the violent bear it away.

Maybe the best song in to which to go running.

Or standing alone in the middle of crazy wild spectacular beauty.

Or driving through granite vistas eternal.

Endless.

Or just lying under a birch tree looking up at lazy clouds hanging in pale blue skies.

ansel.

People wonder why I don't express more interest in traveling around the world. The fact is, I really haven't completed explorations of my backyard! Two-dimensionally, I am jealous as Hell over your flying by the Himalayas! JEZUZ!!! But - after all - the other day I walked by some fresh green moss in my garden; this is a terrible confession for an old grizzled mountaineer to say - but that moss looked mighty impressive to me!

From a letter to Dorothea Lange, February 22, 1959

snowpack.

So this is a little alarming for all of the Western mountains except basically the northern Cascades ...

And ... pretty dramatic compared to last year where J and I found ice on Hungry Packer Lake the end of July ...

I guess we won't have to worry about too much snow for this year's Sierra trek - although the entire southwest US may be a bit concerned ...

fake empire.

A new song on repeat ...

The National

Fake Empire

Close eyes.

Fade away.

like this hail that is falling down out of the sun.

For whatever reason it always come back to me this idea of trying to distill in reason words and such why it is I am drawn to mountains. Have not been able to yet. But in a moment this morning sun sifting through windows fog in and out the train rushing north reading The Snow Leopard pressed up against the glass I come across this idea in a way that catches my attention. Read it again. Pull out a pen to underline the paragraph. There it was. Of why I go. Why I take J.

They have just left the porters behind and crossed over Jang La pass on their own carrying full loads for once. Fed up with sluggish porters snowblind in mountains amidst from where they were born. Matthiessen describes that feeling carrying his rucksack he calls 'free life' the way a mountaineer would write it ~

'The mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as breath.'

But then - after near death - he says the same mountaineer would describe freedom in a much more luminous form. About how having won his freedom which he would then never lose. And about how - having been given the rare joy of seeing - a new life would have been opened before him.



... as necessary to us as breath ...



Like Daumal writes -

'There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up; when one can no longer see, one can at least still know … '

The obligation to take the lesson learned of mountains when plodding along our own symmetry.




This getting out then surrounded by mountains white 'thick and silent' comes down to Matthiessen his own idea of freedom. The 'possibility and prospect of free life' he writes - of 'traveling light, without clinging or despising, in calm acceptance of everything that comes. The absurdity' - he continues - 'of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of the duty to live it through as bravely and as generously as possible.




'I am here to be here, like these rocks and sky and snow, like this hail that is falling down out of the sun.'

give a mile. or four. or five.

The scene was sort of sad. Sort of picturesque. Quiet.

Moss-covered logs once vehicle curbs. Sword fern and huckleberry where once cars parked. Pavement cracked and covered seemingly ancient. The sound of the river off in the distance nearby. J clambering up on a lichen-covered rock at the head of the Sulphur Mountain trail. Making goofy faces. K down wandering silently off somewhere. The Suiattle #784 trail sign almost eerily unupdated a tattered map of the Glacier Peak Wilderness stapled front and center. Laminated hiding under plastic. No cars though today. No one actually. Just us.

A mile or two back we had met one guy coming down on bicycle (we too were on bikes). Climber. Had an ice ax strapped to his pack so we just assumed. Seemed out of it. Told us he had been twelve miles deep earlier that day. Not sure from where but we bid him safe journey as he took off downroad. We hung around for a bit. Planned to be back to head up Miners Ridge. Image Lake. Or Sulphur Mountain.

Weather moving in from the west. Time to go.



-----



A couple hours earlier I found myself sun fighting through the approaching cloud layer chumming with a group of men all old enough to be my dad slumped in the grass of Green Mountain Pasture. A light breeze. Them lamenting on the good ol' days all with stories to tell but not enough time to get to them all. Of the Ptarmigan Traverse namely since only a few miles east Downey Creek empties into the Suiattle where most climbers plunge out of alder thickets to wrap it up crazy-exhausted relieved ecstatic.

Listening to them meander about days gone by made me wonder though were they all just grumpy and griping about why things couldn't just be the same? Should I have told them to get over it? Things change. Ethics change. Rivers change. Sandstone and granite. The ebb and flow of it all.

But then it hit me. Pretty hard actually and something clicked.

Isn't more or less the essence of the Wilderness Act (we were sitting smackdab in the middle of Glacier Peak Wilderness after all) to—well—prevent things from changing? Cos if this sort of stuff always changed—roads and boundaries and use and such—from one generation to the next then—well—just a few down the line and what will be left? How much will have changed?



A mile here. A mile there. Who's counting anyway?



So taking off from the meadow the three of us up towards the bridge over Downey I thought to myself it seems these candid and kindhearted old men of which whose company I had to remind myself I had been in and for what we should be thanking them might just be on to something. 'I'm old school wilderness' one of them had huffed to me with a partial twinkle in his eye as he prefaced a reply to my question of why not just pave the last four miles of the road? I rather like a river walk he spoke without answering hinting at a gesture to shush and listen to the quiet still air surrounding us.

Admittedly though despite my age I suppose so am I.

There are plenty of unwild places left it seems. Not enough wilderness. Some may argue that but hardly radical. And the debate has heated up through quick searches of the interwebs as the deadline for public comments draws to a close the end of this week. Alt B or C? Fix the whole road all twenty-three miles back up to the Sulphur Mountain trailhead and campground next to the creek or leave the last four or five miles from Green Mountain Road for foot and bikes and packs? What's four or five more miles anyway?



A mile here. A mile there. Who's counting anyway?



-----



The ride uproad was enjoyable. A barely-perceptible up. The last four or five miles from Green Mountain to Sulphur Mountain maybe four hundred feet or so. Quiet. The cedars dripping with moss. A grove of birch near the riverbed. Leaves shuttering. Had to stop my bike even to really appreciate it the sound of knobby tires on rocky roadbed half overgrown drowning out the essence of the river and silence of forest and air. A good sort of eerie.

It didn't necessarily or really make sense to me why at that point in between reality and sublime all the rage all the fuss all the back and forth over four or five miles? Why must we feel I guess that 'access' can only mean vehicle access? Why must we drive so much? Always be in such a hurry? It seems when all the arguments are made for or against B or C or this or that what it all everything comes down to is something simple ... that essence of dew clinging to a fern not coated with dust from a road or fumes.

Of course it would be easier to drive the road to its end. Park. Stretch some before heading off down the Suiattle River trail. It's not like I don't take advantage of roads. Hennegan Pass. Cascade Pass. The cross-state North Cascades highway-turned-eyesore. So for me then I guess I could stand to walk four or five extra miles if I wanted. A couple hours on foot. Quicker on bicycle. Maybe the campground at Sulphur Creek would be more special. Maybe a little tougher to get to than all the others sprawled beside or tucked off pavements. Maybe I just sound like an old curmudgeon.



-----



We get back to the truck parked off the road just outside the gate at milepost twelve. I walk past a pile of garbage spilling cascading down the hillside toward the river. Ugh. Close my eyes for a second to forget that. Go back to the lichen and the moss and the ferns and cedars at the end of the disintegrating road the quiet pristine. Still the sound of the Suiattle. Try to picture all of this not now not today but when it's finished and the debates have died down and the construction dust has settled. Fifty years from now. A hundred. More.

Which is the better scene?












To send in a comment to the USFS use this address ... wfl.suiattleriverroad@dot.gov

for a minute i was wondering if you'd come around.

The new song on repeat

repeat

repeat