to get to the trailhead. Neither of us communicated this with each other; I’d actually stopped talking. Both of us were in the wrong, and we made it worse by making assumptions.

If Mike was acting like an ass, then I certainly was, too. And when the storm broke between us, in the lush forest below Colchuck Lake, it was the direct result of displacing my frustrations on Mike, my subsequent misinterpretation of his actions, and my brooding silence while I tried, unsuccessfully, to let it all go.

I had a really hard descent a few years ago from Crater Lake in the Wallowas: after 11 miles of hiking, crawling over downed trees, and a wet ford of a creek, Mike and I dropped 3000’ in 3 miles over loose rock half obscured by shrubs that scratched our calves and caught our poles, in 90 degree heat with no wind, and with no water. Halfway down Aasgard, Derek asked us how it compared to the Wallowas. Mike replied, “we’re not done yet” – meaning, it could get worse. And it did.

The landscape can be beautiful but harsh, generous and yet unforgiving. Aasgard was a physical challenge, but a harder mental one. And I lost that battle.

There are a lot of details I had to leave out of this story, and I’m sure Mike and Derek both have their own interpretations. I’m not trying to have the final word, and I’m not assigning or abnegating blame. The entire trip through the Enchantments tested our individual and collective strengths, and I wonder now where mine broke down. I doubt there is a single place – but there is much to be learned in the seeking.

Getting to the truck was like a blessing; getting to a motel was bliss. Aasgard Pass has a long reach. And there’s a huge distance between the soaring heights at the top of that pass and the dark rocky base. But Aasgard only enhanced the experience, and the descent, while difficult, won’t be what I remember years from now – I’ll remember the feeling of walking through the Enchantments, of feeling so alive that I can’t express it, of seeing the great and vivid beauty of the mountains and lakes and wildlife, of the camaraderie and good times I had with my friends. I’ll remember that, and not the argument in the woods, when Mike and I apply for next year’s permit this February – and maybe then, I’ll remember Aasgard just a little bit and plan to go up that son of a bitch, instead of down.

Looking Back: 2010 Hiking Review

2010-12-27T17:10:00.000-08:00

Climbing the trail at McCall Point on a cloudy, wet, viewless February morning earlier this year, I couldn’t imagine how my year in hiking would turn out. I hadn’t been hiking in almost two months; rough weather and the holidays had seen to that. During that time, I sat inside and made a list of places I wanted to go. It was an ambitious list, and although I didn’t get to check many off my list, in 2010 I ended up hiking more miles, in more places, and with more people than ever before.

Looking back, I can’t even begin to pick highlights: the snow, goats, and granite beauty of The Enchantments and the rainy huckleberry meadows of Indian Heaven; the incredible color of Crater Lake and the dome of ocean fog while camping at Bayocean Spit; the high glacial austerity of Cooper Spur and the wildflower meadows of McNeil Point; the steep forest trails of the gorge and the open hillsides of the lower Deschutes. Mountains, coasts, deserts, flowers, forests, wildlife, and amazing friends – I was lucky to enjoy it all.

I’m working (slowly!) on a number of write-ups for the “Hikes Past” and “One Shot Wilderness” series. In the meantime, it’s been fun to look back at my list of hikes and remember all the great experiences I had.

Overview:
Days spent on the trail: 45
Total mileage: 289 (6.42 average)
Elevation gain: 62,000 ft (1377ft average)
Most mileage in a day: 12
Largest gain in a day: 3000ft

Places Visited:
Columbia River Gorge: 17
Mt. Hood & Vicinity: 10
Oregon Coast & Beach: 6
Other Alpine & Sub-Alpine: 5
Other: 2
Hikes repeated within the year: 8, including McCall Point 3 times, Catherine Creek area 4 times

Hike Details:
Overnights: 11
New hikes (to me): 21
Solo hikes: 27
Number of different people I hiked with: 11
Toughest hike: Snow Lake to Colchuck Lake (Enchantments traverse)
Easiest hike: Toketee Falls (half mile, 200ft gain)

Animals seen: deer (over 25), mountain goats, marmots, black bear, pika, mink
Days with at least some rain: 10
Days with snow: 6
Thunderstorms: 2
Blisters: 1

Hiking isn’t about numbers, about how many miles you hike, or how much elevation you gain. While I can quantify my year in numbers, in the end, it’s the wealth of experiences I’ve had on the trail that I’ll remember most. Hiking, for me, fills not just a physical need but spiritual and psychological needs as well, and I’m blessed to live in a region saturated with premier hiking opportunities, with hundreds of places to get outside and get away. It’s raining again and the forecast calls for freezing nights and snow at 600ft. I hoped to get one more hike in this weekend, but I guess I’ll start putting together a destinations wish-list for next year…

Hand-Drawn Maps and Hard Choices: Hardy Ridge, May 2010

2010-12-16T01:52:00.000-08:00

Going back to May 18^th, 9:00 am, sitting in my truck at the equestrian trailhead off Kueffler Road in southwest Washington. I smoked a cigarette and watched two birds – an oriole and a yellow warbler – peck for insects on a rain-soaked stump. My windshield was a constellation of water droplets. Ferns softened the forest in front of me, pew-like picnic tables surrounded by pillars of young, straight Douglas firs. The gated gravel road serving as the trail led uphill into gloomy, weather-darkened woods. I’d come here to hike Hardy Ridge for the first time, and something held me back.

I conducted a long argument with myself. It was raining. I’ve hiked in the rain before; I even enjoy it, sometimes. The rain would obscure the views from the ridge – but also from any other hike I might do instead. I was tired from lack of sleep and the previous night’s beers, but hangovers had never stopped me at a trailhead before. It was dark and ominous and there was only one other vehicle at the trailhead. Afraid of the gloom, afraid of being alone? No. I wanted solitude, and with the rain, almost any other hike would be equally as gloomy. Afraid of the unknown? No. At one point, every trail I’ve ever hiked was unknown to me. Didn’t feel like hiking abandoned roads for several miles? It’s not ideal, but I’ve done it before.

So what, then? Intuition, a gut feeling, not fear but another force with equal weight. I hike every week, I enjoy challenges, I’m prepared for the weather and to hike a new trail. Should I listen to myself? Should I bail? Why should I bail if I can’t identify the source of my hesitation? Everything I’ve ever read about trusting your instincts in the wild came back to me: stop, don’t panic, listen to yourself, assess conditions, proceed cautiously, know when to turn back, no regrets. But that was always for alpine climbing or other dangerous pursuits – not for hiking thousands of feet up miles of unfamiliar trail in the rain, with a hand-drawn map and having left no itinerary.

I argued with myself. Do it, a voice whispered, don’t give in. What will people think? You’ve gained a reputation for doing this, don’t let yourself down, don’t let your friends down. What will they think? What do you care what they think? Multnomah Falls is nice, another voice answered. You can come back later and hike Hardy Ridge in the sunshine. That’s reason enough, isn’t it? No, it’s ridiculous to sit here thinking about this. You’ve never turned around before. Go for it! You’ve been beyond Multnomah Falls several times this year already. Yes, but I’ve never, ever experienced such an instinctual warning, not a thought or an emotion but a deep, complex knowing. Listen to that, learn from it, gain from it.

I looked back at the stump and the oriole and the warbler were gone. I started the engine and before I knew it I was driving back over the Bridge of the Gods, west towards Multnomah Falls.

I hiked up Multnomah creek on the Larch Mountain Trail, and crossed over into the Wahkeena drainage. As I descended the steep canyon above Wahkeena Falls, rain began to fall heavily. I put on my shell and looked east towards Hardy Ridge. Clouds swirled across the crest, and a dark mass of rain broke above it before it faded from sight in the downpour.

There wouldn’t have been a view.

Since that day, I’ve told this story to a lot of people. And in telling this story, I’ve found that some people think I should have faced up to the challenge and gone on the Hardy Ridge hike. Most people, however, feel that I did the right thing by following my intuition and leaving. I sensed something wasn’t right and I changed my plans. That, at least, sounds responsible.

Months have passed since that morning I sat in my truck on Kueffler Road. My day turned out well – I enjoyed my hike up Multnomah and down Wahkeena – and I returned with a friend to hike Hardy Ridge less than a month later, in much better weather. But I still debate my decision to alter my plans. What could I have learned from going against my instinct? What could I have experienced, and would it be better in some way than the growing familiarity of the trails and landscape around Multnomah and Wahkeena?

I’ll never know. There’s enough mystery in the woods, and in life. That mystery will never run out. I learned something just from having the debate, and I came up against something else to work through – a question about spontaneity, about trust in my experience and senses, about accepting the situation as it is, and not as I think it should be.

In the end, hiking alone is about control, about learning when to surrender that control, and the responsibilities attendant to each. I choose the hike, I get up and drive to the trailhead, and I hike. I could as easily go to a gym and climb a stair-master. The difference is in what I open myself to while hiking. And in that 20 minute conversation with myself at the Hardy Ridge trailhead, I learned that control and surrender aren’t mutually exclusive properties.

I guess I’m thinking about this because the weather here has been lousy the last few weeks, and I haven’t been hiking. Instead, I’ve been reading about the land and how to approach it. Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams has been provocative in illuminating the qualities the land has to stir the heart and move the spirit, and reveal something of our humanity: “To have no elevated conversation with the land, no sense of reciprocity with it, to rein it in or to disparage conditions not to our liking, shows a certain lack of courage, too strong a preference for human devising.”

I would like to think I am open to wisdom from any landscape, be it deeply forested and shrouded with rain, or cloaked in confusion and the spacious territory of the interior.

Photos Selected for the 2011 PortlandHikers Calendar

2010-12-11T01:18:00.000-08:00

The weather has been lousy for hiking recently, and I’ve been cooped up indoors, reading my notes and journals and looking through photos from hikes this past year. It’s been hard to get motivated to get up in the dark to hike in cold rain, and as a result, I haven’t been hiking for almost a month. One positive thing about being cooped up was that I submitted photos for inclusion in the 2011 Portlandhikers.org calendar, and two were selected.

February, main photo.

This photo was taken in July at Lake Perfection in the Enchantments, on the third day of a backpacking trip with two friends. As we rounded the lake, the view opened up, and nearly simultaneously, one of my friends and I stopped just several feet apart to take photographs. His photos are virtually identical to mine – taken at the same time and place, from the same angle, and differing only in whatever settings our cameras were on.

Dark storm-clouds swirl over the soft contours of Little Annapurna, and the bright green spires of pine mirror the craggy ridge. The snow and ice feel more wintery than mid-summer, and the somber blue-grays of the sky and granite contrast with the pocket of blue sky and sun in the center of the photograph. The reflection and the framing weren’t planned – we just saw the view, and stopped, and drew it in.

The Enchantments were the highlight of my outdoor year: incredible scenery and adventure at every turn. I remember taking this photograph – it was a breathtaking view in person – and it happened on a section of trail growing progressively more challenging, with bare granite and meadows turning to snow and ice, and with rain starting to fall. We’d already hiked a long way, and had a long way to go. And that was fine with all three of us. Scenery like this deserves to be savored, and out of several hundred photos I took on that trip, this is easily one of my favorite five.

November, inset.

This is the original photo that was cropped for the calendar. To me, the expression on the goat’s face is what makes this shot. This is another of my favorite photos from the Enchantments, and it comes with a story.

After climbing above Lake Perfection, we began to see mountain goats. They approached without fear and I took a lot of photos. This particular goat walked up to us while we took a break climbing steep snow above Inspiration Lake. We used a large slab of granite as a table, and I snapped this pic as the goat circled the outcrop. One of the things that struck me about mountain goats is how well they’re adapted to their environment, and I think this shot captures a bit of that. There’s not a lot of color here, and the goat is staring right at the camera. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but he exudes a wry patience and a natural intelligence. Mountain goats simultaneously seem wise and bemused, and this photo always makes me smile.

Sure Goes Good in This High Country, Doesn't It?

2010-11-14T23:21:00.000-08:00

In September, Mike and I camped overnight at Deep Lake in the Indian Heaven Wilderness. We found our campsite well-stocked with a pile of downed wood, and we made the best of it as the temperature dropped into the thirties. We sat up late into the night, sipping bourbon while the fire snapped and roared.

The next day, we hiked to Lemei Rock. The trail led past the jagged summit to a viewpoint high above Wapiti Lake. While we admired the view of the lake’s indigo and turquoise waters, and watched clouds cross the imposing silhouette of nearby Mt. Adams, I unfairly teased Mike by calling him a redneck, sparking a conversation about growing up and attending high school in rural Oregon. Just then, three people rode up on horses: a man about our age, and an older man and woman in their fifties, accompanied by two dogs. They were clearly locals, ranchers or farmers or simply people who enjoyed living in the country and riding horses. We got to talking about the area and the weather, and the older man, sitting astride his horse, asked how we dealt with the cold the night before.

Exactly at the same time, Mike replied “bourbon” and I replied “fire.”

Neither of us heard each other, but the man on the horse laughed at our response, and said, “Sure goes good in this high country, doesn’t it.”

And the funny thing is that both of us thought his comment was completely appropriate and directed at our own individual response, and our conversation went on as if nothing odd had happened. It wasn’t until after they rode away that Mike and I realized what had happened – but the phrase struck both of us as completely and utterly perfect:

“Sure goes good in this high country, doesn’t it.”

It sure does.

One Shot Wilderness: Indian Heaven in the Rain

2010-11-13T00:06:00.000-08:00

Indian Heaven in autumn is absolutely stunning, a rolling wonderland of forest and meadows brilliant with fall color. Old growth firs draped with moss open into crimson, gold, and vermillion huckleberry meadows heavy with plump ripe berries; innumerable lakes become deeply hued mirrors reflecting the depth of the sky; and the rugged peaks – Bird Mountain, Lemei Rock, East Crater – are volcanic balconies overlooking the surrounding wilderness and snowclad Cascade mountains. If you’re lucky, the days and nights will be clear and dry. If you’re lucky, they’ll be filled with rain or snow. Weather that most people consider “bad” simply highlights the softer side of Indian Heaven, and offers glimpses of beauty and solitude not often seen together.

In late September, I backpacked in Indian Heaven with two good friends. Derek and I left from the Thomas Lake trailhead on Saturday morning under clear skies and warm temperatures. We hiked through expansive huckleberry meadows to Blue Lake, set in a bowl below a crumbling ridge, and turned north on the Pacific Crest Trail to Junction Lake, where we set up camp in a small stand of trees. The night was clear, and the moon-rise lit the lake and meadows with shafts of silver, erasing the other stars from the sky. It was so bright that I could follow trails by moonlight, and I had to shade my eyes to keep any semblance of night vision.

Not so much the second night. I woke on Sunday to rain. The forecast called for a 20% chance of precipitation that would clear by 11am. The forecast was wrong. It continued to rain all day, flooding the trails and soaking everything we didn’t keep in our tents. Every other camp but ours packed up and left by noon. Somehow, our friend Mike hiked in and found our camp – we’d hiked to Blue Lake to find him, he’d adventured along an un-maintained trail to short-cut us, and we returned to find him napping in his tent. Our spirited reunion was dampened only slightly by the weather as Mike told tales of his slog through rain and muddy trails, route-finding through trail-less meadows, and fording thigh-deep flooded lakes. As night fell, we tried to start a fire, but it was so wet and humid we couldn’t get paper to burn.

And that brings me to the photograph above. Mike and I wandered down in the rain and mist to the lakeshore at twilight, and talked quietly for a while as the evening light faded. A subtle tint began to gather in the expectedly normal gray fog and mist. As it grew more intense, the atmosphere began to glow a deep, ethereal pink. It washed over everything– the sky, the trees, the lake, the meadows and the huckleberries – and every element of the landscape seemed to become pink: not just appear pink, as through tinted glasses, but glow pink, as though the water, earth, sky and forest were infused with pink light and gave off pink light. There was to be no source: the light was indirect and encompassing. I’ve never seen anything like it, a combination of rain, light, reflection, timing, strange physics and stranger natural lyricism. We ran back to our tents and grabbed our cameras, and raced back in time to take a few photos before the color faded entirely.

The gorgeous pink color lasted only a few minutes before fading into lavender and shadow. And when it was gone, night fell quickly, and it grew dark enough to retreat back to camp and get out headlamps. I can’t explain those few colorful moments of subtlety and intensity in terms of science, and I can’t explain it through poetry, either. I felt like we’d been given a brief moment in time that could not be shared or duplicated, but only held in memory.

The next morning, on Monday, the rain tapered off and the clouds lifted. We packed up our soaked camp and followed Mike down the unofficial trail he’d used the day before. We forded the same lake, where two lakes had actually flooded into one, and by the time we reached the trailhead, we were hiking under blue skies and warm sun, quite the opposite of our experience the day before.

On Sunday morning, the day of rain, I walked down a spur trail from the lake with my camera and a ziplock bag to collect huckleberries for breakfast oatmeal. A couple of backpackers passed me and said hello. The first, a young man, made a comment about the rainy weather. I replied that it was a beautiful day to be in the mountains. He looked startled, but his girlfriend smiled. Rain and mist, shadowy fir, fall color, ripe huckleberries, good friends – and a smile from a girl?

That’s Indian Heaven.

High on Hood: Cooper Spur, 10-12-10

2010-10-17T21:19:00.000-07:00

Cooper Spur is otherworldly, high above the tree-line where nothing grows but hardy grass and imagination.

Click here for more photos

October is usually a fine month for hiking in the northwest, and this year is no exception. The skies have been clear, the temperatures moderate, and though the leaves haven’t turned as bright as I’d hoped, there’s still time to get up to the mountain. Not much time, though – as the days grow shorter in length, I have to get up earlier to get out, and that’s hard for someone who works swing and enjoys beer.

Cooper Spur is two hours away from Portland, and the easiest route follows the Columbia through the gorge and up the fertile Hood River valley. A two-lane road narrows to a one-lane paved road, then turns into almost ten miles of rough gravel crossed by numerous water-bars. The drive itself is beautiful, winding through gorge, farmland, and the ghostly snags and ash left behind the Gnarl Ridge fire in 2008.

When I arrived at the trailhead at 10am last Tuesday, I had two goals: climb to Cooper Spur, and take photographs. In late September I drove here, short on time and without a memory card for my camera, or a pen for my journal. I spent a few short hours on a lower lateral moraine against the side of Eliot Glacier. The views were stupendous, and I vowed to come back.

The Cooper Spur trailhead is the highest on Mt. Hood, and the trail to the top of the spur is the highest formal trail on the mountain, starting at 5,850’ and quickly climbing to the summit at 8,514’. The air is thin and cool, but I shed layers as I walked through a forest of massive old-growth hemlock and entered Tilly Jane canyon. The sandy trail is filled with rocks and winds around massive boulders, dry water channels, and mats of ancient heather. Up-canyon, Mt. Hood and Cooper Spur charge across the horizon, seemingly, tantalizingly close, with a hint of blue glacial ice just over the barren slope. After passing through a wind-sculpted forest of hemlock and white pine, I reached the Timberline Trail and the intersection with the Cooper Spur trail.

I trudged uphill to one of Mt. Hood’s few remaining 1930’s-era stone shelters. Inside were supplies left by other hikers: matches, cigarettes, a compass, tent poles, and other items useful in an emergency. This would be a beautiful place to camp. A rolled up door and metal roof protect the shelter from the elements, but there are enough flat spots to pitch a tent with a view that stretches hundreds of miles. Dawn here must be spectacular.

It’s hard to write convincingly about the Cooper Spur area. There is space, and there is the mountain filling up part of that space, wind and the rocky ground. The mountain is absolute, a jagged fang of sheer rock and ice. The space constantly shifts, with every step bringing a different slant of light, a warmer or colder breeze, a different angle to view the glacier slowly grinding downhill. There are no trees to block the sun, no other peaks and ranges to block the views of Cascade volcanoes floating above the horizon. It’s a landscape of stark beauty. More than one person has described hiking here like walking on the moon – over a certain elevation, there’s hardly any life to be found, other than rare, isolated blades of hardy grass and an occasional insect, or the shadowed cry of a blue-black raven. It’s all volcanic stone and sand, loose accumulations of rock fallen or blasted from the mountain, piled up by the glaciers and rinsed by the rain. Permanent snowfields reflect the sun, and even on clear days unpredictable weather washes over the sky and surrounds the summit with storms and the threat of storms, the potential for lightning and the thunderous silence of snow.

And there is distance, great distance.

Between the shelter and the summit, I saw only two other people, and they were descending. Given that only the certifiably insane would be climbing Hood so late in the season, it’s almost a certainty that I was the highest man on the mountain that afternoon, maybe the highest for hundreds of square miles. The climb is steeper than it looks from the shelter, but there are constant views of Mt. St. Helens, Mt.Rainier, the Tatoosh Range, Goat Rocks, Indian Heaven, Mt. Adams, and the Gorge peaks that seduced me into frequent stops. Gazing east, the high desert slipped into a gauze of haze and horizon. Below, Elk Meadows lay in autumn color in the bowl below Bluegrass Ridge, framed by Lookout Mountain and the Badger Creek wilderness, and Newton Creek ran almost a mile below me under Gnarl Ridge and Lambertson Butte. To the south, the lifts at Mt. Hood Meadows glinted in the sun, and the Newton Clark glacier fell away into deep blue ridges and valleys punctuated by Mt. Jefferson and the Three Sisters.

It’s hard not to gasp for breath in such thin air.

I climbed higher and higher, switch-backing up the spur until the trail disappeared under an icy snowfield. I backtracked and picked an off-trail route uphill until I reached the summit and laid down my pack by a wide circle of stones arranged as a windbreak. Mt. Hood towered before me, and the Eliot Glacier fell from its cirque in a frozen river of ice falls, seracs, and crevasses. Hiroshima Rock, carved with kanji to commemorate a 1910 Japanese climbing expedition, reflected the afternoon light. A climber’s route led up a narrow spine past Tie-in Rock, the traditional place where climbers rope up before the technical climb between the Newton-Clark and the Eliot. Cold wind gusted from the ice, and in the bright, warm sun, I felt elemental, my weariness replaced by serenity.

I stayed for an hour in an otherworldly trance, my attention occupied by the proximity of the mountain and the subtleties of the Eliot Glacier at my right. Eliot is the largest glacier on Hood, but it’s shrinking rapidly. Geologic time isn’t always measured in millennia. This high on Hood, I could hear the ice grinding and cracking, and the near-constant rumble and retort of rock-fall. From the edge of the spur, loose rock drops precipitously to the ice hundreds of feet below. It was sometimes nerve-wracking to hear mini-avalanches below my feet as I watched the light change on the ice: glacial-blue with an inner light in the ice-fall and crevasses, snow-covered and brilliant in the sun, dirty where rock had fallen onto the surface, and grades of gray and brown where the rock-covered terminus lapped at lateral moraines near the tree-line.

The sun began to sink and shadows encroached on the east face of the mountain like a wave. I took my time descending, caught between the show of evening light on the mountain and the glowing, deep color of the land below me. It’s hard to walk away from such an awesome sight, wandering through barren terrain and listening to the emptiness. But I reached the shelter and the Timberline Trail, and the wind-sculpted forest of hemlock and white pine. At the top of Tilly Jane canyon my shadow was long, and the sun blazed just above the mountain and the long dark spur. Ahead of me was a short hike to my truck, where a clean t-shirt, a change of socks, and a thermos of coffee waited for me. I still had to negotiate the gravel road and the drive through the gorge with the sunset in my windshield, but I felt utterly relaxed and cleansed, my worries gone. I hadn’t hiked in two rough weeks – and before I entered the trees I turned for one last look at the mountain. This was Mt. Hood’s parting shot – perhaps my last hike of the year in good weather, and a brilliant end to the season.

*****

Distance: 6.4 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 2700ft (est)
Region: Mt. Hood
Information: 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Portland, 3^rd ed., by Paul Gerald; Geo-Graphics Mount Hood Wilderness Map; Portlandhikers.org

Notes: Northwest Annual Forest Pass ($30) or day permit ($5 at trailhead) required. Water and restroom available at the trailhead.

Distance From Portland: 2 hours

Directions: From Portland, take I84 to Hood River and turn south on Highway 35. Drive approximately 23 miles and turn right, following signs for Cooper Spur Ski Resort. About 2 miles later, turn left onto Cloud Cap Road, which becomes rough gravel for 9.5 miles. Between the gate at Inspiration Point and the trailhead, drive slowly and watch for large water-bars.

While the Dark Leaned In: Fall Equinox, 2010

2010-10-02T00:43:00.000-07:00

More photos here

I had the pleasure of celebrating the fall equinox with some very good friends at Catherine Creek. Frank had invited me and his friend, Brook, several weeks earlier, and we watched anxiously as the weather opened up a sunny window right on the 22^nd. We left town at noon under clear skies and warm temperatures, and after great conversations in the car and a stop in Hood River (to visit a rock and bead seller named Janet Planet, no less), we arrived at Catherine Creek with a ton of positive energy and set off to visit some of Frank and Brook’s favorite spots.

Catherine Creek is a large area of land managed by the Forest Service. It lies in Washington, between Hood River and The Dalles. Bordered on the west by Coyote Wall, a massive anticline, and the town of Lyle on the east, Catherine Creek is a rolling grassland broken by creek drainages and stands of oak and pine. Catherine Creek is on the dry side of the Cascades, and has one of the earliest spring flower blooms, when grass widows explode in purple sheets across the March meadows. In late September, the grass is brown and the creeks are dry, but there is a quiet, desolate beauty to the place - the crowds of wildflower seekers are gone, and the air is crystalline and fresh. It would be a good place to film a western, ponderosas red in the sun and the wind rippling across prairie grass.

I usually hike west from the trailhead, heading uphill and left into forests, above the tumbled canyons of the Labyrinth and across to Coyote Wall. I hadn’t explored much to the east, and after reading a selection from a Gary Snyder poem, Frank led us uphill to the east. After passing the ruins of an old corral and a natural basalt arch, we arrived at a large fallen snag he called the Dharma Tree.

We rested there for a while, and Frank strung Tibetan prayer flags from the Dharma tree. It was mid-afternoon, and Catherine Creek was bright under the sun. But as the sun sank lower, we climbed higher between two stands of oak as the sun cast long beams through the clouds and on the plateaus and scablands around the Columbia River. Frank and Brook hung another string of prayer flags, Frank planted arrowleaf balsamroot seeds in a large patch of earth, and I found a hawk’s tail-feather in the duff beneath the oaks.

It was a day of serendipities and coincidences – if Brook hadn’t seen a critter under the oak, and if Frank hadn’t rustled the leaves with his hiking staff, I’d never have seen the feather. We’d already set a great tone for the day, pacing a train by the river, sharing snacks, drinking a bit of beer, and goofing off. We’d seen where deer had bedded down for the night in the grass, found a beautiful green snake, and basked in the sun after a week of rain.

It was good to be outside.

As the sun sank, we hiked west to an open hillside, with the decaying remains of a barbed-wire fence stretched through the brown grass. Two deer appeared in the meadow above us, then folded into the oak like shadows. The sky glowed with sunset. Mt. Hood appeared in silhouette across the Oregon gorge, and lights began to appear in the vast distances opening below us in evening light. The full moon would rise from the east at 6:25pm, followed by Jupiter at 7:15pm, and summer would officially end at 8:09pm with the equinox.

The moon came up, a silver coin in the soft purple-lavender sky above The Dalles Mountains. A line of cumulus, smoky orange and scarlet from the sun, arced all the way overhead from Hood. Jupiter appeared pendant below the moon, and the air turned blue, then indigo, and the last light faded in magenta waves from the west.

As night fell deeper we hiked without headlamps down through the meadows, guided by Frank and the light of the moon. It was the kind of time William Stafford meant when he wrote the lines “So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid. / Some day like this might save the world.”

We descended to another tree – I couldn’t tell you where or retrace my steps – a place that Frank has visited many times. Frank planted more balsamroot and Brook and I enjoyed the moon rising in the deepening sky. Eventually we followed a small trail, almost a game path, down through the trees and into the draw leading past the arch and old ranch. Somehow I ended up in front, leading in darkness by LED headlamp down a trail I’d never been on. I charged ahead, letting my feet and eyes collaborate and guide. Only after I became aware of what I was doing did I ask if I was on track, and only after I was told “yes” did I lose the trail, brought back by gentle directions from the voices in the night behind me.

Down past the arch, the ranch and the corral, down through the lower meadows and to the lonely trailhead lit by the climbing moon. In the nearby ranch-house a few yellow squares of windowed light. The gorge was bright from shore to shore. A light wind, still warm – t-shirt and pants weather – and a last look at the silver grassy slopes of Catherine Creek. We piled into the car for the drive home, quiet in our thoughts. I’ve never before honored the earth so ritualistically or holistically.

My respect for the wilderness is my application of that term to include even human-altered landscapes, so long as they foster the wild within me. I believe in, and practice, leave-no-trace principles. My spirituality is deepened and molded by my outdoor experiences, and yet… Outdoor experiences don’t have to be so intense or serious or solitary all the time. It’s not always about testing yourself by hiking far or climbing high, or going into extreme conditions. They can be about silence, and beauty, and appreciation. At Catherine Creek, on the fall equinox, hanging prayer flags and planting seeds made sense. Sharing food, time, and laughter made sense. Relaxing and watching the world majestically turn made sense.

Even the jammed-out Swedish prog-rock we listened to on the way home made sense.

Enchantments, Day 3 - Deep Play

2010-08-31T16:12:00.000-07:00

"There is a deeper form of play, akin to rapture and ecstasy, that humans relish, even require to feel whole… In its thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they're taken to intense and transcendent heights…

Deep play always involves the sacred and holy, sometimes hidden in the most unlikely or humble places… the physiological goal is to impel the initiate into a higher state of consciousness that kindles visions and insights, in a locale where survival may depend on a combination of ingenuity and nerve." *

Finding a suitable spot to pitch a tent isn’t always as easy as it might seem, and I’d slept poorly for the third night in a row. Morning came early, with a bright sun shining above Snow Lake. We broke camp, slathered on DEET, shouldered packs, and headed out on what was, on paper, a short, easy 6.5 mile day-hike with 2600’ of elevation gain, and 2200’ of elevation loss. But this wasn’t a well-graded, wide National Park or Forest Service trail – this would be a gnarly, rock and root filled climb into snow, across boulders and granite slabs, down loose scree and avalanche rubble, and into tangled thickets and swiftly darkening forest.

The hike to Viviane felt easier than the day before, despite the lack of sleep and other ailments, and we ate lunch before crossing the log bridge and hiking up above the lake. The trail climbed a steeply sloping granite slab, dangerous because the snow hadn’t fully melted out and covered the rebar supports embedded in the face, and the rock was wet from snowmelt.

From Viviane, we followed tracks in the snow to Leprechaun Lake, half-covered in turquoise-blue ice and surrounded by melting meadows, granite covered in snow, and spindly alpine fir. One at a time, we crossed a large snow bridge over the stream between Leprechaun and Viviane, and pausing to reflect, Derek pointed out our first mountain goat on a distant snowfield above the lake. The clouds built into frothy masses of white and gray and McClellan Peak became a blade, serrations marked by avalanche shoots filled with sun-brightened snow.

The outside world fell away. Suddenly there was nothing but raw experience and immediacy, nothing but sensory input, a perfect conjunction of thought and action and feeling, a complete immersion into the real and a disappearance of anything superfluous or unrelated to the experience. When I’m outdoors, hiking or backpacking, I often think about work, about the bills I have to pay, about my family and friends, about weighty relationship issues. Occasionally these thoughts fade into the background. Sometimes they disappear completely, only to resurface when it’s time to head back, or when I see or do something I’ll want to tell someone about. I’m rarely entirely focused on my activity. There’s almost always something in the way.

Not this time, not now. This time there was no outside world, nothing but what was in front of me – McClellan’s serrated ridge, Leprechaun Lake’s dark waters reflecting the mountains, steep scree and snowfields. Under my feet, snow, and on my face, sun and wind. Mike and Derek were present, of course, but they belonged there, as did the twisted firs, the rushing stream, the dance of light and shadow. My movements were unplanned but exact, as though my body knew exactly how to balance, where to step, when to stop and when to start. And my thoughts were calm like the lake water, even when the wind blew across its surface. You can enjoy something until you realize your enjoyment will end, and then your enjoyment is tempered or sweetened by sadness; I only saw what was in front of me, but I knew it fully, and I imagined the next several miles of lakes and mountains and snow and I was at peace with the immensity around me.

Buddhists talk about “Being-Awareness-Bliss,” and almost all the way to Aasgard Pass, I embodied “Being-Awareness-Bliss.” I felt like I was walking in a Chinese scroll, where the mountains and waterfalls and pines recede into the void, and where man is an impossibly small figure placed in the corner for scale, and for a balance and harmony between nature and life. I felt necessary, exactly the right size.

I felt right – acting naturally without thought, sensing without the need to reflect, knowing without doubting. Everything was more real, more vibrant, more genuine - not just what I saw, but also the wind on my face, the snow and earth under my boots, the weight of my pack and the movement of my limbs, the warm blood in my muscles. Later this sense of completeness would fade as the weather changed and I grew accustomed to my surroundings, but for long stretches of trail I moved in a state of peace.

Aasgard Pass would rob me of that, but there were miles to go before then.

We continued from Leprechaun through snow and meadow to Sprite Lake. Darker clouds began to move in from the southwest. The trail gradually turned to snow near Perfection Lake, but each stream crossing was manageable and the trail easy to follow. We wore yak-traks from here on, rarely slipped, and rarely post-holed much more than past an ankle. We didn’t have crampons or ice axes, but I never felt like I needed them, maybe because I was foolhardy, or maybe because I just didn’t need them.

In the Enchantments, every lake seems more incredible than the next. Photos and words can’t do justice to the color of the ice and water, or the contrast between snow and stone, sky and meadow. Rounding Perfection Lake, the trail became mostly snow, and a quick drizzle of rain rippled the edges of the lake where the ice melted into a clear turquoise. But unlike the snow, the rain let up, and we took our packs off to rest like hermits by a boulder shaded by an ancient pine. The basin stretched out behind us, snow lying under bright green trees, and rocky hillsides arching below Prusik’s arrow-like summit. Then, just before Inspiration Lake, I walked to a small viewpoint to look out over Perfection Lake and the glacial valley that drops below Little Annapurna to Crystal Lake and falls from the basin into deep forests. Something moved in my peripheral vision and I turned to see a mountain goat walk out of a stand of trees and approach within several feet of me.

There is something inherently likeable about mountain goats - their dark eyes and beards give them a sage-like appearance, and their sureity on rock and slope is reassuring. They're in control, comfortable in their environment, and steadfast and solid as the mountains. As this first goat passed me, though, I was immediately nervous and didn't think any of this. You just don't usually get this close to wild animals, and goats are tough, compact creatures. The goat's winter wool was peeling, and two short, black horns jutted from his head. Black eyes watched me carefully as he passed, climbing up the rock in a clatter of sharp hooves. The goat looked back one more time, then disappeared into the trees.

I was shocked – I think I said, “Oh my God” and as I turned to watch the goat, I pulled out my camera. Mike and Derek did likewise. We expected to see mountain goats in the Enchantments, and we’d already seen one at a distance, but I didn’t expect to see one so close, behaving so casually around people. I thought this might be the only one we’d see so close. I was wrong.

At Inspiration Lake, filled with thick cracked ice and surrounded by steep granite walls, we ran into two older hikers exploring from their base camp. We’d met them before, at Leprechaun, Lake, and together we watched another hiker descend a steep trail in a snow slope above the lake. Above the slope, a notch led higher into the upper basin. Coming around a corner, we encountered the hiker and his family watching a mother goat and her kid.

The human family was the same we’d met at Viviane the day before, and they were taking a break at the edge of a rocky open area with expansive views of Perfection Lake, Prusik, and McClellan. The goats were near the cliff edge, but they soon ambled towards us. Like the previous goat, the mother’s coat was shedding, and the kid was an incredibly cute ball of wool.

Mike climbed atop a low ridge of stone and the mother and kid climbed up to meet him. Standing a few feet away, Mike and the goats posed for the camera before all three animals ambled over to join Derek and I at the snow-free rocks at the edge of the cliff. The family of hikers left us to climb up the notch, and we relaxed with the goats, watching and taking pictures as they ate the flowers off penstemons. It felt unreal to be so close to wild animals, especially a mother with a baby. They were wary – they kept us in sight with their big black eyes – but neither goat showed fear and both came within just a few feet of us. Goats in the Enchantments are obviously used to people, and in an environment with little salt, the goats have learned that backpackers are an excellent source of nutrients. Campers are advised to keep boots and packs in tents to prevent goats from chewing up gear in search of salt, and the wilderness permit instructs bearers to urinate on “huge” flat rocks so that goats won’t dig up the fragile meadows.

The day was growing later, so we left the goats and began to climb up the notch into the upper basin. The trail below the snow probably switchbacks a few times one or two hundred feet to a cluster of boulders, but the trail in the snow did no such thing, heading up in a straight line above the lake. The yak-trak’s coils dug in as we stepped in footprints, one foot after another, using trekking poles for balance and focusing on every step. The footprints ended near a boulder. Lifting a foot to bridge the gap where the snow had melted away from the stone, I slipped off the granite and fell, stopping myself before the long slide to the lake.

As falls go, it wasn’t bad. We all made it off the snow without further incident and broke for a snack, and we were soon joined by another inquisitive mountain goat that circled the boulder we used as a table. After eating, Mike felt the call of nature and stood up on a large nearby rock. As soon as the goat heard the sound of liquid, it ran over, hooves clattering. Derek and I shouted and Mike barely had time to zip up before the goat was up on the rock, licking at the fresh urine.

Mountain goats are cool but this was a little gross, and we decided to keep moving. Packs cinched up, we ascended the pass at a more moderate slope, and very soon we stood at the edge of the upper Enchantment basin, staring at a landscape forged in ice and shaped by wind and snow.

Introductory quote from "Deep Play," by Diane Ackerman

Good Graces

2010-08-31T12:24:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning to thoughts of fire.

Outside it is gray and the air smells of rain. A few leaves skitter in the street. My apartment is cold and I’ve pulled on a favorite old sweater. It isn’t raining yet, but the wind blowing through the trees makes it sound like it is. Fall is coming soon, and I’m looking forward to it.

Last night a friend of mine equated autumn with grace, with the need to live gracefully as summer ends and the seasons turn towards winter cold, shorter days, and stormy weather. For both of us, autumn is our favorite season. For me, it’s time for cool, blustery walks in colorful woods and mountains, time for crisp days and flashing nights full of stars, time for harvest celebrations and afternoons spent with books and beer at rainy pub windows. Autumn suggests the holidays, companionship, and turning inward and inside.

Autumn also suggests wood-smoke and heat, the crackle of sap and the glow of embers, a tidy campfire reflecting the cold and darkness.

Summer is ending and I spent only six nights around campfires, most in the mountains and one at the beach. Accompanied by friends and sometimes deer, each was a blessing. Every fire is alive and unique, from the setting and circumstance to the species of wood and the patterns of grain. The voice of the flame and the architecture of logs and coals are different every time. To start a fire is to begin something that creates its own designs.

I’m looking forward to enjoying a few more campfires before November’s storms arrive. In the meantime, rain falls in long gray dresses. I’ve missed it and needed it. Like a campfire, and like autumn, it reminds me to take the days as they come with their graces and calm equanimity.

Alone in Paradise - August 24th, 2010

2010-08-29T01:09:00.000-07:00

(More photos)

There are multiple ways to get to Paradise, and none of them are easy. The routes from Ramona Falls and Hidden Lake are long, with several thousand feet of elevation gain. The trail from Timberline Lodge – the route I took last weekend – is also long, though the easiest, with a descent and climb out of Zigzag canyon, and a return trip that is moderately, yet consistently, uphill through open sub-alpine forest.

It all pays off, in the end. Even when the end is the next day at work, with sore calves and bright memories.

Hiking, alone or otherwise, is as much a mental exercise as it is physical. How you deal with fatigue, with biting insects, with heat and sun or inclement weather – it adds up to what your father told you when he assigned you chores; it builds character. I got bit by a deer fly on my adam’s apple, of all places, and it itches like hell, and I consider it the price of admission. Four miles away from the trailhead, what do you do with negative thoughts? I’d love to be at my truck, drinking hot coffee from my thermos and replacing wool socks and boots for sandals and a clean shirt, on my way home to a shower and a beer. But there are four miles to cover, including a big canyon and a mountain stream to cross, and an uphill slog through late afternoon heat.

Man, I can taste the coffee now.

Hiking alone means no one hears me complain. But it also means I get fed up with the complaining. It doesn’t get me home any faster. It doesn’t matter if I’m retracing a trail I was on earlier in the morning, with the same scenery and my own boot-prints in the dust. The sweat in my eyes and the ache in my shoulders isn’t going to go away. What I do about it isn’t going to win me points or cost me friends. All I can do is keep going.

It’s the price of admission.

I wandered through wildflower meadows full of butterflies. I crossed picturesque creeks running down from glaciers. I stood in the shade of a huge rock and marveled at the power of nature to move stone and carve deep chasms. If all it takes is an uphill walk, it’s worth it.

Where I ate lunch, there’s a block of dacite erupted from Mt. Hood, with a wide curve to it that invites lying down and spending time staring at meadows and the mountain. The boulder is covered in bright green lichen. The lichen is probably centuries old. It was there when the first climbers reached Hood’s summit, there when Robert Gray first crossed the Columbia Bar, there when the Columbia was dammed by an earthquake in 1700, giving rise to the legend of the Bridge of the Gods. How many eruptions has this lichen survived? How many seasons of wildflowers? How many lifetimes of man?

One foot after another, I walked back from Paradise.

Distance: 12 miles roundtrip (est)
Elevation Gain: 2300ft (est)
Region: Mt. Hood Wilderness
Information: Afoot & Afield: Portland/Vancouver, 2^nd ed., by Douglas Lorain; portlandhikers.org

Distance from Portland: 1.5 hours
Directions from Portland: Take Highway 26 just east of Government Camp and turn left on Timberline Lodge Road. Drive 5.5 miles to the lodge and park. The well-marked Timberline Trail passes just above the lodge. Head west.

Lake Viviane and the Wilderness Life - The Enchantments, Day 2

2010-08-28T00:08:00.000-07:00

When you hike with water tainted by dead goat, you get thirsty fast. When your fellow hikers have a head cold and sore feet, you have a recipe for big arguments and raging tempers. It was a blessing and a wonder that none of that happened when we set out to day hike in the Enchantments.

Mike and Derek and I followed the Snow Lakes trail towards the head of the valley to find a small stream cascading through boulders and underground tunnels, and splashing through pools on the forest floor. We refilled and treated our water, and made our way to the inlet where the stream draining the entire upper basin entered Upper Snow Lake.

The water was aquamarine and deep, clear to the bare granite bottom. Trout swam in the shadows cast by a few drifting logs, feeding on whatever the current carried down from the heights above. A few yards upstream, two logs with sawn crosshatches for traction spanned the wide stream, and the trail began to climb, first through forest and then through alternating stretches of gnarled root, bare granite, and rocky ground.
At times, the trail was shaded by trees, and the footing was a mix of earth and root. The higher we climbed, the more rugged the trail became. First came easy granite bedrock, with cairns marking the way to the next section of trail. Then the granite began to build a slope, and the route followed natural fissures and gaps between outcrops. These gave way to staircases and pitches of stone marked with cairns, with some that almost required scrambling. There were other backpackers heading up, and our pace slowed to accommodate them. With Mike’s cold and Derek’s increasingly sore knee – he’d aggravated an old strain – we weren’t in a hurry. After one hard stretch, we took a break at a huge flat boulder overlooking the cascading stream as it fell over a hundred feet in the same amount of yards.

Mike and Derek cooked up ramen while I laid on my back, listening to the water and looking at the sky and jagged ridge across the valley. If we were all healthy, we’d consider the climb fun – but we weren’t, and I was doing my best to contain my excitement while Mike and Derek were admirably biting back complaints.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about backpacking is that it teaches self-reliance, while valuing sharing and teamwork. Each of us carried our own weight – everything we’d need in the wilderness was in our packs, on our backs, and in our hearts and heads. We shared food, insect repellent, water purification, sunscreen. We set up our own tents, cooked our own meals, carried our own loads. Whatever stresses we encountered were our own. Though there were complaints, they were not bitter, and though there were obstacles, we supported each other. This was Derek’s first extended backpacking trip and he asked a lot of questions, learning as he went. All three of us shared our past experiences, enthusiasm, and good humor, teaching as we went.

Wilderness is not something to anthropomorphize. It is not static; it follows its own rhythms. It does not care if you live or die, or how you live or die. Wilderness simply exists, independently of your physical or spiritual attachment to it, and how you interact with wilderness is a reflection of your approach to it, and a measure of what it means to you. When immersed in wilderness, when living in wilderness, you must treat it with respect, because only in that way will you treat yourself with respect. How we dealt with the hardships, the trials, and the changes of plan – all symptoms of what we brought with us – were emblematic of our respect for the wilderness we were in, and for each other.

That’s why it was so damn relaxing to lie back on a slab of granite and soak up the sun, listening to the rush of falling water and the quiet voices of my friends as they prepared a simple meal in the shade of the Enchantments basin.

The rest recharged us, and up the trail we went, into a more open country where the views were magnificent and the route more difficult.

Scattered pines cast crooked shadows over granite bedrock and blooming pink and white heather. The sun shone brightly on the lakes below, and McClellan Peak towered to the west, a serrated blade notched by chutes filled with shaded snow and tremendous fields of rockfall. The landscape didn’t lend itself to a trail – in some places, small steps and edges had been cut into the bedrock to help hikers balance. Sheets of granite lay exposed and sloped precipitously down, with nothing to stop a hiker if they fell. Between the granite sheets were stairs of stone at a steep pitch and high enough that it was hard to raise my foot high enough to step up. And then we arrived.

The trail lost elevation, rounded a corner, and opened up to Viviane where the outlet coursed through a granite channel and fell down the mountain side. Viviane was beautiful, with walls of granite holding two sides of the lake and Prusik Peak looming above. The western slopes were covered in snow and above them the Enchantments basin rose under McClellan Peak’s ramparts. At 6785ft, the lake still had ice floating in it, but we set our packs down and splashed cold water on our faces, necks, and hands. Backpackers reclined along the shore, included several we recognized from the ascent.

After taking photos and relaxing, Mike and Derek wandered down to an overlook above the valley and Snow Lake. I unloaded my day-pack and refilled my water, and right after I joined Mike and Derek, one of the backpackers by the lake ran down to say that chipmunks were getting into our food. I knew it had to be my fault, and when I ran back I saw that it was. I’d left food out when I pulled out my water bladder. Embarrassed, I packed everything up and decided to test the sketchy log bridge over the outlet stream.

Several small logs had been jammed between the bank and a boulder to make a surprisingly sturdy bridge. The gap between the boulder and the elevated bank opposite was no problem for agile, confident backpackers, but I proved it was possible to cross by hikers with other attributes. The trail wound around a large outcrop and I climbed up to see an elevated view of Viviane and the little shore crowded with backpackers.

When I returned, we watched seven or eight backpackers – two couples and three teenagers – cross the bridge. I’m always envious of kids that get to backpack; I wish I’d been able to go hiking or backpacking more often as a child, but at the same time, I recognize that I might have hated it, subsequently avoided it, and never have the opportunity to experience wilderness again. It worked out okay, but I wish I had those kid’s energy.

At 4:30pm we hoisted packs and began the descent, which, steep as it was, stressed Derek’s knee even more. Our downhill pace was still quicker than our uphill, and we passed a number of backpackers heading up or resting on the way. One group of guys had hiked all the way from the Snow Lake trailhead, with packs, and they were beat after a 5485ft, almost 9 mile day. They may have been the only hikers on the trail who wanted to reach camp more than we did.

The sun was bright but low over the headwall when we walked in to our own camp. Mike crawled into his tent to rest, and I joined Derek at the lake, soaking sore feet in the clear, cold water and leaning back to watch the sun set over the bottom lip of the Enchantments basin and trout jump in the lake. Those trout could feast all night long, I thought, and not make a dent in the mosquito population. We were just two days in, with two more to go, and our supply of DEET was running low. I thought the mosquitoes at Crater Lake two weeks before had been worse, but these were just as plentiful, and for whatever reason more annoying to Mike and Derek than to me. I’ve never heard more creative swearing than on this trip.

Dinner was once again dehydrated meals – spaghetti and meatballs, in my case – as well as ramen with a dash of DEET and a sprinkling of dirt. Dessert consisted of sitting back with a hand-rolled cigarette and a nalgene bottle half-full of bourbon, watching the stars come out. We discussed plans for the next day, which depended greatly on Mike’s cold and Derek’s knee. We were low on DEET, ibuprofen, and emergenC, and our aqua mira supply was halved when one of the bottles leaked. The day hike to Viviane was frustrating in that we’d have to do it again, and it had tested us already. There were no answers under the stars, but we were in high spirits and not about to suurender – we all wanted to push through the Enchantments, and while we agreed that any one of us could say “I can’t do this” and we’d reverse course, there was little chance that would happen. Still, I had concerns, though I kept them to myself. After the moon set, it was a dark night - but I had friends I trusted and a wilderness to conquer.

Hikes Past: McNeil Point, August 3rd, 2010

2010-08-23T12:27:00.000-07:00

Mt. Hood and the Sandy Glacier from the ridge below McNeil Point

McNeil Point is my favorite hike on Mt. Hood. A half-mile from the trailhead, the path curves through wildflower meadows on the south side of Bald Mountain, with a huge view of Mt. Hood sitting high above the deep Muddy Fork valley. From there, the trail climbs steadily through a forest of Noble fir before entering more meadows, with McNeil Point high up on the ridge. Wildflowers line the trail and fill the meadows all the way up: paintbrush, lupine, wild carrot, valerian, mustard, tiger lily, Mt. Hood lily, avalanche lily, bistort, western pasqueflower. After passing a steep spur-trail that shortcuts to the top, you cross several cascading streams and arrive at a series of small tarns reflecting the mountain. Just afterwards, the trail climbs out of the forest in the sub-alpine zone, where snowfields linger late into summer, surrounded by meadows of white and pink heather and more wildflowers, bordered by stands of scrappy fir and rocky slopes filled with scree. After a breath-taking mile, you arrive at McNeil Point, a loft perch occupied by a 1930’s era Civilian Conservation Corps shelter overlooking miles of wilderness all the way past Lost Lake, Bull Run Reservoir, and the Columbia River Gorge to the snowy peaks of Rainier, St. Helens, and Adams. Your route lies beneath you, and above, a trail climbs through higher meadows to a knife-edge ridge between the Glisan and Sandy glaciers. There’s nowhere else to go, no sound but wind and water and the cracking of glacial ice, no sign of life but the bleached and gnarled limbs of whitebark pine groping for the sky, and penstemons rooted in deep cracks in the dark volcanic rock. Mt. Hood fills half the sky, the arete a spine of rock continuing up to bergschrunds and the litter of rockfall above blue crevasses. Yokum Ridge and Barret Spur bookend this tumbled country of moraines and ice, and the Cascades fall away into deep valleys and green and blue ridges disappearing at the horizon.

It’s an epic place that challenges as much as it liberates. I watched a large buck effortlessly flow across the meadows below me, and listened to the glaciers flow. I filled up on ice, sun, and stone, then returned to the long walk back through wildflowers and butterflies, hiking down past the snow and frog-filled ponds and into the forest, where finally I reached my truck and the long drive home. “This is magnificent country,” I wrote in my journal, and “it is peaceful here.”

Distance: 9.6 miles roundtrip (est)
Elevation Gain: 2900ft (est)
Region: Mt. Hood Wilderness
Information: portlandhikers.org; 60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Portland, 3^rd ed., by Paul Gerald

Distance from Portland: 58 miles (1.5 hours)
Directions from Portland: Take Highway 26 to Zigzag and turn left onto Lolo Pass Road. Drive 10.6 miles to the pass and take the first right on paved Road 1828 (the sign might only say road 18). Drive 3.1 miles and make a sharp left at Road 118. The trailhead is 1.2 miles up this gravel road.

More Photos

The Enchantments, Day I - DEET, Dams, & Mountain Goats

2010-08-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

Just after six o’clock at the top of Aasgard Pass. Colchuck Lake is a half-mile below. To the west, the sun shines rays behind dark clouds above Dragontail Peak, and to the north, lines of ridges and snowy mountains recede into the distance of the Cascades. The wind blows gently over the pass and despite the snow and an unsettled feeling, it is warm enough for t-shirts and shorts. The lake looks inviting – I wish I were there now – but I remember the words of the wilderness ranger yesterday: “The trail is rocky, sandy, and steep. Go slow. Cross the big snowfield at the bottom, not the top.”

“Typical Aasgard,” she said.

Typical Aasgard – the route drops 2200’ in .9 miles, 5-10° past the typical angle of repose. Most people go up it, and the backpackers Mike, Derek and I encountered in the Enchantments almost universally expressed surprise that we intended to go down. The clouds grew darker, and after several false starts, we found the right trail and passed the first cairn on our descent.

The Enchantments are a series of high alpine lakes tucked in a basin in Washington’s central Cascades. Surrounded by jagged peaks, the lakes necklace through two granite basins filled with waterfalls, pine, snow, and inquisitive mountain goats. It is epic country, difficult to get to, and harder still to forget. Permits are required, and requests must be submitted in February; only about a third are granted, and not all allow camping in the core zone. We drew permits to camp at Snow Lake at the end of July, below and to the north of the core zone, and after a five hour drive from Portland, we arrived in the faux-Bavarian town of Leavenworth. All the official campgrounds were full, but we stumbled across a hidden, “locals only” site and spent the night drinking bourbon and beer around a campfire. In retrospect, that might not have been the best idea.

The next day, we organized our packs and set up the shuttle – one truck at the Snow Lake trailhead, one at Colchuck. We’d decided to enter via Snow Lake; the ascent was longer and gained more elevation, but once in the Enchantments proper, the scenery would get progressively better. From Colchuck, we’d have to climb just as far, and we’d arrive at the best part only to hike down a long haul.

That long haul and the previous night’s partying caught up to us. The Snow Lake gains 4300’ in 6.5 miles. The weather was warm and sunny, and the steepest section of trail, the first few miles, shoots up through a fairly open hillside before entering the valley and thicker forest. Of course, we had heavy, “first day’ packs, and soon broke for snacks to lighten the loads. This was Derek’s first multi-night backpack, and he carried a new pack on broken-in combat boots; Mike also carried a new pack, an Osprey like mine but a smaller model; and I shuffled along with older, battle-tested gear and a few new toys.

The climb was uneventful and tiring, but we made good time and reached Nada Lake and our first look at The Temple at mid-afternoon. Nada Lake was a welcome sight – one little ridge to cross and we’d be at Snow Lake. We sprayed on DEET against the mosquitoes and continued on. The little ridge didn’t feel so little, but suddenly we arrived at the concrete dam between Upper and Lower Snow Lakes, and we knew we were almost there.

Like the trout swimming in Snow Lake’s clear waters, the dam is a remnant from the time before this area became a designated wilderness. Somewhere about 50ft long, give or take, and perhaps 8ft deep on the upper lake with a 10-15ft drop on the lower lake side, the dam allows water to spill over the entire length of its top. The trail crosses the top of the dam. We made jokes about the likelihood of someone falling in, and agreeing that if anyone would, it would be me, I stepped foot on the dam first.

The current wasn’t very strong, and the water was never more than a few inches deep. I shuffled along, using my trekking poles and the logjam in the upper lake for balance. Upon reaching the opposite side, I turned to see Mike and Derek already crossing, and we all made it across with nothing more than damp boots.

A side trail a short distance away led to a small peninsula and a lakeside campsite with a view of Lower Snow Lake and room for three tents. There was an occupied campsite a hundred yards away, and a murky pond that we suspected was responsible for breeding the clouds of mosquitoes buzzing around our ears. We pitched our tents and relaxed for a while before walking down to the dam to draw water for cooking and hot toddies. We watched the sun set and ate our dehydrated meals, smoked cigarettes and swatted at the bugs while the sky turned pink and the hillsides lost definition in deepening darkness. I put on my newest acquisition, a compressible synthetic-down jacket that Mike said made me look like a Jersey girl in the woods. Whatever – I was warm under one layer. At last the stars came out, and the moon shone through the trees behind us. We wandered back to the upper lake in time to watch the moon set over a 7250ft un-named summit just east of McClellan Peak, then we, too, settled in for the night.

The morning brought surprises.

I slept poorly, using my jacket as a pillow and finding every root and rock under my sore limbs. At 7am I got up when I heard Derek moving around. The sun was bright in the cloudless sky; the day would be warm. We made coffee with Starbucks Via and ate oatmeal, and dodged gray jays as they darted around camp, occasionally dive-bombing us. After a while we tried to goad Mike into rising. A muffled voice rose from his tent; he slept badly too, and felt miserable with a sudden cold. The morning went slowly from there as Mike got up, found the outdoor privy, and climbed back in his tent. Derek and I each paid a visit to the wooden box, which didn’t smell bad but was exposed to the forest, and drew mosquitoes and biting flies from all corners of the valley. DEET was as important as TP.

To pass time, Derek went down to the dam and returned with words I’ll never forget: “Did you guys know there’s a dead mountain goat in the logjam?” Mike started to get up immediately and I followed Derek towards the dam. We were intercepted by a ranger – she carried a full pack and a long-handled shovel, and she wore her hair in pig-tails. Knowing she’d want to see our permit, we walked back to camp and she provided us with information about trail conditions. As soon as she left, we returned to the dam and we looked for the goat, shielding our eyes against the sun and scanning the logjam.

“Where is it?” we asked, looking further and further out. “Right there,” said Derek, pointing to a yellowish, bloated carcass jammed between two logs about 15ft from us, near where we’d drawn water the night before. It had obviously been there a while, with logs backed up behind it outside of the main flow and close to the edge of the lake.

I think we all felt a little sick.

Back at camp, we held counsel. The original plan had been to day-hike to Lake Viviane, the lowest lake in the Enchantments basin and just 2 miles away and 1360ft up the head of the valley. But the dead goat unnerved us; we weren’t certain our water was safe to drink, although it had been treated. Mike was sick, and the mosquitoes were thick, possibly because we were so close to a brackish pond. Derek and I agreed to hike around the lake to look for a campsite closer to the upper basin, and with fewer mosquitoes. From there, we’d figure out what to do next.

It worked out well. Derek and I found a camp next to a granite shelf that gently sloped into green-blue water, and we moved camp, set up out tents, and prepared to hike to Viviane. I stuffed my ultralight day-pack with gear, Mike and Derek reorganized their backpacks, and we set off in early afternoon with a mission: find a cleaner source of water.

Thundering Waters: Toketee Falls, July 6th, 2010

2010-08-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

Toketee Falls is one of the most beautiful falls in Oregon, roaring out of a narrow gorge on the North Umpqua River. Toketee means “graceful” or “pretty’ in Chinook jargon, an apt name for a waterfall spilling 80ft over columnar basalt into a deep green splash-pool. An upper tier brings Toketee’s combined height to 120ft.

On the way back from Crater Lake, my friend and I camped at nearby Clearwater Falls, and hiked the quarter-mile trail to Toketee the next morning. The trail leaves a parking lot next to a huge, old, wooden pipe, part of an upstream hydroelectric project. Recently closed to repair storm damage, the newly opened trail follows wooden staircases and boardwalks through old-growth forest, ending at a viewing platform above the pool. The morning light made photography difficult, but the falls were stunning anyway, surrounded by steep cliffs, tall trees, and the roar of the cascade. Toketee, and the rugged beauty of the Umpqua River highway, made a fitting end to a spectacular trip.

Distance: ½ mile roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 200ft (est)
Region: Umpqua National Forest
Information: Managed by the Diamond Lake Ranger District, USFS
Directions: Turn off Highway 138 near milepost 58 onto the well-signed Road 34. Stay left at the fork, cross the bridge, and find the trailhead 200ft to the left.

Hurricane Ridge: July 23rd, 2010

2010-07-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

The Olympic Mountains from Hurricane Hill (more pictures)

You know you’re in an amazing place when there are deer grazing peacefully in the parking lot. Hurricane Ridge, on the north side of Olympic National Park, is an easy drive from Port Angeles – which means it’s crowded with tourists who come for the same reason I did: to see an outstanding 360° panorama of the Olympic mountains. At the end of the road, past the visitor’s center, a short paved trail leads to the top of Hurricane Hill, with views south to the Olympics and north across the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Victoria and the Canadian Coast Range, the San Juan Islands, and Mt. Baker. On this trip, Mike and I encountered two three-point bucks bedded down not 15 feet from us in a stand of trees, and a doe who grazed nearby as if we weren’t there. Marmots whistled in the cirque below the summit, sunning themselves and foraging in the evening light. The mountains were magnificent, and the meadows were filled with flowers: paintbrush, lupine, western bistort, buttercup, and many more. Hiking back, we said hello to a couple who pointed out two black bear across the ridge, and let us use their binoculars to watch them for a while. I’d never seen bear in the wild – and it goes to show that you can encounter kind, generous people everywhere, including crowded, easily accessible national park trails. Hurricane Ridge isn’t wilderness, but for those with an open mind, anything is possible.

Distance: 3 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 650ft
Region: Olympic National Park
Information: Day Hiking Olympic Peninsula, by Craig Romano.
Notes: National Park entry fee required. Dogs prohibited. Open in summer; winter accessibility varies.
Directions From Port Angeles: Turn off US 101 near milepost 249 and follow Race Street south 1.2 miles to the Hurricane Ridge Road. The visitor’s center is 17.5 miles away; drive 1.5 miles further to the trailhead.

Hikes Past: Burnt Lake, March 23rd

2010-06-06T22:39:00.000-07:00

Mt. Hood reflected in Burnt Lake (more pictures)

Burnt Lake is a popular summer destination, with reflective views of Mt. Hood and spectacular Zigzag ridge just above it. Surprisingly, I hiked there for the first time in late winter, with a group of hikers from portlandhikers.org. The trail started in lush green forest and followed the sounds of a creek before switchbacking up to the iced-over lake at 4,125ft. Snow covered the upper half of the trail, and there was no way I’d have made it without a guide (thanks, Gene!). I thought about this hike recently while looking at the weather forecast – the mild winter made it possible to enjoy clear skies and warm temperatures while eating lunch at the edge of a frozen lake, and yet the late spring rains haven’t given me a sunny hike in months. I’ll be back to climb Zigzag, trading in wet snow falling from hemlocks for wildflower meadows and huge views. That is, if summer ever comes…

Distance: 7 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 1,400ft
Region: Mt. Hood
Information: Afoot & Afield: Portland/Vancouver, 2^nd ed, by Douglas Lorain; portlandhikers.org
Notes: Northwest Forest Pass ($30) or day permit ($5 at trailhead) required. There may or may not be a porta-potty at the trailhead.
Distance From Portland: 1.5 hours
Directions From Portland: Follow at your own risk – I haven’t driven here! Take Highway 26 to Zigzag and turn left on Lolo Pass Road. After 4 miles, turn right on Road 1828 (signed “Campgrounds and Trailheads”). After 0.6 miles, turn right on Road 1825 and cross the bridge over the Sandy River (Gate closed in winter). Drive past McNeil Campground (0.8 miles from Lolo Pass Road) and past the right turn to Riley Horse Camp. At mile 2.2 (from Lolo Pass Road), stay right at the left-hand intersection with 1825-100 to Ramona Falls. You’re driving on the road to Lost Creek Campgrounds; take the gravel road past the campgrounds. At mile 2.7 (from Lolo Pass Road), stay right at the unmarked fork. There are no signs until mile 3.8, where the road dead-ends at the trailhead.

Going Ultralight On Dog Mountain - June 1st, 2010

2010-06-06T00:46:00.000-07:00

Balsamroot covering the upper meadows on Dog Mountain

I might have just been bitten by the ultralight bug. Last week I tried out a new pack on the Dog Mountain trail, and the results were better than I hoped for. This post will be all about gear, so get your geek on or stop reading now.

Before Dog Mountain, I’d hiked over 400 trail miles with my tried-and-true daypack, a McKinley Mistral 28 (made in Europe). But the Mistral weighs almost two pounds, and I’m a notoriously heavy packer – extra weight is good for training, and if it fits in the pack, why not take it along? In preparation for a summer trip, I bought an REI Flash 18 to stuff in my Osprey and use as a daypack. The Flash weighs just 10 ounces and loses 10 liters of capacity to the Mistral, so I had to rethink my gear list for Dog.

I started cutting gear immediately: yaktraks, extra socks, binoculars, camera case, tripod, leatherman, a length of hemp twine, a hand towel, allergy tablets, the stale for-emergencies-only Cliff Bar in my least favorite flavor. Sure, all of these things are useful – but most of it I’d never needed, or I’d forgotten I had it with me and I’d never used it. Some of it was for seasonal use, or something else duplicated its utility. And some of it was purely useless – I can’t make tea without bringing my stove, so why bring tea bags?

In the morning, I started packing the Flash and quickly ran into a problem – my gear, plus rain pants and jacket, three liters of water, and a 22oz Spring Reign from Ninkasi Brewing left just enough room for lunch. I’d also be carrying my wallet, keys, and CD face because I didn’t want to leave it in the truck. The Flash was getting heavy enough that I was concerned the stitching on the straps might not hold. Maybe I should take a 12oz beer instead of the 22oz… nah, some luxuries are worth it. I took a hard look at my gear and ditched the gloves and map. I removed extra batteries and packets of power gel and considered leaving the compass at home (like the map, I wouldn’t need it for this hike). I almost went through my first-aid kit and removed extra band-aids. Finally satisfied, I threw it all together and hit the road.

When I slung the pack on at the trailhead, it felt great. In fact, at first it felt like it wasn’t there. Dog Mountain is a steep, 2800ft climb in just over 3 miles – and there’s a good stretch in the middle where the trail runs fairly level, so the uphill parts are really uphill. At the top, the flowering meadows erased all the pain from the climb, and I found a cool little lunch-spot about a quarter mile west of the summit. I’d barely noticed the weight of the pack at all. My shoulders weren’t sore and I felt a lot more alert and light-footed than I’d anticipated. The true test of a pack is on the downhill return, after you’ve had your summit buzz and the scenery, while fantastic, just isn’t quite as good as at the top. Coming down is when I usually start to get tired – my feet begin to get sore, my knees begin to ache, and the thought of a thermos of coffee waiting in the truck makes the time slow way down. That happened a little bit – the Augspurger Trail can get tedious – but I felt great, at least until I took some heat and fell on my knee because of some kind of warp in time and space. Not my fault, I swear. Regardless, the Flash held up well, though minus the weight of lunch, the beer, and a lot of water.

I spent the evening drinking beers with friends. The next morning, I was really surprised to discover I wasn’t sore at all. Dog was my most arduous hike this year, and it usually tires me out. It usually takes me a few days to work out the stiffness in my legs and shoulders, especially if I drink after the hike. But I wasn’t sore and I wasn’t stiff, and while I might be in better shape this year than I was the last time I climbed Dog, reducing the weight I carry helped out a lot.

I do have a few complaints, but they’re minor and I’ll learn to live with them. The pack only loads from the top, so getting at gear near the bottom is a bit of a hassle. The chest strap kept loosening on the uphill, requiring frequent adjustment. The hip-belt is useless for my torso. And when I wore my layers and jacket, the extra room in the pack caused my hydration tube to slip out a considerable length and swing around. It’s just not a big enough pack to carry additional winter hiking gear, and since there’s no top, it won’t do too well in rain.

These are all things I can live with. The Flash is great for what I bought it for (a lightweight daypack on backpacking trips) but it’s also a great pack for summer day-hikes. Forcing me to reconsider the gear I take, though, is probably the best thing about it. I won’t miss any of that gear, and when winter comes, I still have my trusty Mistral.

Gear List:

Pack: REI Flash 18

Marmot Precip rain shell

REI snowpants (for rain)

Wool cap

Wide-brimmed hat

MSR Dromedary (4-liter, not fully filled)

Canon PowerShot A480 camera (with 2 extra AA batteries)

First Aid kit (well-stocked)

CRKT Mt. Rainier pocketknife

Columbia watch

Aqua Mira water treatment

Petzl Tikkina headlamp (with 3 extra AAA batteries)

Mirror

Shoelace

Eye-glasses (extra pair)

Eye-glasses repair kit

Compass

Bic lighter (small)

Waterproof matches (with extra strikes)

Skunk hemp rolling papers

Toilet paper

Purell (1 fl oz)

Sunblock (1 fl oz)

EmergenC (1 packet)

Gu Energy Gel (1.1 oz)

Small garbage bags and ziplock bags

Leki Makalu trekking poles

Distance: 7.4 miles roundtrip

Elevation Gain: 2,800ft

Information: portlandhikers.org; Afoot & Afield: Portland/Vancouver, 2^nd ed, by Douglas Lorain

Notes: Dogs allowed on leash. Facilities at trailhead. Northwest Forest Pass ($30) or day permit ($5 at trailhead) required. Intermittent roadwork on SR14 this summer may cause delays.

Distance From Portland: Just over 1 hour

Directions From Portland: Take I84 east to Cascade Locks and cross the Bridge of the Gods ($0.75 toll). Turn right on SR14 and drive just over 12 miles to the large turnout at milepost 53. The trail leaves the parking lot at the east end; the Augspurger trail returns in the middle of the lot.

Hikes Past: Mitchell Point, May 11th

2010-06-03T00:36:00.000-07:00

Looking west down the Columbia from Mitchell Point

Mitchell Point is a little known promontory above I84 on the way to The Dalles. The trail climbs a bit steeply through forest, crosses a talus slope, and passes under power lines before heading up an open ridge to the windy crest. I’d never hiked this trail because it’s a short hike and a rather long drive from Portland, but I had the idea to combine it with a hike at McCall Point east of Mosier. I had the place to myself and spent a sunny hour at the top, watching storm clouds break over Dog Mountain and Mt. Defiance. On the way down I took a short spur trail to a grassy overlook covered in bi-colored cluster lily, then descended to my truck and an afternoon date with wildflowers at McCall Point.

Distance: 2.6 miles roundtrip

Elevation Gain: 1,270ft

Information: Curious Gorge, 3^rd ed, by Scott Cook; Afoot & Afield: Portland/Vancouver, 2^nd ed, by Douglas Lorain; portlandhikers.org

Notes: Facilities at the trailhead. No fees or permits required. The trail is fairly obvious, but the Wygant Trail also starts from this trailhead (just west down the road). Watch for poison oak and ticks.

Distance From Portland: 1 hour

Directions From Portland: Head east on I84 towards the gorge. Take Exit 58 (signs for Mitchell Point Overlook) and park at the end of the road. You can only go east on I84 from here.

Yanayacu River Journal, Part V - Things Are Bigger Here

2010-05-04T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Piraha, a tiny tribe living in Brazil along a remote tributary of the Amazon, have no words in their language for past or future. Psychologically, linguistically, and conceptually, they live entirely in the present.

This isn’t so surprising after you’ve experienced the Amazon jungle. My journals are out of order, my internal editor is at a loss. My memories are a mobius strip, tautological and endlessly fertile. The difference between “it happened this way” and “it didn’t happen that way” are so slight as to be irrelevant. It’s not that I’m lying – it’s that I can’t prove I am. However vague or flexible my memory is, and however incomplete my journal – sometimes the sum of a butterfly outweighs the equation of an entire afternoon – what remains is a mirage of incomparable imagery and meaning so vast that it means nothing.

That endless split second in a car accident when you know you’re going to crash – that’s what I’m talking about. Moments that encompass the entire world.

Things are bigger here – snail shells, teeth, venom, spiders, trees, species diversity, leaves, thorns, insects, butterflies, storms, vines, hallucinations, appetites. The jungle is elemental and unforgiving, and it asks nothing of you except survival. Long term, I’m sure it’s hard to adjust. But I love it now and I wish I had more time to find out.

Spent some time watching a blackfronted nun-bird, a flock of parakeets, and a brightly colored bird, a barbet, its head brilliant red, with a yellow throat fading to a green belly. Wearing shorts, no shirt, barefoot, smoking a cigarette, in a hammock. Time like the river. In the crook of the nearest tree, a red-flowering bromeliad.

Thunderstorm moved in quickly; grew dark, a strong breeze through the lodge. The birds fall quiet. Thunder crashes nearby. I feel electric, my heart thrashing wildly like an animal in the bush. I hope it rains and moves on quickly so I can go on the next hike. Rain to clear the humidity, clean the air, bring the temperature down. The wind has really picked up, and still the storm moves closer.

Air slides through the mosquito netting and passes around and through the buildings as if the lodge wasn’t there – a wind tunnel wouldn’t show the air breaking around the walls, just a slight perturbation in the movement of the wind as it follows paths through the trees and down the myriad rivers. Follow the wind, is a good Amazonian expression. I just made that up, but it’s apt – surrender to the flow, let things go, don’t attach too much to any one thing or things. All life here is natural, including decay. The Amazon is a zen koan teaching patience, and the movements are calligraphic brush-storms representing acceptance.

A fish-eating hawk has found a seam in the air the exact dimensions of its wings, and silence follows filled with thunder. Birds clatter at every gust; leaves and fronds clatter against the thatched roofs. The air is charged, scented with the heady aroma of the jungle, a heavy loam flavored with bark and water and damp soil. Now the rain, easy cymbals riding the snare and kick of thunder. The sloths in their acacias ride it out with infinite wisdom.

As the storm moves away, rain, and a sweet fragrance.

The fragrance of blood – mosquitoes are out.

***

Kerosene lantern, cup of coffee, moldy book – Birds of Peru, Clements and Shaney, Ibis 2001 – cigarettes, headlamp. Outboard running against the noise of the toads. Thunder ceased, maybe it won’t rain and I’ll get to go hiking in an hour.

Squirrel monkeys, Hulber tells me, travel in troops that may number between one and two hundred. I travel alone.

After the storms passed we went upriver to look for owl monkeys. Birds filled the forest: bright orange troupials chasing off hawks, yellow kiskadees with black and white striped heads, tiger herons and cocoi herons stalking muddy banks, wattled jacana poking around lily-pads, kingfishers, Couvier’s toucans, flocks of festive parrots and noisy short-tailed parrots, yellow-headed caracara perched on river-bank branches.

We put in and walked down a dark leaf-strewn path under overcast skies – Hulber and myself, the French/Peruvian couple, and Moses – he who caught the caiman the night before, who parted the waters. Ten minutes later, Moses stopped us under a tall tree covered in vine and strangler fig and laden with bromeliad fronds. About 40ft up, a small monkey sat in a balcony formed by a twist in the wood. It took me a long time to spot it – the light was dim and the monkey very well camouflaged, and I kept looking for a different shape. All I could see was its head, but it was unmistakable when I finally saw it. How the guides locate these animals sometime verges on magic, but in this case, they knew the monkeys lived in the tree and never strayed far. The trick is to look for movement, especially with monkeys and birds. I’m getting better at it – I spotted several sloths and pointed out the parrots on the boat ride in. I missed all but a flying silhouette of the toucans and their long beaks, and the sheer angle of looking straight up at the owl monkey meant we didn’t stay long.

The forests are beautiful – many of the trees have wide buttressed roots and are covered in other plants. Roots extend and hang everywhere, waiting for high water, intertwining and plunging like curtains in a drama of unending decay and rebirth.

I can’t believe how interested I’m getting in birds. They’re easily the most commonly seen and most varied of all animals in the jungle. I understand the ecology of trees and flowers, but I always saw birds as secondary and uninteresting. All my photos are of plant life and insects; the birds and other large animals are too hard to photograph with a small point-and-click digital camera. I really want to return in the rainy season and see more, see what it’s like when the Yanayacu floods 15ft higher than it is now and all the animals are pushed into smaller parcels of higher ground.

Strangely and unexpectedly, the rainforest has been the most relaxing part of the trip. Cusco was bustling and active; the Inca Trail was physically challenging; the travel and logistical aspects were stressful. But I am “in” nature here and it is wonderful. I thought the mosquitoes, insects, rain, threats of sickness and disease, and heat and humidity would add up to be more discouraging than the other parts of the trip. Not so.

I have one and a half more days here. Tomorrow I visit a village, and then relax for a few hours before going out in the evening to camp overnight at a nearby cocha (oxbow lake). It sounds exhilarating and tough. Overnight in a tent in the jungle. It doesn’t get much more authentic than that.

***

Writing by kerosene lantern is quieting and somehow right, as long as the night is filled with crickets. An outboard announces the return of a boat to the little dock with the thatched roof, reached by wooden stairs lit by homemade torches smoking in the languid night.

I may be the only guest still up. Activities here do depend on sunrise and sunset, on high water and low. It’s only 9pm and I’m not at all ready to sleep. I have a 6:30am expedition so I don’t need to get up before 5:30 at the earliest. I don’t need a full night’s sleep; I can nap between the village visit and the camping. I hope the staff hasn’t crashed and that I can get a beer – I’ve been looking forward to it.

***

Tonight’s night hike was about an hour long, down a trail behind the lodge. A tarantula darted into a deep seam in a tree, and we turned off our flashlights to try to lure the spider out. The night was still, almost subterranean, a nuanced perfect dark with just a few hints of lighter sky. Hulber took a drink of water and I heard every action, though I couldn’t see a thing – the bottle cap twisting, the water splashing, fabric rustling and the gulps as he drank – and the night insects chirped, sang, whistled; water dripped from vines and fronds; and the haunting, almost human grunts of a tree-frog resonated in the forest darkness.

The rainforest is spooky at night. It feels like a room with high ceilings. The beam from a flashlight only penetrates twenty feet or so before a wall of vegetation blocks it, and if pointed straight up, the light dissolves into darkness through successive layers of canopy. The rumors of the jungle filled with snakes and spiders are only partially true – we found only one snake, a harmless sharpnose coiled on a palm frond, and the spiders – tarantula, whip, and wolf – ran from our lights. The most dangerous animal here is the mosquito – I’ve just been bit all over my hands and neck, my only exposed skin.

I wasn’t nervous about the night hike, though Hulber said most guests aren’t willing to do it. I don’t see why not – the forest is so different at night, interesting, full of unknown potentials. Depth changes. Trees and vines twist and loom in a limbo of darkness, and the understory adopts strange shadows and shapes and forms. Color depends on light, and light only comes from a narrow source whose power to penetrate is limited against the dense dark.

I got pretty lonely sometimes, in Cusco and while traveling. Not so much in the jungle, or on the Inca Trail, where there has been activity to distract me from thoughts of home. Perhaps cities foster loneliness, while wild places replace loneliness with a sense of actual place – you do or you do not fit in, and you’re challenged every moment, unlike in cities where you can easily find someone who speaks your language, or return to your hotel and shower, or find a hot meal. And once that wild sense of place is established, you want to share those experiences. I beginning to remember that I’m a guest here, and that guests return home.

East of the Rainshadow: The Deschutes River Trail

2010-04-09T01:21:00.001-07:00

With rain in the forecast, I debated Monday night whether to go hiking on Tuesday. A long pull from a bottle of Deschutes Black Butte Porter gave me an idea…

The drive to the Deschutes River was more a surfing contest than a drive, and it seemed like every truck I passed drove the exact wrong speed: too slow to stay behind, too fast to pass safely. But towards Hood River the rain slackened, and when I arrived at Deschutes State Park campground, it was drizzling lightly from thinning clouds. I pulled over at the first pay station, and chatted briefly with the camp host. I admit a fondness for those rugged people who sell bundles of firewood to hordes of summer campers and off-season RV wanderers – they’re American in the biggest and best sense, unapologetically individualistic and yet big-hearted and welcoming, and eager to share their odd ideas with colorful language, and in this case, a whole lot of spit.

But I digress. After parking at the back lot (per the Portlandhikers.org field guide), I strapped on my pack and crossed a long lawn filled with Canada geese and slippery droppings to the start of the river-side trail. Three other hikers set off at the same time on the upper trail and I didn’t see a soul until I was almost back.

The river trail is described as infested with ticks, but that didn’t bother me much as I strolled through little stands of trees and listened to birds sing above the river’s constant rhythm. My approach startled mergansers from bank-side thickets, and the hillsides glowed green and gold as the sun broke from the clouds. A few bouldery sections were starkly beautiful, with grey and brown stone covered in brilliant green lichen, red moss, yellow desert parsley, and carpets of grass laced with tiny pink and red flowers. Walking further, I passed an increasing amount of balsamroot in flower, accompanied by lupine and phlox. Wandering, with no real intentions, I soon found myself among large numbers of wooly-bears at Colorado Camp (3.3 miles).

From there, I became concerned with ticks. The trail disintegrated into an unmaintained game trail, crisscrossed with fallen limbs and marked only by flattened grass. At every step, I sank into the waterlogged ground, once into mud over my ankle, and the vegetation was tall and dense and encroached over the narrow path, rubbing against me at every step. I gave up after a mile and hiked up to the road, where the river was quieter and the ground more solid, and my attentions shifted from the small and beautiful to the large and grandiose.

Past Gordon Creek, the gravel road runs under a long cliff blasted from the hill, and the violent history of this area is cross-sectioned to make a geology-lover’s heart swell. Where the cut is highest, basalt columns radiate immense spokes in strange wheel-like patterns, and where the hill slopes more gently, it soon rises into jagged ramparts with rock arches overlooking grassy bowls where balsamroot blooms.

Because the road follows an old railroad bed and doesn’t gain any elevation, staying about the same elevation above the river, I didn’t notice how hungry I was until I passed a campground under powerlines (Gordon Ridge Camp, 5.3 miles). I stopped to eat and was surprised to find it was almost 2pm – my turn-around time. I’d read about a lot of cool man-made artifacts on this trail – railroad cars, bridge remains, an old homestead – but I couldn’t remember how far up the canyon those artifacts were, so I headed back and continued my meditations on life and death other and “big ideas.”

Big ideas, as in, the Deschutes River canyon is freakin’ massively big when you’re trying to leave. I’d round a bend and see the next bend ahead, and give myself 10 or 15 minutes to get there. Then I’d plod along, and plod along, and plod along some more until 30 minutes went by and I wasn’t any closer. Distances lost their meaning, compared to the depth of the sky; the seemingly barren, rocky landscape lost its emptiness as the sun composed plays of light and shadow on the grass; and the afternoon lost its warmth as terrific gusts of wind roared up and down the canyon and ravines. The wind was insane – it tore my hat off my head, shook the photo opportunities off the fiddlenecks and sage, and disassembled the songs of meadowlarks like a tone-deaf grad student studying music theory.

The canyon can be a lonely place when the wind blows hard and you haven’t seen anyone for hours. I’m starting to understand why those camp hosts are so weird.

Last week I immersed myself (literally) in a rainy and snowy Salmon River hike, surrounded by old-growth and steep timbered ridges. The Deschutes is the polar opposite – so empty it begs the imagination to fill it. When at the last bend the campground and the interstate bridge came into sight two miles away, I decided to take the trail to Ferry Springs, a few hundred feet higher up the rolling hills. Ferry Springs itself was anticlimactic, but the views were great, and a well-placed bench surrounded by trembling shooting-stars kept me from the worst of the wind and let me savor the view to the rain-caressed hills across the blue Columbia, the wind-turbines and crackling power-lines, the big empty spaces that seem tailor-made for road trips and exploration, for a Dean Moriarty to converse about them, for just sitting and looking and filling up on sun and sky and powerful land in every direction.

Eventually I descended, passing the first hiker I’d seen since starting out, and encountered a trailside plaque that made my day. I’d been disappointed that I hadn’t hiked far enough to see any of the historical artifacts along the trail. I never considered that the Ferry Springs trail itself is an artifact, built in the 1860’s for wagons and stagecoaches. The grades and wall-like piles of stones leapt out of the landscape then, and too quickly I reached the road and my truck, and the long drive home – but not before snapping a photograph of a large pipe, inscribed “Calm” at the end pointing into the canyon, and “Drama” at the end pointing towards the highway and the towns and cities.

All told, I hiked 11.3 miles and gained just 800’ elevation. Spring is in force along the Deschutes, and it’s worth every minute of the drive. Virtually complete solitude for six hours, lots of sun and flowers, expansive views, ample meditation, and thankfully, no ticks. I couldn’t have asked for more for my first trip here. Well, maybe that last third of a mile to the railroad car, but I’ve heard that burned down. I’ll have to go back to find out.

Giving Back - $1 Per Mile

2010-03-17T01:06:00.001-07:00

Early this morning I slipped out to the Gorge and hiked up Multnomah Creek. The sun shone down on the rapids and honeyed the moss draped over tree limbs and boulders. As I climbed higher, a mossy talus full of fir opened up to the sky and the snowy shoulders of Silver Star mountain graced the hills across the river. I smelled the scent of pine sap and damp earth , and welcomed the touch of wind and warm rain. My plan was to cross from the Multnomah drainage over Wahkeena Creek to Angel’s Rest, for a 9 mile loop with a few thousand feet of elevation gain. I love this hike – it’s one I’ve done many times, in all seasons. I’ve seen carpets of spring wildflowers, tapestries of autumn leaves, barren winter stands of fire-scarred trees. There are many hikes on my list yet to check off; today, I chose an old favorite.

But there was a time, just a year ago, when I couldn’t go hiking.

Last April, I was diagnosed with testicular cancer and had surgery. Since then, I’ve been undergoing regular blood checks, CT scans, and x-rays. In fact, I have another appointment in three weeks. I don’t know if this means I have cancer or not. I think not – and I don’t let it stop me.

I stay active by hiking. It’s physically challenging, mentally clarifying, and spiritually lifting. I’m fortunate that I can hike about once a week. Many are not so lucky.

Try walking into the Cancer Center. It is a messed up feeling. It isn’t right. There’s no good reason for being there. It could be you or someone you love, but whatever reason brings you through those doors, you always, always, always wish you didn’t need to be there. Every three months I walk past the receptionist to the elevator and hit the button for the sixth floor. When I get out, I walk down an empty hallway and enter a waiting room filled with huddled, silent people who don’t make eye contact and who read months-old magazines while waiting for their name to be called. Even though the secretaries remember me, they still verify my insurance. And after my doctor has seen me, while I wait for the scheduling nurse to tell me when to come back, I try to ignore the hairless men and women reclining in chairs with chemicals flowing through their veins.

Many people have to walk through those doors far more often than I, and many of them will never get to go hiking and experience the beauty of Oregon’s outdoors. That’s why at the end of 2010, I will donate $1 for every mile I hike during the year to Providence Cancer Center in Portland.

Providence treats more cancer patients than anyone else in Oregon. They have excellent doctors and treatment centers, renowned researchers and diagnostic facilities, and superb outpatient counseling and care. If worst comes to worst, you want to go to Providence.

Last year, I hiked 163 miles after having surgery. I’m up to 43 miles this year, with a goal of 250. If I don’t make it, I’ll donate $250 as a minimum. If you hike with me, I'll donate a dollar for each mile you hike, too. It may not be much – my riches are measured in friends, family, and experiences, not in dollars – but every dollar matters. Because walking through those doors is something that no one should ever have to face.

Yanayacu River Journal, Part IV - Before an Altar in Deep Worship

2010-02-28T17:56:00.000-08:00

Lounging between hikes through the jungle in the hammock hanging from my bungalow’s back deck. More guests are here – the boat has just arrived from its daily three-hour sprint from Iquitos. The Frenchman and his Peruvian friend left earlier, so for a while there were only three of us. Arriving here is like arriving in paradise, although you don’t recognize it immediately. The speedboats are cramped, and when I arrived my left arm was burning from the sun. I craved a cigarette, needed a stretch, and as the boat tied up to the dock and I stepped out into the slow humid heat, heavy with a thick, vegetative smell, the lodge looked like a cheap Disney facsimile designed to impress more than to provide an authentic experience. But that was post-Iquitos, and I was in no mood for anything resembling that frontier town. Thankfully, Muyuna is an oasis in a living desert – how much more remote can you get than a several-hour boat ride from a city that can only be reached by traveling thousands of miles by air or river? So to the new arrivals – welcome. There are things here that can kill you and things here that can drive you mad. And there is great beauty as well.

This morning’s hike was just Hulber and I. I overslept – last night I felt like I was moving on the sea when I laid down, but the cacophonous selva put me right to sleep and I rolled over again when my alarm went off. At the breakfast bell (a loud ringing cowbell), I leapt up, dressed, brushed my teeth, and ran to the main hall and downed a cup of instant coffee with a cigarette. I was in rubber boots by 9, and Hulber led off into the jungle behind the lodge along a series of trails, showing me various plants and animals and sharing ethnobotanical knowledge along the way.

I said that the lodge is paradisiacal – if so, the jungle behind it is hell, slick with deep mud and decaying vegetation, and tangled and overgrown. We need machetes to cut through the vines and limbs that grow far more rapidly than the rate the annual floods obliterate the trail. Giant bees and wasps skirt through down-hanging vines like annoyed bombers, mosquitoes buzz and whine constantly; and ants – fire, army, bullet, leaf-cutter – crawl and haunt the leaf litter, the leaves, the branches, the trees. Hulber has been bitten twice by bullet ants – 24 hours of the most intense pain possible in the insect kingdom, with blistering fever, delirium, nausea, diarrhea – and only then do the effects lessen. We found them in two places – a nest in the roots of a tree, and a few on the end of a vine that Hulber cleared with his machete before I swung around like Tarzan.

It isn’t hard to find ants in the jungle. Streams of army ants, blind and following each other single-file, cross the trail and forest floor. A specific species of tree has developed a symbiotic relationship with a species of ant; the tree branches are covered in ants, which prevent epiphytes and bromeliads from growing on the tree, and the tree has thorns to deter predators from eating the ants. The path skirted a colony of leaf-cutter ants: a pile of dirt more than twenty feet by twenty feet, devoid of vegetation. Hundreds of soldiers carried pieces of leaf like tiny battleships with green sails unfurled. In the jungle, watch where you step, where you put your hand, and where you sit down.

Throughout the hike, Hulber pointed out termite nests in trees, massive bulbous growths that resemble dark brown tumors at the intersections of branches and trunks. One of them was low enough to study. With his machete, Hulber scraped open the papery surface and as termites appeared like ghostly ants, he told me to put my hand on the nest.

I declined, the first time I’d declined to do anything since arriving in the jungle.

Hulber told me again, and I thought, “He wouldn’t tell me to do it if it were dangerous or painful. I can do this.” Nervously, I placed my palm against the nest, and tiny whitish termites crawled all over my hand. Hulber started to tell me that natives burn termite nests to ward away mosquitoes, and burning termite nests seemed like a really good idea to me just then, with my hand covered in them. It tickled more than anything else, and I acted immediately as soon as Hulber told me to rub my hands together rapidly and smell them. Turpentine – termites contain a chemical that smells like turpentine, and is a natural mosquito repellent.

Lesson learned, again. Experience is the best teacher; trust yourself and others. The worst that could happen is you end up with smelly termite guts coating your hand.

We continued on, our boots sticking in the mud and decaying leaves, my feet and calves sticking to the inside of the boots, my shirt sticking to my shoulders under the straps of my pack. My forehead held a line of sweat under my hat. My skin itched with sweat, with insect repellent, with the crushed termites and tickling mosquitoes. We hacked at vines and long whip-thin branches, stumbled over roots and ducked under twisting aerial cords of vine, passed through beams of yellow-green sunlight and through wide shadows falling from the immense trunks of ceiba and maquira trees.

Pausing at a massive maquira, Hulber spoke about the forest. For years, loggers have illegally cut the largest Amazonian trees, and lodges, like Muyuna, have worked to save the jungle around them. In front of a tree 14ft in diameter at head-level, I posed for a photograph. There are no trees this wide in Oregon; there have not been for years, maybe never. The trunk is huge, dark brown and black, covered in strangler fig roots more than foot wide, and splayed out into mild buttresses at the base. Something animalistic happens in my mind when I see trees this big here – my rational mind knows that the living tree is just a thin layer under the bark, and the leaves high overhead, but the sheer bulk, the weight of the tree, impresses on me and I can’t think clear thoughts, as if I’m standing before an altar in deep worship. And maybe I am.

Leaving the shadow of that tree we walked back towards the lodge and lunch. Bright heliconia hung from the forest, which became an abstract tapestry of greens and browns in the growing heat. The thorned pyramidal roots of a walking palm occupied my attention for a while; the straight roots are exposed to a height of several feet, tapering towards a straight trunk. Legend has it that the palm moves up to four feet across the jungle floor each year, as roots die on one side and grow on the opposite. And lore has it that the Oje, another of the Amazon’s large trees, is the source of a milky, alkaline sap, discovered by shamans, that treats gastrointestinal parasites found untreatable by modern science. As Hulber showed me a tiny white-stripped toad, barely the size of a fingernail and almost invisible in the leaf-litter, I decided to believe the stories instead of dismissing them. What are one or two small rebellions against rational doubt when faced with facts as small as a toad, as thick as a tree, and as thickly tangled as the coiled and knotted vines and creepers stringing the jungle together?

After all, it was still morning, and I was deep in the Amazon jungle: above, a pygmy marmoset, one of the smallest monkeys in the world, scurried around its tree unburdened by our presence below, while macaws flew overhead, their cries echoing down through the canopy like falling feathers.

Wind Mountain, February 7th, 2010

2010-02-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

Superbowl? May the best team win. I went hiking instead, and I think that Wind Mountain, the sun and clouds, and native vision-quest pits were the real winners on Sunday.

The Gorge was overcast in the morning as I drive past Multnomah Falls, but the clouds began to tatter as I arrived at Wind Mountain. In the parking lot, I met another hiker named Kevin (Kenneth? I don’t remember) who had driven around the mountain looking for the hidden trail – from the parking lot, the trail starts a ways down the gravel road, but it isn’t very visible from a moving car. We set off together behind a man and his two young grandkids.

I'd been looking for solitude, but hiking with Kevin was pleasant enough. Wind Mountain is a steep trail, and our conversation forced me to concentrate on my breathing, and our pace gave me something to test myself against. I weigh about 10-15lbs more than I should, and it isn’t muscle weight. I also haven’t been hiking regularly over the last two months of eating and drinking, so the trail became a workout, and about three quarters of the way up I stopped and gave Kevin the lead so that I could catch my breath and finish the climb alone.

Penny Postcard: Submerged Forest in the Wind Mountain, Washington, ca.1920. Card #321, Published by Chas. S. Lipschuetz Company, Portland, OR. Private collection of Lyn Topinka.

Though Wind Mountain is 1907ft tall, the unofficial trail starts halfway up on the north side, so that the climb is only 1,170ft. Wind Mountain, and its Oregon partner, Shellrock Mountain, are volcanic intrusions that erupted through the Columbia basalts a few million years ago. Wind Mountain stands alone, an isolated cone towering over the small town of Home Valley. At the top is one of the Gorge’s more important archeological sites, a collection of native vision-quest pits in the steep talus slopes covering the summit. Native American men once climbed the mountain and spent the night alone as a coming-of-age rite. To facilitate visions, they forced themselves to stay awake all night in a state of heightened awareness, and built rock walls and pits that are still present today. Once a spirit or guardian appeared, it remained with that person for life. A sign at the summit warns hikers: “This archeological site is extremely fragile. Just walking over it will damage important cultural features. Therefore, the USDA Forest Service has closed the site to hikers. All visitors must stay on the trail or within designated areas shown on the map.”

The 1940 book "Oregon, End of the Trail,” by the Works Projects Administration (WPA) of Oregon, describes a native legend: “The Indians believed that the Great Spirit set the whirlwinds blowing in constant fury about Wind Mountain as a punishment to those who, breaking the taboo, had taught the white men how to snare salmon. ..."

There’s certainly no escaping the wind on Wind Mountain. I reached the top and quickly cooled down in the cold breeze swirling around the summit. I went right on the small loop trail and found Kevin at the top of the first viewpoint, looking over the smooth-as-glass Columbia as far west as Beacon Rock. A long train rumbled past on the Oregon side, and the sound drifted up almost 2000ft across the river and above Home Valley. Otherwise, silence, the wind in my ears, and a heartbeat returning to normal after a steep mile climb.

After a quick rest, Kevin and I walked to the eastern talus, where clouds swirled and filled the valley between Wind Mountain and 2,948ft Dog Mountain to the east. Vision-quest pits drifted in and out of the foggy talus, and the clouds lifted, and the sun shot down searching beams over the forest and far ridge. Across the river, Mt. Defiance was swathed in tattered cloud and snow and the dance of the sun.

I cracked open my celebratory beer, and sat down on a rock, enjoying the interplay between sun and cloud, river and mountain, the thin works of man clinging to the river’s shores while pine-clad slopes and rocky cliffs towered a mile above the highways and rail tracks. Against the distance, the traffic on the highway appeared to make no progress, and in front of me were four or five vision pits, updateable and who knows how old, that had withstood the elements on top of an old volcano, and that had harbored the coming of visions and the appearance of spirit guardians who lived lives equally as long as their ward’s.

Kevin left to start down the trail, and for the next hour I sat with the vision pits dappled with sunlight. I walked around over the talus, seeing the slope and the pits and the distant mountains change in the light. I felt as if my own vision had grown sharper – at one point, I thought of my friend who I’d left my itinerary with; my very next thought was that the talus was unstable and that I needed to be careful about loose rock that could shift and twist an ankle. Immediately after that thought, a rock shifted under my foot and I nimbly stepped away. I can’t put too much stock in prophecy, but it happened just like that, and I went back to meditating on the view.

When the clouds rose up again, I wandered around and investigated the patterns of lichen and moss on the rocks and twigs of a small vine maple. Like the vehicles on the highway far below, tiny worlds exist in shades of burnt orange, bright green, silvery gray - in the miniscule, strange and alien life-forms parliament together on twigs no thicker than a pencil, or on the shaded face of a rock. In a space barely a third of an inch across, life blooms in unusual forms, and I imagined it to be an alien city, or an Alice in Wonderland theme park missing the caterpillar (who is out back smoking a joint and taking photos of very small things).

I never looked at my watch, but driven by some inner chronometer, at some point I grabbed my pack, did a quick check for accidentally dropped garbage or gear, and headed back towards the first viewpoint, now dim through a veil of cloud. The upper half of the mountain remained wrapped in cloud as I descended, feeling the strain on my knees grow as I entered sunshine tumbling through the forest halfway down.

As is usual for me, the climb had been a physical exertion, with my focus more on myself then on my surroundings. On the descent, the forest captured my attention, with mossy trees standing over deep green coils of fern, sharp Oregon grape, and jumbled talus slopes. The sun burst through at odd times, and the forest responded with a symphony of browns and greens and darting yellows. I walked through a cathedral of firs, the trail my guide and the sun leading the way.

I cut off the main trail at a very steep spur-trail that lead down to an outcrop with great views east to Augsberger and Dog Mountain. The view was spectacular, but the cliffs treacherous and dizzying – no one would find you if you messed up and fell from here. In the distance, the Columbia ran blue and reflective, smooth as a mirror, and the sun flashed down on Frog Lake and the pointed crowns of hemlock and fir.

I reached my truck as more people arrived in the lot – a busy day at Wind Mountain. I put on music for the drive home, and as a few drops of rain fell from warm clouds over the river, sunlight scattered through the drops on the windshield, and the lyrics synced up with the twisting bends of the state highway, the freight train rumbling on down by the river, and the long interstate curving along the base of the Oregon Gorge, where progress is measured in spirit as much as it is in distance.

Yanayacu River Journal, Part III - Wildlife & Village Life: Piranhas, Caimans, and San Juan

2010-01-19T23:32:00.000-08:00

Back at the lodge – Adam, Anna, and Laila left this morning, while two guests arrived. I spent the last hour in the shower, wonderfully cold, then the hammock, listening to birds and watching the varieties of butterflies – white, yellow, ocher, black, iridescent green, incandescent blue and scarlet. They amble like the people do – purposeful, yet unhurried. The pace is slow, languid like the river, and when things happen they happen slowly, like the distant sound of an approaching boat growing louder and louder until it slips past, laden with palm fronds and the men sprawled on top, smoking cigarettes.

The buildings and the walkways between them are covered in thatch and stand on stilts for the high water season. The walls and ceilings are largely open and covered in blue mosquito netting, and at night kerosene lamps and torches light the rooms and the grounds. I have a private bungalow with a shower and sink, a deck with a hammock, and a queen-sized bed. The water is cold, and the nights are so warm I sleep on top of the covers in my boxers – not before checking the room for spiders, of course. Birds nest in the trees and palms – a noisy flock of yellow-rumped cacique inhabit a nearby palm and occasionally burst from their hanging nests in a shower of bright sparks – and natives pass by in small canoes powered by muscle and sinew or the occasional outboard. Considering most supplies come from Iquitos by boat, the food is excellent – fresh fish is plentiful, as are chicken and eggs, fruits and vegetables, coffee and tea and beer. The owner is Peruvian, and the lodge staff are Amazon natives, friendly and laid back, and their laughter as they go about their work echoes around the compound.

***

Rode upstream past San Juan village, and moored under a tree leaning far out over the water, with long roots hanging down from branches slung with vines, and bromeliads growing from the nooks where branch and trunk meet. A three-toed sloth hung under an upper branch and for a while moved faster than the fishing. Our poles were wooden sticks about eight feet long, with an equal length of fishing line and a barbed hook tied to the end. Fishing for red-bellied piranhas is easy. Attach raw meat to the hook. Splash the water with the tip of the pole to simulate prey in distress and attract the piranha. Drop the bait, set the hook at the bite. It doesn’t take long. Maybe I should’ve said simple, because I didn’t find it particularly easy. These piranhas are small, just a few inches long, but they bite fast, and hard. I hooked a number before landing one. Hulber removed the hook from the first and our pilot (a young native from San Juan) promptly cut it up to use as bait in a deft display of karma. I caught another and insisted on removing the hook myself – the piranha was small enough to grasp in my left hand while I carefully pulled the hook from its jaws, a wide mouth that resembles an oversized pair of industrial nail clippers lined with serrated teeth and a swift, almost mechanical bite.

The ease of catching piranha makes me think that the rivers are filled with them. I knew to expect it, but the sight of villagers bathing or swimming or washing clothes in a dark river filled with piranha is still strange. Life in the jungle depends on the river – it is the primary means of transportation and of communication, acts as a primary food source, and informs and structures every activity in village life. Villages lie on high ground along the banks, organized in a row of raised buildings, with paths leading to the shore where canoes and peque-peques are tied up or beached in the thick mud.

The villages are usually no more than a building deep, stretched along the bank; fields and a soccer pitch or a few common buildings might add a little depth. In Ayacucho, where the Yanayacu greets the Amazon, the majority of the population leaves during the rainy season. Most villagers have no such recourse, and the river in flood enters their lives by the front door. But no one lives far from river access, and the river runs through the villager’s lives just as blood runs through their veins. The Incas looked upon the milky way as a celestial river, a common enough symbol that I wouldn’t be surprised to find in Amazon tribal myth. Hulber told me that the Yagu believe the ceiba tree is the Mother Earth, and that when it fell, it created the Amazon from its trunk and branches. I can see in the ceiba the Amazon’s serpentine form, and I can see the wide meandering and slow current of its tributaries in the ethic and outlook of the people who live by it. They are often quiet and reserved, but quick to laugh and banter, greeting each other from canoes and calling out from shore to passing boatmen. Generous, peaceful, and kind, they share what they have, in an easy and necessary exchange with echoes of the Incan system of reciprocity. They move methodically but unhurriedly, without much in the way of possessions except what they absolutely need, and much of what they need, like the fishing poles we used, they improvise. In almost every boat is a plastic soda bottle cut in half to use as a bail – I’ve seen these deep in the forest, carried by flood water, their bright artificial color incongruous against the shaded jungle foliage. The homestead I saw on my first day here is fodder for thought, and I’m looking forward to visiting Ayacucho to learn more about the permanent residents of the jungle.

All these ideas, and a couple of guys and a sloth hanging out fishing for the afternoon. The hours passed by and we flipped piranha after piranha out of the water, throwing the guts to a black-collared hawk that dove from a nearby tree to snatch entrails from the water. We caught a number of other fish, catfish and perch, and something larger and meaner-looking than piranha, a dark brown monster with spines and tremendous teeth filling a gaping mouth. Not a bad way to spend a vacation, fishing in the Amazon.

They served the piranha for dinner. No one would touch it until I took one off the tray, head still attached, and went at it after sprinkling it with lime. Not bad, but too bony.

In an entertaining demonstration of cultural and linguistic barriers, the Frenchman tried convincing me to eat the piranha’s eyes. I did not.

The rest of dinner: squash soup, chicken, hardboiled eggs, olives, rice steamed in a sweet, flavorful local leaf, cooked and sweetened plaintains, pineapple, and tomato and avocado sandwiches. Like all the meals here, served buffet style and far more food than necessary. I find myself going back for more every time; my hunger is ravenous.

After eating I smoked a cigarette, one of the Inka brand I brought from Cusco. There are ashtrays everywhere, and the mosquito netting blurs the distinction between “inside” and “outside.” I’m the only smoker. No one seems to mind. Many Peruvians smoke very causally – I recall Henry Jorge bummed a few smokes off Tom and I one cloudy night on the Inca Trail, while we watched stars peek from the southern sky and drank sangria.

A short time after dinner we jumped in one of the larger boats and went upriver in the dark, looking for wildlife with a flashlight. As we passed San Juan, we saw several sloths, each high in their individual trees. Occasionally kingfishers would dart from the trees and fish would leap from the water, silvery streaks in the torch’s powerful beam. We entered a lake and one of the shores fell away into the darkness, and I felt suspended in an inky void, black water calm on all sides and a black ceiling hung with stars doubling as chandeliers. We motored on while I wondered how anyone could possibly keep track of our location, and a few minutes later, when a spectacled caiman’s eyes shone near the shore, we pulled in close. It swam away, disappearing in the water. Too late, we tried again - and again, we were in the dark, a darkness populated by lightning bugs and lit by distant lightning. Finally, we found a caiman’s eye-shine and pulled up to shore, close enough to see it in detail. One of the guides, Moses, lowered himself over the side and waded in ankle-deep water right up to the caiman – then he reached down, grabbed it by the neck, lifted it from the water, and brought it into the boat. For a while, he showed it to the new arrivals, a young couple from France. Then, he handed it to me. I took it firmly by the neck for a few minutes while Hulber took a photograph, and before I had time to think, I released it into the water. In my hands, it had been unmoving, hanging limp and frozen in the light from my headlamp and Hulber’s torch. In the murky water, in its element, the caiman moved with grace and form, propelled by a tail as long as its head and body, legs trailing as it undulated into the darkness outside the reach of our lights.

Only after it disappeared into the lake did I think, “I held a wild spectacled caiman in my hands!” It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time – I’ve been able to do some amazing stuff in Peru – but it was a big deal. Spectacled caimans can grow to two meters or more and live for decades. As soon as Moses pulled it from the water, I’d wanted to see it closer, and maybe hold it. The guy next to me didn’t want anything to do with the caiman, moving away pretty rapidly when Moses handed it to me. It’s been a day of that – the same guy also freaked out when a fish leapt out of the river and landed near his feet in the boat, and when the same thing happened to the French girl, she actually stood up and screamed.

So far, nothing in the jungle has scared me more than the idea of tipping a canoe. And that only because I’d soak my camera.

When I started to write, the lodge cat – Panda – sat above me on top of the mosquito netting. She’s gone now, trotting off into the darkness. The jungle must be an interesting place for a domesticated cat… That strange, syncopated, echoing clicking has started again – I keep meaning to ask Hulber what makes it. It reminds me of the Kodama portrayed by Miyazaki – benevolent forest spirits that make a strange clicking noise. I find it incredibly relaxing to lie down in my bungalow, with the darkness of the Amazon all around me, listening to the noises of the jungle as I drift off to sleep. At night, the volume of the jungle takes on a depth and breadth as rich as a symphony, with modulations in tone and pitch and rhythm, with themes and measures and solos, fugues and crescendos, and pregnant pauses. None of the forest sounds frighten me, or make me nervous, perhaps because no one else pays them any attention and perhaps because I have no frame of reference. Moses said the other day that he loves how quiet the jungle is, and I wonder if he would be as disturbed by the silence of Oregon forests as some people are by the cacophony of the rainforest.

Nicanor Parra: Today Nothing is Known in This Regard

2010-01-12T21:54:00.000-08:00

Nicanor Parra is praised by poets and critics alike. Neruda calls him “One of the great names in the literature of our language,” and Howard Bloom, calling for Parra to receive the Nobel Prize, says he’s “unquestionably, one of the best poets of the west.” Yet, I’d never heard of Parra until I read a series of articles posted by Tom McCartan to Critical Mass. The series is titled “What Bolaño Read,” and the second installment deals almost entirely with Parra. Intrigued, I ordered a copy of Liz Werner’s recent translation, “Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great.” I am now in the uncomfortable position of responding to a slim volume of poetry -one of the twenty-some volumes Parra published - that makes very little sense to me, both in terms of the poetry itself and the reasons why this poet isn't more widely known in the United States.

On the basis of one book, it is impossible to form a compete opinion of the poet Parra. Just as Bolaño slipped past American readers, so too Parra, despite his enormous influence in his native Chile and in the Spanish-speaking world. Cursory internet searches reveal hundreds of editions of his books available for sale, and thousands of articles and biographies about him – and yet, only a few of these books are in English translation, and even fewer in print. The rest are out of print, Spanish-language editions, or individual poems published in journals and anthologies.

What I’ve learned of Parra, then, is not Parra; its Parra filtered. Born in 1914, he studied engineering and physics in Chile and in the Unites States, and cosmology at Oxford. He currently lives in Chile, as he has almost all of his life, teaching mathematics and physics and writing what he calls “antipoems.” His antipoems subvert conventional poetic and cultural norms, though not in a negative sense – his “anti-translator” Werner describes antipoems as complementary to poems, just as antimatter particles are complementary to ordinary particles in physics. Parra was at the vanguard of Chilean poetry in the 1950’s, leading the way with an aesthetic that would revolutionize South American poetry for many years.

While this helps me better understand “Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great,” in the absence of the larger context of Parra’s work, my understanding is still quite limited. Yevgeniy Yevtushenko said that “A poet’s work is his biography,” and without being able to read Parra himself, my understanding isn’t just limited, but obscured by the works of others. It is dangerous to form a criticism on such thin material, but then again, the most important aspect of criticism is the work itself, not the context, and knowing one’s limits is a way of focusing attention on what matters.

In “Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great,” Parra’s poetry is colloquial in tone, critical of politics and religion, decorated with quotes and allusion, and filled with wordplay built on mathematics and humor. It is a poetic in touch with the times, responding to contemporary events with a sharp eye and graceful wit. Sometimes, these poems feel less like poems than they do slogans or revolutionary verse scribbled on subway walls or boarded-up construction sites. Often, they contain strong images, and just as often, the images don’t add up.

Antipoems don’t add up as a literary movement, either. Literatures grow by breaking convention before developing into the status quo and falling to a new revolution. If the intent of antipoems is to push boundaries, raise questions, expose artifice, and demonstrate potential, then aren’t all challenges to conventional form antipoetic? What happens when everyone is writing antipoems, when antipoems become the convention?

These questions are not value statements. Literature needs to be pushed and prodded, forced to look at itself and change. Parra has been very successful at that, writing not just antipoems but traditional poems as well. He just hasn’t been successful in being translated into English. I believe there are several reasons for this. Americans do not read much in translation, and maintain certain expectations raised by familiarity with more accessible Spanish-language poets such as Pablo Neruda and Frederico Garcia Lorca. Furthermore, Parra’s poetry presents textual and contextual difficulties to the translator and reader alike.

But there is much to gain in Parra, despite the difficulties. Take his short poem “No President’s Statue Escapes:”

“From those infallible pigeons
Clara Sandoval used to tell us:

Those pigeons know exactly what they’re doing”

The title is part of this funny and overtly political poem. I dare say most Americans today only have a peripheral knowledge of Pinochet, but it’s enough to know that directly criticizing a dictator in power is gutsy business. Clara Sandoval, Werner tells us, is Parra’s mother, poeticized. Footnotes, introductions, prefaces, and biographical notes are necessary to make sense of these and many other motifs in Parra’s work, but other aspects are more visible, as in “3 Pre-Columbian Artefactos,” with its echoes of Ginsberg:

“Expelled from Barros Arana Academy
4 going around planting trees on the tennis courts."

Ginsberg wrote in “Howl:” “who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull.” That ties Parra quite neatly to the Beats and vice versa, a relationship well worth exploring.

Mathematics are everywhere in Parra’s work, and assume levels of meaning not usually ascribed to numbers. The Parra/Beat relationship above may be nothing more than coincidence, until you learn that Ginsberg was, indeed, influenced by Parra. However, in the poem “Watch Out for the Gospel of the Times,” Parra subverts what we accept as true – including coincidence and conclusions based on evidence – using mathematics:

“2+2 doesn’t make 4:
once it made 4 but
today nothing is known in this regard.”

The last statement is patently untrue; if it is true that “nothing is known in this regard,” yet Parra (or the narrator) knows it, then the statement is contradictory and evidence of an unreliable narrator. Parra pokes fun by making a bold statement against the status quo, then undermining his own attack. Furthermore, Parra the mathematician knows that the 2+2=4 theorem isn’t as simple as most people think, with a proof requiring almost 2,500 sub-theorems. And what does it mean that "nothing is known in this regard?" Which regard - that of mathematics? That of accepted logic, of commonly known formulas, of fact? It is these and other intertextual layers of subversion that make Parra difficult to comprehend. Parra even reused these same lines in “Humungous Mistakes,” a poem that doesn’t stop at math but which also re-imagines well-known lines from Hamlet and the Bible.

It seems as though Parra is playing all sides, adopting the figure of the devil’s advocate in order to illumine the inherent emptiness, randomness, or meaninglessness in the world around him. That he does so with humor makes his poetry something more than a simple record of the times or a reasoned critique of cultural forces – it makes his poetry pleasurable. In “Note on the Lessons of Antipoetry,” Parra writes:

“Often our pleasure in antipoetry is impaired by our curiosity: we attempt to understand and dispute when we shouldn’t do either."

At first, I wasn’t sure if Parra was joking here or not. If he isn’t joking, then in the absence of pleasure there’s no point in reading further. But he is joking – just a few lines down, he writes “Ask your questions openly and listen without argument to the poet’s words…” This is what makes him a pleasure to read, once you learn what to pay attention to.

I can think of no better reason to read poetry than for pleasure, and that’s reason enough for me to seek out more of Parra’s work.

Escaping December: What I've Been Reading

2010-01-11T00:17:00.000-08:00

Jim Harrison writes in so simple and straightforward a style that I’m always lulled into plot and place, only to be stunned from this transport by a line or two of unending beauty:

“…it occurred to her that she had to keep expanding her life so that her trauma would grow smaller and smaller.”

In “The Farmer’s Daughter,” the title novella in his just-published collection, Harrison describes Montana so accurately that my own memories of the place swirl with his details and the effect of years of removal. You don’t seem to truly know a place until you’ve left, a truth Harrison explores in subsequent stories. I remember fields of winter grass rising from snow and stretching out towards distant mountains – but now I remember them in connection with what it was like to grow up an outsider in your own skin, much as the farmer’s daughter, Sarah, does. Living outside the mainstream is one of Harrison’s main themes, and his characters are eccentric and charming in their awkward attempts to live self-determined lives (the third novella features a werewolf desperate for a lost love and unable to find the peace he wants in urban society – trust me, it works). The three novellas in “The Farmer’s Daughter” share as common denominators adolescent groping for sexuality, Patsy Cline’s “The Last Word in Lonesome is Me,” tremendous appetites for the natural world and an earnest and sincere effort to transcend the limits of place through intellectual pursuits. In other words, they are about quiet self-sufficiency, and Harrison writes as though nothing else matters. After reading the book, I found myself wishing the world were a simpler place, but calmed by the idea that that place is something we can attain.

That place might even be our backyard. Robert Michael Pyle’s investigation into the phenomena of Bigfoot takes him across the west coast, from British Columbia down to the redwoods, although it focuses on a wilderness not far from Portland, Oregon. “Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide” is a treat for naturalists and native north-westerners, and the book is as much about what makes us human as it is about the mythical hominid in our forests. And it’s a really fun book, full of humor and grace and bursting with unusual facts and colorful people.

Pyle is a scientist and his writing leans towards narrative beauty and butterflies. They flit through pages as the shadows of Pyle’s prey flit through hemlock and fir. In one particularly gorgeous passage, Pyle describes the spectral flight of ghost moths in the darkness outside his tent, deep in the Dark Divide Wilderness. As an investigation of beauty and belief, this is powerful medicine. As a sociological investigation, this is magic. Pyle interviews Native American elders and storytellers, serious Bigfoot hunters and loony cranks, scientists and residents of dying logging towns. He favors hard science, but encounters doubt, and the unabashed joy he feels in hiking and camping in places like the Indian Heaven wilderness (one of my favorite places to hike in the northwest) was more than enough to forgive him for his faults. Pyle goes to real places – I’ve hiked where he hiked, camped where he camped, driven the same roads and visited the same towns – and even if his quarry is never proven to exist, Pyle successfully exposes what it is to be left to one’s own devices, deep in the winding ridges and forests of Washington state, alone with only eyes and ears and intuition to guide whatever perceptions and senses wilderness evidences. The world is a vast place, he suggests, and even the unknown deserves our respect, for it reflects upon us.

Pyle’s book is a winter read that makes me yearn for summer, quite unlike the Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler novels that I read over Christmas. I needed something escapist, and there’s nothing better than the adventure novels I grew up with. I know these books so well I can skip through most of the story and still feel the tension grow as the plot races towards climax.

As an adult, I disagree with Tom Clancy’s politics. His Jack Ryan novels started well with “The Hunt for Red October,” which focuses on a few people in the midst of something far larger than themselves. The sequence of novels ends with Ryan, a self-made man – as an outsider president, and the action in these later novels takes place on a world stage, with less focus on character than on plot. Clancy is great at the military techno-thriller, but as his main character evolved, right-leaning politics replaced some of the action, and I began to distance myself from the novels. As a child who moved frequently whenever my Air Force father was reassigned, I developed an appreciation and respect for the military and what they do, while simultaneously I cultivated a moral stance against violence and misapplication of force. Clancy is popular because his novels are intricate, well researched, and well plotted – and also because he worships the military and feigns a civilian’s outsider naïveté of government machinations. These are powerful attractions, but Clancy should stick with tanks and espionage. Not only is he better at it, but his prejudices don’t show as much.

Clive Cussler, however, has this and another, bigger problem entirely. I picked up my copy of “Raise the Titanic” and within a few pages, the quality of writing fell short of the Dan Brown standard. I loved this stuff as a kid, but I find it barely readable now. Early on, a husband and wife are arguing with each other at a White House reception:

“May I join the battle?” The request came from a little man with flaming red hair, nattily dressed in a blue dinner jacket. He had a precisely trimmed beard that matched the hair and complemented his piercing hazel eyes. To Seagram the voice seemed vaguely familiar, but he drew a blank on the face.
“Depends whose side you’re on,” Seagram said.
“Knowing your wife’s fetish for Women’s Lib,” the stranger said, “I’d be only too happy to join forces with her husband.
“You know Dana?”
“I should. I’m her boss.”
Seagram stared at him in amazement. “Then you must be – "
“Admiral James Sandecker,” Dana cut in, laughing, “Director of the National Underwater and Marine Agency…”

It doesn't get any better. “Raise the Titanic” was published in 1976, and while Cussler's later novels are stronger, they remain over-dramatic, overwrought, and factually inaccurate. They take enough leaps and bounds enough to make me reach for Clancy’s politics instead, and that’s sad, considering how much I once enjoyed reading about Dirk Pitt, his trusty Colt .45, and the beautiful women who fell at his feet when he rescued them from swarthy terrorists or international cabals.

I met Clive Cussler in 2008, when I introduced him to 200 people at a signing at my book store. He was a fun, elderly man basking in the warm glow of a life well spent – writing bestselling novels, organizing real-life treasure hunts, leading marine expeditions. The man behind the books had the fortune of living out fantasies in writing that his readers devoured, which helped fund his real-life searches for shipwrecks and underwater treasure. At the signing, the issue of the quality of his novels diminished, and I sensed that Cussler’s life and his novels mirror each other perfectly – they each celebrate the self-determined path, a plunging headlong into experience, with self-assured men transcending their place by successfully living both the armchair and the explorer life.

Borges wrote in a poem, “Seek for the pleasure of seeking, not of finding.” I understand that to mean always have something to look for, and go after it joyously – something all four of these writers understand well. We’re all looking for something in life, and how we get there is a way of our own choosing and of our own making. In that, there is art, and vice versa.