Our landlords’ younger son and I hiked to Camp Muir, a 5,000-foot or so ascent in 4½ miles, then back again. Nearly all on snowfield with rock-pile islands within it. Amazed by so much alpine flowering within it. On one island, clear streams gurgling through moss and blossoms.

As I noted, 23:VII:78, Sunday [I’m assuming the climb was on a Saturday, now that I had those off]:

A stiff, hard climb. We both stopped many times to rest / catch our breath, then discovered that by moving slowly, in “rest step,” we made better time, even with still needing rests … we were passed by skiers who climb to the camp and then ski down, and by climbers with full packs. [how humbling!]

But we made it! Left the ranch at 3 a.m., stopped for breakfast and gasoline, catching the first pink rays on Rainier as we came through White Pass and then the first rays on Adams in Stevens Pass …

At the higher altitude, the sky becomes the clearest, deepest blue, almost the color of this pen but clear, like a dense copper-sulfate solution. (Ward would also mention this about his Rainier climb.)

Muir, “cloud camp,” is nearly Tibetan — two rock shelters in a barren, snowy saddle, plus a few other shelters for shitting, mountaineering supplies, and a ranger. Five ravens fly in, like hawks or vultures on battered wings …

 

How lucky we were to have a clear day. Only the highest clouds, nothing on the mountain itself. Adams, Goat Rocks, St. Helens all clear, even distant Hood. Above Seattle, though, the purple-exhaust soup rising perhaps to 8,000 feet. Fantastic views, too, of Nisqually Glacier, with its pale blue electrical ice …

I was surprised by the number of people we saw above timberline — 300, perhaps. Party after party, black dots working toward the crest or returning.

By late afternoon, the atmosphere thickened; we lost sight of Hood in the haze.

~*~

I loved using the ice axe I borrowed for this outing, felt it gave me so much control as we carved our steps upward in the slick cold. I even felt armed and protected. The ax proved especially helpful on our descent. We wrapped our ponchos around our butts and slid down the slopes, using our ax as a rudder and brake. Glissade, as it’s called, bouncing and spraying up snow as we go. Still, we got wet.

Despite sunburn precautions — zinc oxide over our face, gloves to protect our hands, wide-brim hats (“Say, Cowboy,” I address Anders), we were both burned on our faces by the strong reflection off the ice and snow, as well as the thinner air not breaking the rays …

And then, as we approached the Paradise lodge, the mobs of tourists plus rangers directing traffic, like a Central Park in Manhattan.

The tourists looked at us as if we were Bigfoot or space aliens. Zinc oxide? “I’ve been drinking the clouds.”

Later, I was surprised by how many skilled climbers go in shorts only, achieving the deepest of tans.

[I had forgotten we did that twice.]

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Actually, contrary to what I would note later, I did get out into the wild that summer, just not nearly as frequently as I had hoped.

North Cascades

Summer Solstice
once again

Cornices — the snow overhangs at a mountain crest, hence the classical architectural imitation: capital, shaft, etc.

This trip turned into a pilgrimage to Snyder’s lookout experiences … Marblemount and Desolation Peak are in the mix.

 

Diablo Lake, in a Wikimedia photo. Ross Lake sits just upstream from it. Their waters really are this color, due to mineral “flour” that washes in.

The cross-state highway closed every winter …

Saw Forest Service packhorses going in at Mazama, two big trucks — up to supply the lookouts? Or pack the guys in?

Smokejumpers Camp and Airport 5

Imagine undertaking a journey where there are no road signs, no maps, no guidebooks — you don’t even know how far to the next town or inn or camp site with clean water. Much less a gas station, restaurant, or motel. You ask people and hope they know.

Now, for a spiritual journey?

23:VI:78

Vacation, at last — too exhausted to do anything (laundry in the washhouse, to free socks to pack) — almost afraid to leave the office, like a mother hen —

Still have to pack up (leave Sunday?), should I read or not? Swing around Montana, Idaho?

Sunday

After going to Thriftway, getting enough food for two weeks in the wild — things I never have at home — got cans of 7-Up, vegetables, soups, juices, puddings …

Wandered up along the Upper Columbia with tall alpine jagged escarpments dusted with snow behind and beyond the bunchgrass ridges over Wenatchee …

Hurricane Canyon Orchard …

The Yakima drops about 700 feet between the city of Yakima and the Columbia River — that’s a lot of energy siphoned into the orchards

 

The Columbia River threads past Chelan Falls and the beginnings of Chelan Lake on the left. A few orchards are nestled in along the river just below that. The large blocks are farmlands to the east of the river. Photo by Doc Searls via Wikimedia Commons.

Lady of the Lake, up Lake Chelan (original spelling was something like “Tslain”), leaves 8:30 each morning for Stehekin — barge takes cars up once a week, 8 a.m. Wednesday …

Friends Church at Quincy — half an hour earlier, I would have stopped — in blue jeans, red flannel shirt, and whiskers. [I didn’t yet know what to make with Quakers whose worship includes service by pastors.]

Vacation, reestablishing potential after being pushed against the wall. That is, freedom and cleansing. Leading, giving orders, following routine being functionary of choices already taken by others.

Somehow, the Methow Valley felt much like the trip Moon and I made up to Towanda from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, a forgotten land; here, silver mining gave out by 1890 …

Yet orchards surrounded by six-foot high deer/elk fencing, young trees staked up against the wind; even mature trees supported by lines of wire and fencing …

Twisp, Winthrop decked out as Wild West town — boom town clapboard false-fronts — me, arriving with “what-if” worries about home, such as fire … manuscripts and journals, especially …

Amazement of seeing two solo deer hopping, all four legs still, just the hooves springing all at once.

A single Douglas fir crosscut puts the felled tree at 1,335 years old. Rip ‘em out, they’re gone forever. As long as our up-teen great-great-great-etcetea-grandchildren …

Drove up over Harts Pass (6,206 BM) — nearly camped there in a patch between snow and a table buried within it, but whiteout coming in. Remembering how cold the Hoh was, the year before, along Pacific Coast,  pushed on to a site called Chancellor only to find, after a long drive bruising and cutting the tires, the road was washed out. Nearly camped in a secluded spot up there, beside a raging torrent of an icy stream, but noticed a bad cut in my left front tire and realized if it went flat there, I’d been in trouble … [this in the days before cell phones, much less any reception there] …

So back, up and over, to safer sites — of 16 Forest Service sites on the map, only two were open — the third one down was closed by a pile of rocks bulldozed up across the road …

 

Silver Star Mountain photo by Ron Clausen via Wikimedia.

Monday afternoon, Silver Fir Campground, Baker National Forest

Find a site beside the north fork of the Nooksack River, park my car, cross a footbridge to my tent and table … delightfully royal, sitting here in shorts only, listening to birds and water

[Note that I go off without her … maybe she had classes? No matter, I was free!]

Note of Coal Creek, Soup Creek, and Washboard Creek in the Cascades …

Drove up to the Baker ski area, then hiked six miles in snow up to see Baker, which was hidden behind a high ridge yet once seen, it’s a massive, overpowering, and heavily/thickly glaciated peak … Shuksan, at 9,127 feet about 1,500 feet shorter than Baker, is separated by an incredible chasm …

Hiking, God, how I hate switchbacks! Every step seems like my last (my mature poems, sez Phlum, will be sky blue and hemlock green with a touch of snow at the top).

Climbing to Welcome Pass, hoping this slope (sun-facing) will be snow-free — amazing problem for late June, “trail should be snow-free by mid-August,” booklet description of another path.

During the climb, some great views  of Mount Shuksan and its gorgeous pond way below me.

Keep hearing cascades but can’t see the chute —

At the pass, when the forest finally opens up to what should be sub-alpine terrain, I instead face a six-foot deep snow bank … where up from there, the High Divide Trail supposedly takes off — 6,000 feet elevation.

 

What I saw was something like this photo taken later in the season at Cougar Divide by Walter Siegmund via Wikimedia Commons. The three highest summits on the skyline right of center are Tomyhoi Peak (left, 7451 feet), American Border Peak (8026 feet) and Mount Larabee (right, 7868 feet). The highest peak left of center is Mount McGuire (2019 m) in British Columbia. The long ridge in the middle distance is the High Divide.

As I noted, what I beheld included an unbelievable valley below me to the north — huge glaciers on mountains I can’t identify. One mountain near here has a lookout perched atop; need my binoculars to see it.

Then stumble back down switchbacks — dodn’t see another person the whole trip.

“This is a very steep old miners trail.”

Riprap Creek flows down from Sourdough! (map reading)

28 June (Wednesday)

Realizing I’m 30, the next ten years being (traditionally) the most important in a writer’s career, and yet having the feeling I will stretch that, by shifting at 40, like Brahms from chamber music to symphonies, from poetry to novels (and perhaps a kind of Western, at that, from a much different order)

Flecks of gold in the sand (real gold: there had been a gold rush in this valley in the late 1800s

75- to 80-degree slopes … and they’re heavily forested

The droning of the river isn’t anything like the drone of a motor.

(the latter like an evil dentist dressed in black)

Nothing really matters right now, and that’s strange for me. Haven’t even heard classical music for three days now.

Coming through rainy North Cascades, this time stopping in Diabolo, Sourdough Trail (# whatever), “Sourdough Lookout 5,” thinking it’s been almost 25 years since he was up there (spotted the lookout, a tiny prick on a long monster loaf, snow still deep around it). Thinking how personal his work’s become to me — shit, I hadn’t even begun kindergarten when he was up here, how it would be another dozen years before approval as a national park or 20 before the North Cascades Highway opened (and that being closed each winter by snow) … how accessible all of this has become in the years since: yoga, Zen, too. Along with the setbacks: “14-year-old perfect master,” TM, Hare Krshna.

“a place that seems to have a more interesting past than its present”

30:VI

Home again

Air out sleeping bag, ground cloth, tent

Launder my smoky, sweaty clothes

Unpack and repack: sort through books and maps

So rare to have time to read: that sense of leisure

Yesterday, driving nearly 500 miles, a storm along the Columbia — the smell of summer rain and thunder — low clouds swirling, water gray, reminding me of the Hudson … should I have stayed on through the 4^th and its mobs?

Rain in the orchard: how beautiful the back porch sounds …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

Picking up on my old journals:

A month of rain: 2½ inches in December: snow, then melt. Our view of Rattlesnake Hills (rising behind our shack) washed out in fog. Ground soggy, making up for drought.

Vol. 50, 11:II:78

(first trip to Portland, a city that would become our alternative to Seattle, though we never got to know it as well)

longhorn steer on Satus Pass Highway
a longhorn?
Yakama Reservation

Quaker meetinghouse in an old storefront
Service Committee on one side
First-day school upstairs
or a Friends’ apartment? (caretakers

overwhelmed by the Native display at the art museum but not the rest of the collection

• Tlingt Cannibal Society dancers, long-beaked masks opened by strings
• (bird that eats human brains, serpents that swallow whalers)
• mountain sheep horns turned into spoons
• halibut fish hooks with intricately carved animal-peoples as bait
• or a life-size cormorant, hook sewn on with sea lion gut

Portland-town, calm as Philadelphia

Asian and Native
with an Anglo overlay
afternoon, clouds cleared
revealing Hood, proud and pink over all

– Rainier and St. Helens in the soup
but where, oh where was Adams?

Still so ignorant regarding this land

• Haven’t yet seen rattlesnakes beside the rocks
• Survived avalanches
• Fished for salmon, ridden a horse, felled Douglas fir or hemlock
• Sailed out from the coastline
• Crossed wrinkled glacier
• Stood atop Rainier, Adams, Hood, or Baker

 

Much of the Columbia River runs through desert before getting to the lush greenery in the Cascades and on westward to the Pacific. Much of the route forms the border between Oregon and Washington state, Here’s a taste of the eastern Columbia River Gorge downstream from the Dalles, Oregon, looking into the “Evergreen State,” photo by Chris Light via Wikimdedia Commons.

As for the more common impression, consider this photo by Lena Chang/USFWS, also via Wikimedia Commons.

 ~*~

14:V

Climbing Clemens in fog and rain, encountered my first rattlesnake, dead in the logging road; five rattles. They gain a new one every time the shed their skin, usually three times a year.

Old-timers saying this is greenest, mostly intensely flowered spring they can recall.

17 june

Slept till 9, met Whiz and drove from the Nile to Tieton ranger station, then out, in six-foot snow pack to the Timberwolf Lookout — the forest fire watch building is gone but great panorama of Adams, Goat Rocks, Rainier, the Stuarts — Mount Glacier clear, a ghost of Baker, and crown of St. Helens. Plus Aix, Bismarck, Nelson, Butte, Shellrock, Ironstone, and others.

Kitty, off to Seattle with Michael. Platonic, she insists.

 

Stratocone volcanic mountains poking through clouds are Mount Rainer, center, Mount Adams, left, with a very tiny Mount Hood appearing halfway between if you zoom in; St. Helens rises to the right.. Photo by Dllu at Wikimedia Commons. A distinctive feature of the Cascade Range is stratocones about 50 miles apart from Lassen Peak in California to Mount Baker near the Canadian border.

~*~

 20 Aug, Sunday

Entries lately: weekend to weekend

Sweet smell of conifers in the passes — rain at White Pass

everything clouded in

U.S. 12 still showing washout debris
wrecked guard railing
and other signs of last winter’s thawing and rains

4 Sept, Labor Day

Ginko Petrified Forest (at Vantage, where Interstate 90 crosses the Columbia)

Once, 10 or 15 million years ago, 200 species of trees grew here … the Cascade Range, not yet up, left ocean rains to come far inland (mahogany, maple, magnolia, Douglas fir, spruce, elm, ginko, box elder, beech, butternut among the common examples)

When the lava flows rolled over all, only the waterlogged trees didn’t burn … thus forming this site, one of seven major ones in US, and the one with the most species.

Wanapum tribe, peaceful, never declared war on USA and thus no treaty: and thus, alas, no reservation, no land = seems to sum up too much of Amerikan political and economic system, including judicial-legal mysterium frateritas …

~*~

Sometimes — no, too often — I feel or am wrongfully identified in a situation, perhaps because I do not submerge myself solely in a field — so that within a convention of journalists I may seem to be too ethereal, artsy, not politically-addicted enough, a health-food addict, whatever — yet among poets not hip enough, too square, too wealthy (!) or whatever: even too success oriented.

[Success? Guess that rules out poetry.]

A drive today, up into the Horse Heaven Hills … no irrigation system in sight, a few trees by the gully …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

When it came to the great outdoors for us, the year 1977 early on presented us with a trip that settled in E’burg rather than a few more hours on to Seattle. We found refuge in the Outrageous Taco, a freak center in an old beer hall turned pizza/taco/deli quiet with live music and free poetry journals to circulate … a sense of pleasant decay (a $2 movie nearby) … incense in the air, too. We would return frequently … a good selection of new and used books, too.

Homeward by the Canyon Road, walked over the swinging bridge at Umtanum Creek, Kitty screaming, scared, delighted, a future point for a hike …

~*~

The Yakima River Canyon stretches 27 miles through three major ridges between Yakima and Ellensburg, with summits that rise more than 2,000 feet in places. A railroad and two-lane highway cling to the base beside the river.

In late February, we made our Umtanum ascent, including the bald eagle observation, the first in the valley in 25 years. It was the middle ridge, as I recall, and forms a pivotal chapter in my novel Nearly Canaan.

Thinking of my nature poems … man, the legions of demigods, takes something away, reduces the richness of the land … Nancy Trueblood’s “in the mountains I feel closer to God” … limits the diversity of the species, the expansive quiet, the wonderful circling weaves … in Indiana, my nature poems were often at the edge of the woods — the interface of man, land, and seasons … historical depth where farms sometimes expressed a harmony … a deep cold springhouse, a summer porch … the mountains here, ever green or, like our desert ridge, light brown, are something else … and man adds nothing …

~*~

10 July, Sunday

Drove along Sauk Creek to Stevens Pass … [north of Ellensburg]

Gold-mining remains … introduction to Leavenworth and then the North Cascades …

Leavenworth, with its Swiss Alps festive mood … shame that something similar cannot be created/sustained in “American” or Native authentic theme … maybe something to do with America’s lack of holy rivers and mountains or maybe our flat “Christian” approach to life … (Swiss Calvin not withstanding)

~*~

18 July … apricots gone

~*~

31 July/First-day evening

No entries in a week —

Last Sunday, left early for Seattle (after a midnight Saturday shift) to meet Bill and Mig Dietz and Curtis and Jacquie. The whole port city bit: winos, sailors, loggers, porno shops (me, buying newspapers!), Blacks and students, crowded Sunday parks, jazz. Got to know Curtis better, though their planned North Cascades backpacking got jettisoned by Jacquie’s emergency retinal surgery. His gentleness and humor, plus his Seattle friend Bob Green. Our disappointment with the Seattle art museum, then learning it was cut in half, with anything modern at City Center. The aging freaks and the strangest cats.

Met the Dietzes for dinner at Ivar’s, pier 54. How beautiful these people are. Bill’s ability to melt Kitty’s sharp questioning from Jacquie …

Had salmon, scallops. [Not crab?] The Yakima, a sleek new ferry, in the next pier. Seagulls and seafoam.

Heard of one Friend’s decision to go to Australia, though she didn’t have enough cash to get a visa. Hitched to SF, her first ride was with a trucker who CB’d ahead, starting a chain that got her safely, quickly down the pike — always the next ride waiting. Got to the SF consulate office, sat outside till she got a “hardship” visa. Got her case heard. And went on her way, after staying at Friends House.

The uncommonly filling spirit at our parting. So high, elated from this visit, happy to be together, laughing aloud on our long drive home with a new moon.

~*~

Fremont lookout

Rainier National Park

7,200 feet sea level

Kitty joined me in the ascent from Sunrise; thought she’d stop at Frozen Lake but seeing children’s tracks felt shamed into continuing. Amazing Alpine natural gardens …

Clearest day one could hope for: Adams, Goat Rocks sharp view from the trailhead, yet a violet haze layer over Puget Sound from Olympia to Mount Vernon.

Next page a sketched panorama map showing Mount Baker, Glacier peak, and the Stuarts … plus notation, “Olympics a blue ragged line riding above the haze.”

Sitting up here’s just like riding a cloud.

And thus we are cloud-riders being ambushed by ’monks,

the fearless chipmunks attempting to ride our lunch …

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

My encounters with the unfamiliar terrain of the Western mountains and desert had me reading everything I could find. The public library was a good start.

As I noted:

Rainier, honeycomb mountain, radiating heat under all that ice and snow — so fragile a good explosion could level it all … a new appreciation for “the temple tops” …

Regarding petroglyphs at the Dalles, to the south of us on the Columbia River:

“It seems impossible to decipher these inscriptions satisfactorily as it is not likely anyone except the makers and those living at the time the work was done could tell what was meant by them” — Newcombe, 1907

Also in Beth and Ray Hill’s Indian Petroglyphs of the Pacific Northwest, 1974, University of Washington Press:

“To make my name good” as a Northwest Native’s goal in life …

~*~

 

~*~

My explorations fill a number of poems and much of my novel Nearly Canaan and of Kokopelli in the Secret Side of Jaya. In fact, I’ve considered the place to be a central character in itself.

~*~

One book I found most useful in understanding the social differences in the Far West was Anti-California. Many of the points its author raised regarding the Golden State fit what I was seeing in the Pacific Northwest. For instance, few children grew up within a day’s drive of their grandparents or aunts and uncles. He saw that as extending into social life in general, which tended to be more polarized, using the Roman Catholic church as an example in having both one of the most conservative cardinals in the world as well as an entire order of nuns that broke away. (I could add that Quakers there came in two opposite camps, liberal “unprogrammed” meetings and pastor-led evangelical churches.) You get the idea. The author had been a correspondent for Newsweek magazine and other respectable periodicals. I didn’t recall the 1971 book’s subtitle, “Report from our first parafascist state,” or know anything about the author, Kenneth Lamott, father of novelist Anne Lamott. As I’m now hearing, he was quite a flamboyant character, to put it mildly. I do wonder how I’d see that book now.

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.

 

The primary attraction had been the mountains. We were in the foothills on the eastern flank of the Cascade Range. I was getting out into the wild probably every week from summer to the start of winter. Here are a few excerpts.

Darling Mountain

One of my first exploration, maybe the first, was on a Tuesday I had off work, when I drove up the Middle Fork from Tampico and then logging roads to Darling Mountain crest. Sheep scats and tracks around the snow and awesome meadows. Old site of forest fire lookout, since torn down. Climbed a dead tree to enhance the view. Mount Hood, above clouds. Adams, thrusting into them, closer. Goat Rocks across the way, and St. Helens’ perfect cone beyond. Straight ahead, following the road, Rainier thicker into the clouds somehow superior to the others. Then, a golden eagle sailing straight toward me, turning off perhaps 30 yards away, soaring off, circling briefly, and disappearing. With my guest status, I gave gratitude.

Deep forests were extraordinary.

I had no idea that this was on the second-highest logging road in the state.

Rainier route

On another trip, on my way to Mount Rainier, saw my first petroglyphs (rock inscriptions) and petrographs (rock paintings) outside of Naches. The paintings looked a little faked — red and white, perhaps with a little blue or red.

 

Our routes to Rainier were progressions through ecosystems that became familiar over repeated exposure as we drove from sagebrush desert into ponderosa pines and reservoirs of future irrigation waters on our way to the high country of the Cascade Crest and the rainforests beyond.

Rainier hikes inspired many poems as well as scenes in my novel Nearly Canaan.

Each day trip was intoxicating.

To the south

John Day Dam in Columbia River: fish ladder and 80-foot drop of locks: air in stomach, at man’s mass of cement: aluminum company by the RR tracks.

Steam locomotive at Maryhill State Park, reflecting Sam Hill’s source of wealth: Maryhill Museum of Fine Arts, his castle above the palisades, green lawn dropping off into clouds. The sculpture studies by Rodin the claim to fame. During the trip, pondering Mount Adams vs Rainier …

~*~

Along the way

Sweet vinegar smell of hay [up to 5 mowings a year in the interior Far West; the hay was grown in the sunny lands east of the Cascades, and much of it was trucked to dairy farms and other livestock operations on the rainy western side of the mountains].

~*~

From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.