Mountains Walking

If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking.

Dōgen, Mountains and Waters Sutra

In February I was in a head-space filled with moss and mud that sucked at my ambition. Better the real thing, I thought, so I went to Cape Falcon, where rain whipped over cliffs and the sea foamed and thundered in rocky coves. By the time I reached the tip of the cape, my pants were soaked and stained with mud to the knees. My hands were cold and my glasses misted with salt, and gray clouds hung over the beach and nearby Neahkanie Mountain. Out there, it looked and felt like the Pacific Northwest is supposed to – a rain-battered rugged coast dark with misty forests, swept by a steady wind and the occasional cry of a gull. Imagine a Chinese landscape scroll, with a solitary figure in the corner – laughably small, but necessary.

I almost didn’t go - bleak weather, laziness, and so on - but by early afternoon I was lacing my boots at the trailhead. Fifty yards later, the forest swallowed the noise of traffic, and I began to hear thousands of drops of water. Rain fell gently through the trees, splashed against leaves and spruce needles, dripped from glossy salal, and gurgled in flowing puddles. Dense, moody, and a hundred shades of green, the old-growth trapped the air and hushed sound. Mushrooms and ferns grew in the shade of sitka spruce eight feet in diameter, and old-man’s beard hung from colonnades of young trees rooted in decayed nurse logs. Time means little in these pockets of coastal forest, which seem endless and ancient and unhurried. The air is rich with loam and hummus, a heady conifer scent, and the salt of the ocean breeze. Even in daylight there are places where it stays dim, and February clouds only accentuate the atmospherics. Where the forest opens up, the light becomes voluptuous: moss and lichen cover everything in a soft carpet of green, and the light appears from everywhere at once, silvery and shadowless.

Eventually the forest opened onto a headland covered with dense thickets of salal and studded with wind-warped pine and spruce. Tunneling through wet brush to viewpoints on the south side of the cape, I looked south to Nehalem Spit and towards the ancient vision sites on the cloudy summit of Neakhanie Mountain, and ate lunch beneath a bonsai-shaped spruce above a steep cove. For an hour, I watched ocean swells slowly moving towards land, rising in sea-green waves that curled and exploded on a black gravel beach. Gulls drifted over the spray, and reddish-brown sea-weed drifted like bruises beneath the waves. Twice, more than a mile offshore, a puff of white and a dark comma of black showed where gray whales were feeding – year-long residents, maybe, or following their whale-roads north or south.

By this point I’d become so wet that I simply decided to stay wet, and wandered out towards the tip of the cape, trying to keep my camera dry and staying warm by moving. I came around a corner and encountered another hiker with his back to me, dancing slowly and grooving to headphones under a hood.

I said hello and he didn’t hear me. I tried again to get his attention, but couldn’t. This was getting awkward, and annoying – this guy was stationed exactly where I wanted to be, at the best, most remote viewpoint on the entire cape. I backed off and approached one more time, finally getting his attention. After a polite exchange I passed him, but came back quickly from the steep, slick, exposed trail at the end of the cape. When I returned he offered me a smoke, and so for the next half-hour we talked about things common to people who meet in February rain at the end of a cape jutting into the Pacific Ocean. I told him about seeing whales, and we talked about the migratory habits of grays. He pointed out bald eagles on a distant cliff, and I recommended he visit the Klickitat River to see their winter nesting grounds. We talked about mushroom hunting and rumors of Spanish gold on Neahkanie. We talked about Native Americans and Chinook Jargon, smallpox and Lewis and Clark, John Jacob Astor. And of course, we talked about hiking.

In Portland, if I’d passed this guy on the street, I probably wouldn’t even look at him. And he wouldn’t look at me. But just the fact of being out on the cape meant we had something in common, had something to talk about. We both get it.

My initial annoyance with this interuption of solitude had turned to enjoyment of the conversation we shared. Solitude while hiking is a wonderful thing, but it’s not the only thing. We can’t truly “get away” in nature without losing ourselves. We carry our selves into wilderness, and wildness includes other people, actually can’t exist without people – not because we define its boundaries semantically or on a map, but because nature necessarily includes us. Most of us are simply too far removed to even be aware we’re removed. But the rain that falls in Portland is the same rain that falls on Cape Falcon. And the wild forests I walk in at Cape Falcon are just as wild and real and vital as those in my mind when I walk garbage out to the dumpster by my home in the city. That’s what Dōgen was getting at, and what Gary Snyder meant when he said “To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is whole. You start with the part you are whole in.”

Before I left the end of the cape, I took one long last look at the sea crashing against the cliffs. Low clouds drifted among the shore-pine and spruce, and swells rolled in towards Short Sands beach and surfers in the scroll of waves. A gull flew overhead, and I heard in the wind the sound of it laughing.

Wildlife Sightings

“If one is patient,” he said, “if one is careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved.”

Barry Lopez, The Orrery

The crowds dismay me as soon as I arrive at the Multnomah Falls trailhead. It shouldn’t be a surprise how many people are here on a very nice Sunday in early March. But I haven’t been on a solid hike with a bunch of elevation and distance since last October, and a lot of my favorite trails need extensive maintenance to open, or are too deeply covered in snow. So I pass through frustrating groups of tourists sipping coffee and taking photos, cross the narrow Benson Bridge, “put on the afterburners” and climb past day trippers, slow hikers, families with strollers and babies on their backs, running kids, and leash-less dogs. At last I reach the top of the falls and the paved trail turns to rock and earth, thinning the crowds. I can finally catch my breath.

A mile later, at the intersection with the Wahkeena trail, a sign says the bridge further up on the Larch Mountain trail is damaged and unsafe. I walk up to look. A couple in their 50’s is on the other side, dressed in rain-pants and knee-high gaiters, with snowshoes strapped to their packs. “Crossed it six times since they closed it,” says the man after he strides across. “You’ll find snow on Devil’s Rest.”

I stop for a break at the top of the Wahkeena trail. Two trails drop down to Wahkeena Canyon, one heads west to Angel’s Rest, and a third climbs up to Devil’s Rest. I look up into the trees – tall second-growth doug fir, old branches draped in moss, crowns of deep green needles against a clear blue sky. A shadow sweeps by – a crow chases another in and out of the canopy, darting around trees in a game of tag, cawing in the forest.

I don’t prefer blonds, but the one with her friends a little distance away is unbelievably stunning, with rosy cheeks and a contagious smile, in her mid-twenties, and wearing hiking clothes that excite my imagination. It is not too early in the season to find flowers in the wilderness. She and her friends hike on, leaving no trace.

Below Devil’s Rest, I put yaktracks on my boots for extra traction. An older woman descends the trail and stops to chat. She tells me the trail ahead is filled with snow, and beautiful. She recently had surgery, but since her recovery, she's has hit the trail every weekend. She says her doctor probably wouldn’t agree with her climbing to Devil’s Rest, but she can’t help it. I’ve been in her position, and we part with mutual words of encouragement.

In the snow, just before the summit, a man in a t-shirt and ear-buds asks where the overlook is. He seems lost, but competent. I send him down the trail a half mile. Another man passes me, dressed to climb Hood. He’s almost running down the trail in crampons. He’s Japanese, speaks broken English, and seems lost in his own good way.

Finally at the summit, I take off my pack and pour green tea. There’s no view, just a jumble of mossy green boulders in the sun. Movement catches my eye: a large crow glides past at eye level, and with a single caw and a flap of its wings, it disappears into the trees. Voices rise up from the trail below.

It’s a very fit man with a bushy moustache. His daughter follows him to the summit. “Here we are,” he says. “Now you’ve seen it.” They stay a few moments, and depart.

Next come two women with a black lab and two whippets. One of the whippets whimpers with cold. A young man follows close behind. He has a GPS and seems to be the hike leader, a loose designation because all three hikers seem to be exploring the network of trails around here without definite plans. One of the women asks Jason for the time; I look at my watch and almost answer. Then, laughing at myself, I pack up my thermos and put on my pack.

I don’t take more than a few steps when two trail runners arrive in shorts and light windbreakers, carrying water bottles in their hands. They stay just a minute before running off. Damn them. I struggled to get up here and they’re running ahead of me, hooting in the trees.

I take the Foxglove trail, a user-maintained path leading west and down from the summit of Devil’s Rest. It joins the Angel’s Rest trail going back to Wahkeena. Suddenly, there are two familiar faces, a younger couple dressed in t-shirts. I’d seen them on the way to Devil’s Rest, and remarked how great it felt to be able to hike in t-shirts. They happily agreed then, but they don’t look happy now. The man just looks tired, but the woman looks cold and frustrated. Without thinking, I say “Haven’t I seen you before?” They don’t respond, and I spend the next half-mile thinking how creepy that comment may have sounded. In the end, I decide it doesn’t matter.

Once on the Angel’s Rest trail, the snow thins and disappears. I stop a few times to take pictures, and a young woman overtakes me by Wahkeena Spring. When I say hello, she smiles shyly back, and continues on. I let her get ahead and keep hiking, but soon she and I are in an unspoken race to stay ahead of a large group of loud, ill-equipped hikers carrying lap-dogs in their arms as they descend the steep, muddy Wahkeena trail.

I’m getting hungry now. I haven’t eaten lunch, and in my haste to avoid others, I’ve passed by several good lunch spots. But I’m almost back to the trailhead. Just as the canyon narrows to allow only a steep trail alongside a falling white-water creek, I pass two overweight women struggling uphill. I can see by their gear and their faces that they’re determined and serious. I say hello and one of them beams a giant smile at me. It wins the smile of the day, for sure – this is their trail too, and I like seeing them enjoy it in spite of, or maybe because of, the challenge it presents to them.

I’m giddy but tired while walking through the crowded old highway parking lot at Multnomah Falls. An elderly woman in a group walks right at me, not moving out of the way at all. I step aside, right up against a line of parked cars. The woman continues forward. My trekking poles are stashed horizontally across my pack, and the tip is at this woman’s eye level. I can’t move out of the way, and she won’t move, so I give up. The sharp tip of the trekking pole misses her eye by about two inches.

Back in the main parking lot, I walk past a bunch of bikers clad in leather standing around their Harleys, and I watch kids playing Frisbee in the grass. I feel great – sore, but in a good way, and peacefully energized. Pouring coffee from a thermos, I take off my boots and socks and join everyone else in enjoying the late afternoon sun. Devil’s Rest is out of sight above the steep, thousand-foot cliffs, and Multnomah Falls is in shadow. One of the bikers starts his engine and the rumble sets off the car alarm in the Subaru next to me. Then a crow flies overhead, cawing in the clear blue sky.

Hiking Light at the Painted Hills

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

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

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.