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Shivering in the shithouse — and other tests at Sol Duc

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

— Mike Tyson.

Cold was in the air already, an omnipotent all penetrating wet. It was in the slick on the road, the low gray sky, the close ranks of firs and hemlocks — a billion silver droplets on the needles, droplets in the bracken, on the grass. Spotted yellow maple leaves fell heavy with little ceremony, plopping to the pavement, plastered on.

A whisper of diesel lingered from the bus that had just dropped me on the empty stretch of Highway 101 beneath the Sol Duc Valley. I hustled across the yellow lines, pushing my road bike. The full pack was a nightmare on my spine. I regretted this trip before it stared. Yet, there was no choice.

OK, there was a choice. There was a choice between the 15-mile bike, 9-mile hike — and staying home for another “get things done weekend.”

The last “get things done weekend” had began with good intentions of housecleaning, writing canning fruit for the winter (new hobby) but my attention span got sucked out through my internet connection and run over by the news cycle. My hours of productive labor became joyless hours of content consumption and self-loathing. The idea of repeating the experience for another weekend was a nauseating one.

No. I needed a kick in the ass. I needed some adventure. If that adventure required cold hands, shivering and soggy spirits, hopefully I’d at least learn something along the way.

Most of those lessons would come painfully, of course, but the kayak pogies were an exception.  Putting pogies on the bike handlebars actually works pretty well, I learned. Fingers were firmly connected with the gear shifts and brakes, yet they remained encased within their warming shells of neoprene. I didn’t need to worry about wetting my gloves or mitts before I hit the trail.

My decision to wear a trash bag as a kind of skirt while cycling kept a great deal of the moisture off my pants. I was, however, developing a wet zone above the knees. I pedaled slowly.

Salmon cascades

My trash skirt and bike helmet certainly made me among the more fashionable visitors at the Sol Duc River salmon cascades. Several vehicles were pulled  along the roadside near the prominent overlook. A small crowd  had gathered by the river to watch the huge fish leaping up at the series of surging falls.

These were coho salmon returning to their spawning sites from the sea. Though I had seen salmon in the rivers before, I had never seen such perseverance. Fish after fish flew above the surging water to try and clear the four foot ledge into a side pool partway up the falls. Almost all of them fell backward into the foam that they had leaped from.

An instant before they hit the water, the fish would whip their bodies, thrumming with the tight, directed power of a vibrating string. For a couple fish that landed just below the top of the falls, this Hail Mary, was enough to overpower the current for an instant and push them into the pool on top. Others flailed, pathetically to their sides, flopping back down into the maelstrom.

The largest salmon seemed to have the best luck. They took the greatest leaps. Even in shallow water, they could grapple their bodies to the stone and dyno like rock climbers against gravity.

The tumult of the cascades annihilated all noise from these struggles. It was as though the standing wave at the base of the falls was the flywheel on an enormous pitching machine. Instead of baseballs flying up, there were silver 20-pound fish, arching noiselessly from the river.

Satisfying as it was to watch the salmon make it to the first pool, I didn’t see a single one make it past the even higher leap that came next.

They had eaten their last meals long ago, were running down their gauges toward empty. The top of the falls was their Hillary Step, a final test that their years of struggle in sea and river had built up to. Each failure brought them closer to the possibility that they would die without spawning, that this season would be the last chapter in their ancient genetic story.

It was painful to watch the fish jump off from the redoubt they had fought so hard for. I held my breath every time, only to watch the fish tumble out into the main current and — fighting, still fighting — fall all the way back to the bottom of the cascade

It has never been easy to be a salmon, though this moment in history may be their greatest challenge yet. Years of dams, development, over harvest and global warming have devastated the old runs, shrank the size of the fish themselves. Perhaps the fish at the cascades would have been bigger and stronger if the Pacific Ocean, wasn’t still reeling from the enormous “blob” pattern of unnaturally warm water that began in 2015. The phenomenon killed off much of the krill that salmon feed on.*  If not for the failures of our species to respect life on this planet, there might have been a different scene at Sol Duc.

Maybe then, I would have seen some of them complete that last leap.

The river thundered on.

The cold and the beautiful

I got back on my bike and continued up the wet road to its end.

15 miles from where I’d started on Highway 101, I locked my bike and shouldered my pack. I began walking toward Sol Duc Falls. Plenty of people were walking with massive cameras, talking in several languages. There was a family with brown paper bags out looking for chanterelle mushrooms growing under logs.

I went off my route briefly to admire the place where the river falls sideways into a deep chasm (no salmon would ever make it this far.) It occurred to me that if I were really smart, I would just turn around here and then catch an afternoon bus back to Port Angeles. The falls and the salmon cascades were enough fodder to make up a small, successful, low carbon trip with moderate suffering.

Haha. Moderate suffering. Suffering would be abundant. It occurred to me that if suffering were some valuable commodity like goat cheese or maple syrup, I could start a nice artisanal business for myself.

Try Wandering Tom’s latest, Homemade Suffering! This 2017, limited release small-batch edition has strong notes of cold and wet  — a bold contrast to its themes of back pain and numb extremities. It goes great on pancakes.

In order to gather the proper amount of suffering on this trip, it wasn’t good enough for me to just muck around below tree line; I needed to get to the alpine zone where the good stuff was. My Parks Service overnight permit was for the Heart Lake camp area, which happens to be at 4,700 feet, nine miles up the trail. It was raining at the trailhead. I was told to expect snow by the time I got to camp.

So the hike began.

It is worth noting, amidst my morbid contemplations, that there were actually a couple of beautiful things that I noticed going up the trail. One of these was the deep gully that crossed my path, plunging down the slope toward the river. Plaited bands of aerated water splashed over the mossy rocks. Overhead, a canopy of warm yellow leaves on the vine maples. These small trees followed the gully in a perfect line. They flashed out against the dark boughs of the spruces and firs.

The generous amounts of rain at Sol Duc creates a habitat for verdant swaths of moss, goatsbeard lichen hanging off the branches, beads of water clinging to the hairs. Monumental firs stand dark against the light in their shining filigree of epiphytes.

I could look down from the edge of Sol Duc Canyon and see a river that thundered like a fire-hose, bulling against the walls, throwing itself off ledges, swirling through logjams and leaping up into the air in sheets of mist.

Where was all the water coming from? Everywhere. Every inch of the valley was saturated.

Half of the trail was a stream course. My tall boots deflected most of the moisture, but I sensed that it was beginning to make inroads. Some vapor-barrier socks would have been a smart move. The kayak pogies were a surprise success however. I attached them to my poles much as I would a paddle, creating comfy neoprene nests for my bare hands. This was literally handy, because I could take my hands out in an instant and work ungloved on some minor adjustment. It was far less time consuming than me having to take a glove or mitt off to work on something.

I took few breaks while climbing the trail. To stop was to lose temperature. If I put another layer on to warm up, I knew I would get it soaked and have one less piece of dry clothing for the cold night ahead.

When the weight of my fully-loaded pack became too much, I stopped with my pack on my shoulders, crouched into a ball to distribute the weight onto my hips and retain heat.

The rain rolled off my jacket onto the small of my back.

Making myself small for this 30 second interval, I shut out the hostile outside environment and breathed the dirt smell of the rotten log I was leaning against. This short break from struggle was an important way to ground myself, tending to my spirits in the same way I was trying to keep an even body-temperature. The micro-world below gave me a measure of reassurance that I didn’t feel when I contemplated the long miles ahead of me, or the sure to be hellish night ahead.

Hints at what that night would be like included the patches of white I began to see along the trail. There was just a faint frosting on the mosses, or in the shadows of the trees. It was still raining. The clouds hid the highest slopes of the mountains above me, but I’d get a glimpse of ghost white slopes above veiled in rain clouds.

The snow grew thicker as I climbed. It was still raining. I hiked through a goulash of wet snow. I thought of the several empty camps I had passed below tree line. Surely, these would have been more pleasant places to spend the night than what was in store for me in the high country.

Ah, but I still had lessons to learn up there; I still had a suffering quota to meet.

The trail crossed the Sol Duc again, but this time there was no log bridge. I tried to toss a couple branches into the river, but the current laughed and whisked them downstream. I ended up slogging through shin deep water to reach the other side.

After another half mile of goulash hiking I had another river crossing. I had to will myself to go slow, even as the cold water soaked into my boots. A fall would be a survival crisis, likely hypothermia. I reached the side and climbed on. Finally, the trail popped up at the bottom of a snow filled basin where the wind was howling. Chunks of slush and broken ice lolled in the gray, heart-shaped lake. I’d arrived at camp.

Outhouse Camp

The rain was one thing, but when the droplets were thrown by a thundering wind, it became something much worse. The outhouse, naturally, was the place to find relief.

I shut the door and threw on a fleece layer beneath my raincoat. It would be soaked within short order. I felt my jaw clenching up from the cold. If there was going to be a shelter tonight, I needed to get it set up fast.

The shelter was my tarp, which had served me well throughout the summer. Initially, I’d planned to use the rainfly from my tent as the upper level, but realized that this was a no-go because it wouldn’t stand up without the under-tent. A dumb mistake, but still salvageable, because I could use it as my shelter’s footprint with the tarp overhead.

Another problem: Even as I cleared away the snow from the shelter site, the rainwater would start to gather up below. I used my fire pan to dig a drainage trench, which helped somewhat, but only to the extent that I’d be sleeping in shallower water.

I set up the tarp as a flat rectangle that was a couple inches above where I would sleep. This was workable, unless the rain turned to snow, in which case the weight of the snow would collapse it on top of me while I slept. OK, I could try to rejigger the ropes so that the central guy-line was higher up.

BUT, my hands were freezing cold now. Untying and retying knots would be slow work.  Light and temperature were falling. The longer I stood exposed in the face of the wind, the colder I became, the more difficult it would be for me to, warm up or to do simple tasks necessary for survival. The zipper on my rainjacket had blown open and rain was getting into my puffy layer.

The shelter was shit. I was going to be sleeping in a pond with the wind blowing through the whole night.

Should I take it down then? Well, at that point, even disassembling the thing would cost precious energy.  The two river crossings would leave me in an even worse way before I got below tree line to set up shelter again. After I’d been through all of that, who knows how stupid and useless I’d be. It was going to be an outhouse night.

I lurched back to the narrow building and shut the door. I shed my wet layers and arranged my sleeping bag. The last time that I’d spent a night in an outhouse was in Colorado, where I’d used a roomy handicap-accessible building that gave me room to set up a sleeping pad and stove.

This building gave me five feet to stretch out  if I slept on top of the toilet with the lid down. Gusts of wind send droplets of icy water in through the cracks in the walls.

Miserable as this sounds, I had piled on enough layers to maintain a damp warmth. I set my fire pan down on the edge of the toilet and used a flint striker to light a cotton ball, transferring the flames to a hexamine tablet, which gave me a small but very hot smokeless fire. The fire gave me boiling water for hot pea soup and contributed some toxic fumes to help deaden my awareness. I fed additional tabs to the flames as I ate, warming my little shelter as the wind outside thundered into the boards.

When the fire died, I got out my sleeping bag. I bolstered my sleep system with two reflective mylar bivvy sacks. One  protected my insulation from the wet on the outside; the other bivvy went inside the sleeping bag to protect it from my own sweat and damp,  marinating my body inside plastic.

I contorted myself so that I could lie down with my head resting on my pack, knees bent. This was more or less how I would spend the next 10 hours. Though supremely uncomfortable, I was warm. I listened to the wind,  heard the droplets spattering onto the bivvy sack. I thought of the wretched tarp that I’d pitched outside, and how hellish it would have been to spend the night under it.

I was in the outhouse because I’d screwed up. My preparations were inadequate. Plans that seemed solid to me when I was beneath a roof in Port Angeles, were torn up by the mountain wind.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” Mike Tyson said.

He may have been talking about boxing, but the windswept campground was a place where punches came fast and survival required action to move at the speed of muscle memory and instinct.

I’d been able to afford the time it took to noodle and tweaking with my tarp during the months of summer hiking. The October weather was less forgiving. Now noodling with gear was the equivalent of lacing up boxing gloves while the opponent was already taking swings at me.

Cold and disorientation had landed like blows on my unprepared frame. Next time, I vowed to have a stronger system ready for the elements. Another option: I could have kept my lightweight system and camped below tree line. If I’d really wanted to explore Heart Lake and beyond, I could have marched up from a lower camp with a lighter pack.

Now I spent many hours in the half waking, half dreaming state, pausing to sit up now and then to stretch my cramping legs. I thought of the refugees of the world, what it was like to be insecure against the elements, utterly vulnerable. How outraged I would be, I thought, if someone turned me away from shelter on a night like this. Yet, our government routinely turns people out who face not only rain but bullets, not only cold but famine, whose struggles are not over when they get home — because there is no home. It is easy it is to be heartless to those in need when you have no understanding of what their suffering is like.

“I am grateful for this outhouse,” I murmured.

Rough trails, dark roads

The tarp shelter stayed up. It had rained all night, with just a little bit of new snow that alighted during the coldest hours. Perhaps I could have slept under there after all, but if I could have gone back in time, I still would have chose the outhouse.

The wind continued throughout my morning routine, blasting little hail pellets over the mountainside. I gathered some slush water in my pot and boiled it for oatmeal.

I wrung out my hiking pants, put them back on. It was a slog back to the bike, but I was in control of my body heat.

Throughout the hike down, I had fantasized about an imaginary clothes dryer that would be waiting for me at the campground/resort next to the Sol Duc Hot Springs. I would dry all my clothes and then buy a pass to the hot springs and rewarm my core, telling the story of my adventures to any bather who would listen.

Unfortunately, there were no clothes dryers at the resort. There was no Sunday bus service out to Port Angeles either. My plan had been to spend the night camped near Highway 101 and then catch a Monday morning bus back to town. As I contemplated another night of damp sleep, this option became less and less appealing.

Another option was to bike the 32 remaining miles to Port Angeles — a trip I was certain to finish in the dark. I stood for awhile thinking, even put my thumb out for a couple pickup trucks going down 101. Finally, I decided to stop waffling and start pedaling.

The section of 101 that goes along Lake Crescent is incredibly risky for bikes, as there are tight turns and almost no margin. I decided not to try it with a fully loaded pack in fading light.

Instead, I opted to take the Spruce Railroad Trail, which goes on the other side of the lake. The compromise here was that I would face long sections of loose rock and roots that were for mountain bikes, not the skinny tires I was riding that day. I would have to walk long sections of trail.

Even pedaling the pavement proved challenging, as recent winds had knocked several trees down over the path. Branches and leaves were scattered everywhere.

One saving grace: The rain had stopped.

As the paved trail gave way to dirt, I risked biking on some of the smoother sections. I had to stop frequently to clear out pine needles which got stuck between the wheel and bike frame. Finally, I crossed through the railroad tunnel at the east end of the lake, and got back onto paved road. The light was getting low.

I stopped in the village of Joyce to flick on my headlamp and taillight. This was the highway section that I’d been  dreading most. There would be plenty of traffic, a narrow margin and dark pavement.

To clinch it all, my headlamp beam was dying I hadn’t packed extra batteries (stupid.) This forced me to take it slow along the bumpy pavement, fearing potholes and outstretched branches hiding at the limits of vision.

Another worry: Every once in a while I would look back and see that the taillight had flicked off for some reason. Unnerving, considering that this signaled my existence to oncoming trucks with the potential to blot said existence out on their front grilles. I’d stop and hit the on button again and start pedaling until I noticed it was out again. I haven’t had the problem since the trip, so I don’t think it was battery-related. Whatever it was, it wasn’t helping my relaxation.

I’d hoped that some of the fears and hardships would diminish once I reconnected with the bike path, away from traffic. Not so. The trail was covered in leaves, which made it difficult to distinguish the pavement from the edge of the forest. The dim headlamp forced me to bike slowly. Twice, I got disoriented and biked right into the woods.

My most epic fall came when I biked past a roadside construction site. I saw no warning sign,  just a sudden drop off right in front of me. I hit the brakes but it was too late. The bike went over an 18-inch drop and landed hard on the rocky substrate. I fell over and the bike went on top of me. I issued a stream of oaths, got up and dusted off.

I had to readjust the bike wheel before I started pedaling. I was ready to be done.

Finally, a couple miles later, the trail ended at the suburbs west of Port Angeles. There was street lighting, the happy glow of televisions in the windows of warm houses. I could hear waves pounding on the beach below the bluffs nearby. A hilltop vantage point gave me a view of miles of lights, stretching out along the dark waters of the Strait.

Blobs of brightness by the water eroded to disparate sparks of illumination as civilization climbed the hills. And then there were the mountains where darkness  reigned again. My time up there was over for now, until my next journey when I hoped to return wiser and better equipped.  I was happy to follow the orange road, street lamp by street lamp, the rest of the way to a warm bed.

 

Sources

* Information on salmon stock decline can be found here: http://www.oceanfutures.org/news/blog/salmon-stocks-trouble-pacific-northwest

http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/letters-from-the-west/article73268602.html

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Bike Climbing and Snow Sliding: A Doorstep Mount Angeles Expedition

There was the world of the pavement and there was everything else.

Pavement was the Hurricane Ridge Road, an asphalt tendril climbing out from Port Angeles, and penetrating into the Olympic Mountains. was is the accommodation that allowed the river of internal combustion to flow uphill — the shuddering swarms of Harley’s, Subarus, Tahoes and other vehicles to convey their day-trip passengers toward the snow realm up above.

They looked out of windows, and saw the other world: the treacherous stands of stinging nettles and shoots of devil’s club armed with vicious barbs, diaphanous leaves of the big leaf maple shifting iridescent in the sun mist. They were just starting the climb, these visitors. So was I.

I too, grunted and shuddered my up the pavement, and I did it in the lowest gear on my bike. The plan was to notch another entry in the doorstep chronicles with a doorstep ascent of Klahhane Ridge.

The ridge is 6,000 feet above Port Angeles Harbor. It forms what I think of as the most impressive feature you can see from town. Torturous layers of jagged stone jut up out of the ridge’s west side to create the 6,400 foot summit of Mount Angeles. Snow clings to the shadowed north slope, even in July and August.

I knew I was going to pedal long and hard to get there. I knew my back was going to ache and that I would loathe the traffic going past my bike. The bike ride was the part I wanted to get over with before I traipsed merrily up the trail toward Mount Angeles. I thought of all the cars going by as I kept the bike tires on the narrow margin.

But sometimes you sweat the climb a thousand times before the wheels start turning. As I started up the hill, I found myself in a pleasant frame of mind, enjoying the sun on my face. I let my eyes wander off the road and up the narrow gullies where pearly-white freshets cascaded over moss. Fat orange salmonberries grew in the roadside thickets, though they were not quite ripe enough to eat.

An occasional vehicle did perturb my reverie, but the traffic was far lighter than what I had feared. It had been dumb to spend so much energy climbing the mountain in my mind earlier.

After over an hour of climbing, I had knocked out about five miles, which brought me to the entrance station to Olympic National Park. I found a place in a rumbling line of vehicles, then kicked my bike along with the rest of the traffic inching its way toward the kiosk.

Eighty dollars later, I had a crisp new National Parks Pass in my wallet and was pedaling past thick-trunked Douglas Firs. The investment felt good, especially knowing the threat national parks throughout America face from the current president and others who follow his brand of thug-ignorance.

A vehicle stopped ahead of me so that passengers could click at a doe and her two fawns — the size of puppies with delicate white spots along their flanks. These park deer registered minimal concern about my bicycle or the other traffic along the road. I hoped no one had been feeding them, but the world is rich in well-meaning fools.

The lush understory from the lower elevations dropped away to thinner pine forest, with long views across the valley to Blue Mountain and the snow covered face of the Obstruction Point ridge. Day-trippers wandered from their cars to get in front of the views.

“You must be a glutton for punishment,” one woman called after me as I chugged by with my heavy pack.

“I’m loving it out here,” I called back.

Fifteen miles and 4,000 feet after I left my doorstep, I pulled my bicycle up to the trailhead for the Switchback Trail. I immediately peeled out of my soaked shirt and replaced it. A couple of peanut butter banana wraps were the calories I needed before the hike. Water gushed down the mountain valley, melting off the thick patches of snow higher up the way. A guy plodded down the trail with a pair of skis on his back. A minute later, his daughters caught up with him, also with skis.

“How was it out there?” I asked.

It was skiing for the sake of novelty at this point, the man admitted. They had found mushy snow that tended to cave in near rock outcrops. The biggest worry was the fog, which was still wrapped around the mountains higher up. There were no regrets about getting up there though.

The beginning of the Switchback Trail was a muddy line zigging up between stands of Alaska yellow cedar and mountain meadow. Tiny alpine flowers were coming into bloom. Groups of black-tailed deer meandered lazily through their forage, with velvet on their antlers.

I encountered snow gradually, then all at once. A few patches over the trail, became large swaths where other hikers had kicked steps in for traction. No need for me to get the crampons out yet. I did use an ice axe to cut up a couple of switchbacks on the snow.

Typically, cutting switchbacks is a hiking sin, because it tramps out vegetation and can cause erosion. In this case, the snow absorbed the impact of my waffle stomping feet and I could proceed guiltless.

Still, the axe and crampons proved to be overkill for the expedition, where the majority of the climb was snow free.

By the time I reached the crest of Klahhane Ridge, the clouds had closed in thoroughly. This was my turnaround goal, Climbing to 6,000 feet from my home at 300 feet above sea level wasn’t such a bad day. Yet, I knew I could go further. Last year, I had taken a little used side trail up to one of the peaks of Mount Angeles. The tallest peak (which I’d also climbed last year) would be out of reach from this approach, but I would still be at almost the same height of 6,400.

The ridge divided the mostly snow-free area where I hiked, from an entirely different world on the north face. Here, in the shadows, I could peer over a 45 degree slope, where a chest-deep slab of winter snow held onto the rock. Peering down, the white snow blended seamless into the nothingness of the cloud layers. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. The depthless white concealed danger as well as or better than darkness would. I understood why the skiers had been freaked out.

Still…what a ride it would be. All I had to do is hop over the edge, and start sliding on my butt. I’d gather speed — tremendous speed — as I flew into that great white unknown with the ice axe as my only brake. It was a thought that was as terrifying as it was appealing. I thought of Herman Melville who wrote a whole chapter in Moby Dick regarding the terror of white:

“…there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.”

The rock scree on the south side of the mountain was enough excitement for the blood right then. The slope looked like a cake turned on its side, with various shales, sandstones and basalts that were bastard children of volcanism and ocean floor upheaval. The rock was pulverized into bits and pieces. I kicked my boots in for purchase in pencil shards of shale.

The basalt was more solid, but still dicey. I test wiggled every hand hold before I put weight on it. Often I would find a toaster-sized rock, just waiting to tumble down slope. When I had the chance, I used my axe to “dry tool” out holds in the rock above me. There were even a couple of snow slopes, that I used the axe for, though I didn’t bother putting the crampons on. Carrying them up 6,000 feet of mountain was just my way of making sure I got the proper dose of exercise that day.

Eventually, the rock got more technical — as in technically, it was class IV climbing if that sounds impressive. I ditched the backpack, and scrambled my way up the last section to a lookout slab.

The clouds hid plenty, but I also saw a good amount of the June snow slopes to my north. The concealing nature of the fog made the jagged landscape more mysterious and menacing. I grinned in the wind for a couple minutes, then started down.

Descending the scree was predictably unpleasant. I placed little trust in any one footfall. Still, I got a little fun out of glissading down a couple snow slopes. I got a little too ebullient on one of these jaunts, and missed my chance to sink my axe in before the snow went out. The result was a bit like coming to the end of a waterslide to find that someone had replaced the pool with a gravel pit.

I emerged slightly battered and slightly humbled, to hike the rest of the way down the Switchback Trail (and glissade a few more snow slopes.) Though I had hauled heavy snow pants up this far, I didn’t bother putting them on. Instead, I worked on a new glissade technique, sliding backwards on my hands and feet with the axe twisted sideways. When it was time to hit the brakes, I turned the axe into the snow. The method worked OK, for the short sections that I had to deal with, though my hands were thoroughly chilled in their thin gloves.

Near the bottom of the trail, I took a moment to sit on a boulder, while clouds parted and mountains strobed in and out of the early evening light. I let myself breathe in satisfaction. These are moments that reaffirm that adventures, even day trips, have unfathomable worth to me. More and more, I have begun to believe in the Doorstep Adventure and I want to take more of them. If I cannot be in the places I love most, without putting money in the pockets of the people that destroy them, perhaps I don’t deserve to be there.

And it is important to find an equal measure of joy to the hardship that comes with getting into wild places without an automobile. Otherwise, why the hell did you bother coming out?

If you drive up to Hurricane Ridge and have a crappy time, you wasted a couple hours and a few dollars’ worth of gas. No biggie. Hey, let’s catch a movie sequel at the theater.

If you bike, hike or run from sea level, you better enjoy yourself out there, or else you just squandered a day’s worth of time and effort. So you have a good time.

The bike ride up had been fun for sure. The ride down was a complete blast:  14 miles of (almost) unadulterated descent. I leaned my way past curves and through mountain tunnels, white knuckling it with fingers on the brakes. I used the brakes as little as possible.

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A Doorstep Adventure for Bike and Snowshoes

Bicycle

As I wheeled my road bike out onto the street to start my doorstep adventure, I could still see margins of frost on the north face of the neighbor’s roof. Soon the frost would retreat as the sun continued its climb. Higher up, fields of bright white snow filled the bowls and couloirs of Klahanne Ridge. It would stay white up there a while longer.

Yet, the expanse of frozen waste and toothy crags could be mistaken for mere background decoration to the fresh green day that was unfolding in Port Angeles — a glory of spring warmth complete with chirping birds, blossoming cherry trees fresh cut lawns, and the earthy smell of living organisms crawling out of winter sleep.

The disparate scenes were separated by several miles and a couple thousand feet of elevation. Today’s adventure was about closing that gap.

By biking, then hiking and finally snowshoeing up the ridge, I would feel the challenge of the mountains while taking the chance to connect with their snowy realm.

There was a mighty pack on my shoulders, flanked by powder snowshoes and a trekking pole/ice axe. It didn’t take long for that weight to feel uncomfortable on my spine. In the best case scenario, I imagined that I would be able to traipse across 6,000-foot Klahhane Ridge itself. I had ran up there from Port Angeles while training for my ultra marathon last summer. With deep snow in the equation however, the task wouldn’t be so simple. Avalanche forecasts called for elevated risk of slides, especially above tree line. I remembered encountering harsh slopes on my summer runs, which could be hazard zones. If nothing else, I knew I could travel to 5,000 feet or so and get amazing views.

I biked out of the neighborhood past the National Park Headquarters and onto Hurricane Ridge Road. There would be five miles of uphill biking to the Heather Park Trailhead at 1,800 feet.

I ground through the miles, weeping for my aching back. Cars swept up and down easily past me. Why do I have to make everything so hard?

Sometimes I brought my head up to appreciate the endless pavement view in front of me. Mostly I watched the little twigs and bits of gravel creep by my tires. There was progress, at least in the small scale.

Shoes

I made it to the trailhead parking lot by 10:20 a.m., and locked my bike against a sapling.

Other hikers were loading and unloading themselves into vehicles. Most of them, I guessed, were going up the more popular Lake Angeles Trail.

Still, I was in no mood to get caught up in another group of walkers. I was loaded too heavily to run, but managed an aggressive walk up the smooth grade of dead pine needles. At this elevation, the evergreen salal and Oregon grape shrubs grew in abundance. Big leaf maples with mossy limbs still found niches between western red cedar and the Douglass fir. After a few switchbacks, the maples would fall behind and the scrub would disappear.

An hour of climbing switchbacks brought me to the first dabs of icy snow up in the trees. They fell in a barrage of hard little pellets as the sun loosened their grasp upon the branches. Within a hundred yards, a hard-crusted, slippery snow firmed over the trail, dusted with a fine layer of powder. Hikers who had gone before had already worn some indents into the crust which were useful to prevent sliding. I thought of my snowshoes, but decided to wait until I encountered snow that I might sink into.

The more I climbed, the trickier travel on the crust became. The trail traversed the mountainside, but not enough people had been through to notch it out. The result: My feet constantly slid out to the left. Snowy branches above the trail waited for me to brush against them so they could dump their payload down my neck.

I could have protected myself by putting my rain jacket on. Some gaiters for my legs would have been nice too. I also wanted to eat lunch. Still, I knew the transition would take time and I didn’t want to stop for all of that, only to have to stop again and take my snowshoes out — or peel a layer off because I was sweating. I wanted to be in the place where I could do all those things, and I wanted it to be in the warm sun.

There had been one lookout that I had been saving up for. Yet, when I passed it, I saw that it was shaded, and that clouds had moved in below to rob me of the view I’d wanted. I kept going until I found a random patch of sun in the trail where I threw my pack off.

Sun or no sun, the cold found me immediately. The rain jacket and parka I threw on were little help to my cooling metabolic furnace. My hands immediately became dumb blocks of frozen meat. Still, I took my mini show shovel out to dig a small indentation in the slope where I could put a sitting pad.

Lunch included some bread heels and hummus, along with a not-too-bad vegan banana brownie I’d made for myself the other day.

Having tossed fuel back into the furnace, it was time to winterize myself. I had decided to go light on my feet, and was only wearing running shoes — not designed to withstand cold, wet snow. But I would make them honorary winter boots. I put plastic bags around my socks to keep water out, then strapped my gaiters on for reinforcement at the ankles. I brought out my ice axe/pole for additional support on the tricky terrain. Finally, I got my snowshoes on and hefted up my pack.

These relatively straightforward tasks were made far more onerous by numb hands that I had to rewarm with body heat several times in the course of my work. I cursed and struggled several minutes trying to get them into warm mittens, pulling with my teeth.

Forty-five minutes had passed between when I stopped for my break and when I started back up the trail.

Snowshoes

Putting snowshoes on was no magic bullet for making the slippery crust terrain more navigable.

I still would slide violently to the left sometimes on the thin powder layer. The spikes on the snowshoes worked best if I were going straight up or down, but the rounded edges afforded little help on the tilt-a-trail. A pair of smaller mountaineering shoes may have been a better ticket.

Having the pole/axe in my hand, did help here and there for certain maneuvers.

I saw the last section of footprints end in a series of postholes. Then I was the one making tracks. Several times I walked sideways because the snowshoes engaged pretty well that way. The constant sliding was jarring though, and I was getting frustrated.

Now and then I would walk straight up the hill off the trail and then cut back over along the edge of a tree well, where the snow was slightly easier to navigate.

During one of these maneuvers, I realized that I’d lost sight of the trail. I half-heartedly searched for it and realized that I didn’t particularly care. I had my tracks to follow and it wasn’t going to snow anytime soon. My slow progress meant that there was no way I was going to make Klahhane Ridge. There was an adjacent, shorter ridge below First Top, a 5,500 foot peak that I could reach by hiking straight up. Seeing that the snowshoes actually did well climbing straight uphill, I decided that this was a course worth pursuing.

There were several helpful cuts in the trees that I could take. As the going got steeper, I found myself swing kicking my snowshoes into the slope for traction, and sometimes climbing over crust ledges. These would take a while because my feet would routinely slide out under the substrate and I might have to kick in several times to get a real foothold. A lot of the sunny areas included crumbly corn snow that gave out easily. The axe would slide right through it without grabbing anything, so I would slam my hands in and pull myself up. I grabbed tree branches when available.

Just when I was beginning to feel like a grubbing animal, a break in the clouds revealed the Dungeness Spit, which jabs five miles out into the Strait. Meanwhile, Klahanne Ridge loomed big as ever behind me. Enormous snow bowls rose up between blades of rock. White wisps of cloud curled off the ridge, while much darker clouds lurked behind — malevolent and full of power.

So much snow everywhere, I thought. If I flew for 50 miles south above the Olympics, no doubt I would see more snow than bare ground. It made me think of my home where I had started and how springtime with its flowers and cut lawns only really existed on a thin strip above the water. These mountains felt more like the true character of the peninsula.

A recent slide had left a run of broken cheddar snow to my left. The slide was shallow, but ran for about a 75 feet down the snowfield, a reminder to stay alert. I chose to avoid a obvious climb up a steep, clear slope by staying in the protection of a downed tree, and then doing a weird, rock climbing/snowshoeing move to get to the top of another ledge.

The slope became more gradual, then I got to where I could see down the other side.

Mount Fitzhenry rose up beyond the Elwha River Valley. The tallest peaks I could see on Vancouver Island were below me, but were still high enough to hold snow. The top of First Top was maybe a quarter mile away, but only by going through a gnarly looking traverse. I decided that I was happy with the view.

Looking  back down, I could see Freshwater Bay and Bachelor Rock where I had some fun times kayak surfing earlier this year. Bachelor Rock appeared disconnected to the mainland, so I ascertained it was high tide. And perhaps it was high time that I started heading back to Port Angeles. It was 3 p.m. and there was plenty of sun left, but I didn’t want to get cocky.

Ducking into the shelter of some rocks, I put my parka back on, and worked my snowpants on over my shoes (couldn’t have pulled this move if I’d been in boots.)  I was glad for the extra layers, because I was sure to be colder on the way down. After one more look at my surroundings, I began the descent.

Glissade, Run, Ride

Having struggled to find footing on the way up, I had dreaded what the descent had in store for me. Sure enough, my snowshoes soon went out from under me.

As I sat with my butt on the snow, I realized that I was going to be just fine. I could slide down the mountain on my butt quickly and easily in a glissade. The snow pants, which I had thrown into my pack as an afterthought, were now going to be a saving grace. No way would I sit on the snow in thin wind pants up here.

My pole/axe, like the snow pants, was finally proving its worth. The pitches I was sliding down were quite steep. Yet, by holding the pole across my chest and digging the axe head into the crust I could moderate my speed.

Well, mostly.

I lost control a couple times and got swallowed in tree wells beneath Alaska yellow cedars. I kicked off the branches with my snowshoes, crawled away and got in place for another run.

Slide after slide, I ripped down the mountain. A big grin stretched across my face. I realized I was finally having some fun.

When I got back to the trail, I alternated between awkward snowshoe steps and crawling over the crust. If I fell, I just went with the momentum. I felt like a lurching bear, allowing myself to be not-quite in control. Further down, the snow became flatter and I started running.

In a couple places, I glissaded over some switchbacks, but the snow was getting dirtier and sharper as I went down. Melting snow felt like rain off the needles overhead. I snowshoed over crud snow and ice until I got to bare ground and took the shoes off.

I started running again. The pack was lighter now, and the downhill momentum made for a good push. I kept my knees slightly bent to protect them from trauma and put it all on my quadriceps.

The salal and Oregon grape reappeared. By the time I reached my bike, it had only been two hours since I had left the ridge.

There was a short flat section before the downhill descent. I swung into a highway pull out above Port Angeles, and looked northeast. The air was extraordinarily clear, affording me a view of the San Juan Islands and 10,000-foot Mount Baker. Even further north, I could see the white peaks of the mountains near Whistler, Canada.

It is worth mentioning that I tested my brakes before the final descent on Hurricane Ridge Road. It turned out the back back brake was loose. Resetting it was a simple matter. I just flicked a lever back into place. The lessons of last month’s wipeout are still with me, even if the cuts have faded.

I spun the pedals around so that my feet were on the rough sides, kicked off, and started down the road.

Twenty -five minutes later, I was back to my doorstep. The late day light played across the valleys of Klahanne Ridge where the snow still held rein. Those were mountains —  not some pretty background decoration from the kitchen window.

As winter retreats up the slopes, I know I will have to spend more time up there.

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Bikeyaking

Bikeyaking

I just wanted to take my kayak down the river and leave the car at home.

I do many things the hard way because I am stubborn. I was also convinced that with the right kind of trailer, I could use my bike to haul my whitewater kayak 8.5 miles to a put in on the Poplar River, do some whitewater, and bike back home. Why? Why not?

It was a different kind of challenge, one that I liked because it left my polluting car out of the equation while I was having fun.

A nice idea, but one that required technical knowhow that is beyond my ken.

Enter my friend, Jon the Bike Guy. A retired ranger from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources, he sports a waist-length, braided pony tail and owlish glasses through which he diagnoses and prescribes remedies for faulty derailleurs, misaligned spokes and squeaky brakes. Woe unto anyone who borrows a tool from his organized bins and shelves and fails to return it to the proper place.

An expert level forager, he acquires and keep things until the universe reveals their utility.

There was a purpose for the old Burley bike trailer he’d hung onto. Meant for carrying kids, it could have a second life carrying my kayak around.

When I half-joked that I wanted to pull a kayak behind my bike, Jon’s eyes popped. He immediately thought of repurposing the trailer and began talking rapid fire about how it would come together. I could almost see the blueprints floating over his head.

Our first model looked promising until I started pedaling. The shock absorbing spring in the carrier caused it to buck wildly as I accelerated and decelerated. I grimaced every time I hit the brakes. After about a mile of lurching, terrifying riding, I turned around in defeat. Then, coming down a hill, the kayak took an enormous lurch and snapped the wooden handle that attached it to the bike. The boat rolled merrily down into a ditch where it landed in a mud puddle. It preferred water over pavement apparently.

I was far from given up and, unsurprisingly, neither was Jon. The bikeyak would ride. We went back to the design and scrapped the troublesome spring. Instead, John drilled a hole in the metal arm where I could insert the trailer pin. This model fared far better, with the only issue being a tendency for the sides of the hull to rub against the wheels now and again.

Fine-tuning and adjustment could wait however. Whitewater called. After a couple of trips to play around in the Temperance River (about four miles of travel from home to the launch area,) I set my sites on the Poplar River, which runs through a series of frothing rapids and drops that go through a ski resort and a golf course, before the canyon narrows into a log-choked death chute on the way to Lake Superior.

I planned to get out before this part.

One recent summer morning, I started biking with the kayak on the trailer toward Poplar. Puffy cumulous drifted through the crisp blue sky. The previous night’s rains steamed off the leaves and the sodden ground. The sultry air was rich with the smells of earth and life.

Pedaling my bike plus kayak through the humidity was slow, but the easy pace also meant I could look for wildflowers in the woods or listen to birdcalls. A few pedestrians shot furtive glances, then decided that it was best not to talk to the crazy guy.

“That’s an innovative transportation idea,” one walker told me.

He was the one with vision, obviously. When everyone else told those bike mechanics Orville and Wilbur their idea wouldn’t fly, he would have given them the thumbs up.

Everyone else was oblivious to genius.

I arrived at the Poplar River within 45 minutes. I ate some bread and stashed a dry bag full of clothes in some nearby brush outside a graveyard. I’d be back as soon as I dropped the kayak off at the put in.

This was the tough part. I had to climb at least 500 feet along the ski hill road and it’s steep.

The bike crawled along the highway shoulder. Cars and trucks sped past, some with mountain bikes on their racks.

Would I have been able to explain myself to them and, if so, would I believe myself? They’d probably file me under ‘loco’ long before I finished. Yet, everything I was doing had logic to it. It was the marriage of conflicting impulses that spawned the apparent absurdity.

On the one hand, I wanted to minimize unnecessary driving. Whitewater kayaking is a luxury, not a necessity.

However, if I skipped a kayak trip because of driving guilt, this would signal that my anti-driving philosophy placed a heavy tax on fun. If avoiding driving meant hanging around the house and not going out for some excitement, how could I sell it to people? Ergo, the trick was to find a way to take the kayak trip but not drive. Ergo, there I was crawling up the hill with a kayak in back of my bike, which, come to think of it, was not particularly fun.

After I reached the crest of the hill, I parked near a trailhead to the Superior Hiking Trail, close to the cascades I call You Will Die Falls.

I left the kayak in the  woods and biked back down the hill to the cemetery. Some may have considered it a bad omen that my kayak run was ending at the graveyard.

After I got the bike in place, I started back upriver on foot. I picked an arduous route along the river so I could scout the rapids and look for newly fallen trees. Any river canyon on the North Shore is exceptionally slow (or outright impossible)to explore on foot, because of the steep slopes. These tend to be populated by loose rock, slippery moss and dead trees that fall over as soon as you grab for one.

I scraped through briar patches, over spruce trees with impaling branches and under logs. Rarely did I put my foot down with any certainty that it wouldn’t slide or that the ground beneath it wouldn’t give way.

At two rapids, I placed stones so that I would see them on the way down. One of these markers reminded me to prepare for a series of drops, another to stay on the left side of the river and avoid a branch-choked channel.

I came out of the woods onto a golf course, where I walked down to a bridge above a Class V rapid known as Bilek’s Surprise on the American Whitewater website. The rapid is named after a paddler who had come around a corner not expecting to drop down a 100-foot-long chute of whitewater surging over jagged rocks. Surprise!

I didn’t plan to follow Bilek’s example, though I did spend some time looking at the namesake rapid, thinking about how to run it.

At this point, I skipped scouting any further upriver as I had already run by there the other day. Instead, I bushwhacked back to the road that I had biked up earlier and jogged uphill in my sandals.

My kayak waited at the top. I grabbed the end loop and began taking it down the treacherous slope to the river.

You Will Die Falls was in excellent form. The lines of ragged water plunged off the rocks in snowy gouts sending up the clamor of an express train. It was hard to look away from, brutal and beautiful at once, hypnotic.

I took a moment to confirm that the falls were a likely death sentence for a paddler. Some of the rapids at the base of the falls were more ambiguous. If I launched in one pool, I faced a decent chance of getting pinned up on a rock and sent for a battering ride down successive drops. Nah. I was there by myself, and freaked out by the risk.

Below, another pool, looked about as forbidding, but did feature a tiny eddy where I could launch my kayak. From there I would have to ferry against a full-throttle current in order to reach slower water on the other side, where I might be able to weave a path through some boulders and get set up for the six-foot drop that followed. If I was still upright at this point, I could look forward to several more drops and turns that would test my skills.

This launch plan had a high built-in fuck-up potential, especially because I didn’t know if I could resist the current long enough to get across and go through the rocks. I thought about it until I was sick of thinking and got in the boat.

My new neoprene sprayskirt is great for deflecting waves, but it is a pain in the ass to pull it over the kayak cockpit. I balanced on a narrow ramp of rock trying to get the damn thing to go all the way around without it slipping. Or the boat slipping. I almost fed myself to the river a couple of times, which would have been disastrous as soon as the first wave crashed into the boat opening. At this point I wasn’t even sure if I could get out of the boat without tipping in the river.  I felt tightness in my chest, blood rushing through my ears.

The final edge of the sprayskirt curled reluctantly over the cockpit edge. I looked up at You Will Die Falls and the angry serpent of water tearing downhill from its base. My hands pushed the kayak forward.

Go! Go!

The paddle clawed at the shallow water, digging for any momentum it could find. The current slugged the boat nose to throw it downstream. I tilted, got past it, swung around and paddled madly for the space between two boulders. The nose danced over a wave, came to the edge of the first drop and plummeted into frothing water. I had just enough time to brace and avoid flipping, but no time to congratulate myself before I was going over the next drop. I passed within half a foot of an outstretched branch

The water mellowed, but only a little. I picked my way through wave trains and rocks as I sighted the first bridge. It was a low one. I popped my head down as I went under.

A couple of gallons of water sloshed around the boat hull. What the hell? The new sprayskirt was supposed to fix that. I had a bilge pump with me, but there were no eddies in sight for me to pump myself. Finally, I found a place where I could park behind some scrub birches and pump water. I noticed that two screws that I had planned  (and forgotten) to tighten on top of the boat hull had completely rattled out. They left two holes about half the size of a ladybug right next to the cockpit for water to rush into.

I finished pumping and struggled my sprayskirt back on with much profanity.

The river widened out as I went, diminishing the current’s reckless force, but also exposing more rocks. I would try to swing around one rock, only to get hung up on another one that was partly submerged.

One of these unruly citizens caught my boat and turned it sideways so that the current began piling up on top.

‘Here comes the flip,’ I thought unhappily, preparing myself to be ready to grab the escape strap in front of the sprayskirt. ‘A real pro would be able to save himself with a hip snap.’

Then, I tried snapping my hips. The boat started turning back. I made a desperate slap at the water with my open palm and then I was back upright.

I paddled back into the current and found a place to empty the boat at the edge of the golf course near Bilek’s Surprise. I scouted the rapid, decided I really wasn’t going to run it, then started walking back to my boat. I hear a small crash and breaking branches. I whirled around in time to see a golf ball bounce onto the ground behind me.  A gaggle of silver haired business types looked down on me from the grassy knoll where their carts were parked.

Dangerous place. I was glad to be wearing a helmet.

Back in my boat I bombed a series of drops to beneath the last cart bridge before Bilek’s  where I swung into an eddy.

I portaged down the hill and into the woods and launched anew. The canyon re-narrowed so that the river was once again tight and powerful. I spotted a rock that I had left on a boulder earlier and swung my boat into another eddy to re-scout the rapid. After my run beneath You Will Die Falls, this section of river looked far less intimidating than it had earlier. I found myself making some quick moves, but also getting my boat more or less where I wanted it to go. Several of the drops sent water up to chest height, which was fun, though my boat started filling with more water.

Once again roaring water filled my ears. The river was about to plunge through its last canyon before Lake Superior. I was not.

I spun into an eddy near a cart bridge and flipped my sprayskirt up.

I pumped out my boat, got out, flipped it over and emptied the rest of the water.

The time I had spent on the river had been maybe 10 percent of the trip; the rest was biking and scouting, messing with cam  straps to get the boat on the trailer. Yet my work and Jon The Bike Guy’s expertise had meant that the trip had a certain style. I might well have executed the first bike/kayak run on the lower Poplar. Whether it was worth the trouble, well that’s another question. The thing had worked.

I hoisted the boat on my shoulder and walked it back to where the bike waited to take us home.