Olympic National Park – Tom's On The Move

November 6, 2017November 6, 2017

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

January 30, 2017

Moments on Lake Ozette

Some January day.

Jarrett and I stood amidst gear and kayaks on the shores of Lake Ozette — the biggest lake in Olympic National Park, at the north-westernmost corner of Washington, about to launch an overnight trip.

And lo! The sun was hot on my arms. Insects were flitting about. I felt, maybe a little bit silly, that I had brought the drysuit, neoprene sprayskirt, various and sundry items of hardcore cold water adventure.

This was warmer than half of the trips we had guided this summer.

“I can’t believe I went skiing yesterday,” I said.

The chest deep powder at Hurricane Ridge was a couple hours drive away, but was worlds removed from this all-too-pleasant lake front. The water was glass.
Jarrett wanted to know if I had brought sunscreen. I hadn’t. Psychologically, I’d been preparing for wind-whipped waves and sleety rain, not the possibility of a tan.

Jarrett slipped into his drysuit so that he could comfortably launch his kayak in the cold water. I was no mood to steam cook myself in Gore-Tex, and opted for shorts and a thin synthetic layer beneath my life vest.

No one said “Climate Change,” but on such an aberrant day, how could you not think about the warming planet and the new realities that it will impose upon our lives.

January might yet become the best season for kayaks.
And it will be just as well, because at least there will be something to do as skiable snow goes the way of the dodo.

Note to up and coming outdoor business owners: Maybe it’s time to start phasing out the skis. Kayaks will have the edge soon enough.

The snow will just keep shrinking up the mountains. Meanwhile, exciting new waterways are going to open up in low-lying places like Florida, Louisiana and New York City. Sure, the water may be a sludge of sewage, decay and industrial effluvia, but as long as the pH doesn’t get low enough to melt boats, you will probably still be able to float over it.

Think about the windfalls awaiting the entrepreneur who sets up the first guided kayak tour through Lower Manhattan.

“And this is the old New York Stock Exchange, where the short-term greed and willful ignorance of investors, abetted by a complicit government, helped bring the Great Flood. Hey, who wants to hit the snack raft for a New York pretzel?”

No one else had gotten the memo about the perfect weather it seems, because there were no other boats that we could see, no other vehicles at the boat launch into Swan Bay.

Jarrett launched first onto the smooth blue water. I made a couple adjustments to my gear and paddled after him. Within a couple minutes, I caught up to him. He had gravitated to a small shady spot behind some trees, where he’d have relief from the sun.

“You see that?” He gestured lazily.

A bald eagle perched in the branches above, scanning the water with its watchful eyes. It would be the first of many eagles we saw on the trip.

“I’m glad you got us out here,” I said.

The trip idea started less than 24-hours ago, when I’d called Jarrett to ask if he’d wanted to hit the water for a day. He was watching football, and said he’d call me back. When my phone rang again, I half-expected to hear that he’d be busy.

“You want to do an overnight on Lake Ozette?”

“Tomorrow?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Hell yeah!”

Lake Ozette had been on his to-do-list for a while, partly because you can combine the paddle with a two-mile hike over to a remote beach on the Pacific Ocean. I was stoked to some kind of combination adventure. Moreover, I had a strong itch to get out of town for some time away from the hellish news cycle and a fuzz of wintertime blues.
On the road, the dark clouds around Port Angeles began to melt off. Within 45 minutes, there were blue skies overhead. Highway 112 took a serpentine route along the Strait of Juan de Fuca through a series of hairpin turns and jackknife hills. The mountains of Vancouver Island to our north glimmered with sunlit snow.

“Whooo! That’s beautiful.”

“I can’t believe this weather.”

“Awesome!”

Led Zeppelin on the stereo was the perfect compliment to our buoyant spirits.

“It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a long time!”

Indeed. I hadn’t been in a kayak since November.

The highway would continue out toward Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, on the northwestern-most tip of the continental U.S.

Before we reached this juncture, we hung a left onto a little-traveled backroad. Trees, thick with moss lolled over silty creeks. It was life-on-life, Washington’s bayou country.

Boxy metal gates blocked gravel roads that accessed logged out hillsides. We entered the National Park a couple hundred yards away from the boat launch.

Only half the lake shore is public land, and several logging cuts are visible from the water. I was grateful for the sparse number of houses.

The still water and the lack of people made it possible to perceive subtle cues from the environment.

As Jarrett and I paddled out of Swan Bay into the broader lake, we heard the distant sound of breaking waves. It was the Pacific Ocean — close to two miles off the west shore, but sounding close enough to be just over the next rise. The tumult of countless breakers blended into a white blanket of shushing, thundering agitation as thousand-mile swells threw themselves against the continent.

What a contrast to the miles of stillness we saw before our bows. A loon cried out from somewhere.

“Man! I am sweltering inside this drysuit.” Jarrett announced.

“That’s funny. I feel just about perfect right now,” I said. “This shirt and shorts are breathing great.”

“Have you felt the water yet?” Jarrett asked. I dipped my hand in, and it was icy.

“If someone were to tip you over right now, you’d wish you were in a drysuit.”

I made no further comment and gave Jarrett’s boat plenty of room.

We steered around Garden Island and Preacher’s Point. Many of the names on the map recalled the Scandinavian settlers who lived here in the 19th century. Often they paddled boats made by the nearby Makah tribe. Excavations have recovered human habitation in the area going back 2,000 years.*

No sign of those past inhabitants now as we paddled our plastic boats over the still water. We set our sites on Tivoli island, a couple miles down the way, where we thought we might camp. Sure enough, there was a well established site on the north end of the island with firewood lying on shore.

We paddled a quick loop around to the island’s south side to see if there were any spots that still had the sun, but no dice. Jarrett was down to see about sites on Baby Island, about a mile off, but I felt like we had a pretty good thing on Tivoli and voted that we start getting things set up sooner rather than later.

A dim realization had begun to rattle my confidence, as I thought about what I had (and hadn’t) packed.

I took out my dry bags and the bear canister. There was my stove. Ah, but where was the fuel? I remembered that I decided to take the fuel canister out of the can to save space and pack it elsewhere. Unfortunately, I’d failed to follow through on that last important detail.

“So how do you feel about a cook fire tonight?” I asked.

“Sure, but we can just use your stove,” Jarrett said.

“Well, you see what happened was…”

Jarrett might have been a bit annoyed, because I’d told him he didn’t need to bring his stove. Nope, Tom had it covered.

“Good thing we aren’t in the mountains,” Jarrett muttered. “You said you were going to bring your stove.”

I lamely pointed out that I had brought the stove; it was the fuel that I’d left in the car.

“No sweat. I’ll get a fire going no problem,” I said. I knew it was going to be a pain in the ass getting that fire started.

Sure there was wood everywhere, but most of it was damp. The grim reality I’ve encountered is that campfires on the Olympic Peninsula require generous amounts existential struggle and smoke inhalation.

I started by cutting up sections of logs and shaving wet bark from dead twigs with my knife. After 45 minutes of gathering, I had sorted out various-sized piles of wood and arranged a cross-hatched nest of tiny twigs for kindling. Everything looked nice and boy scout-worthy. Now, the fun part.

I brought out one of my cotton balls soaked in petroleum jelly, ignited it with flint and steel, and used a stick to nudge it below my twig pile. Orange flame leapt up promisingly. The twigs were burning! The flames climbed higher, and I realized that the twigs were already almost all burned over now. Not what I wanted.

I threw more tiny twigs onto the pile, trying to get them over the fading licks of flame before they went out. More tiny twigs. I started blowing desperately. Smoke was everywhere. I put my face to the ground to inhale from the puddle of clean air and rose back to the dying blaze for fire CPR. The twigs began burning again, and I tried to get some thicker, longer-burning twigs on the scene. They wouldn’t light of course.

My reputation was on the line and I was not going to let cold dinner be on me.
] I teased more tiny twigs into place. Tentative progress. Breathed the smoke. Cursed the fire. Blew more. Cheered as the the flames climbed up again. Tiny twigs. I cursed the fire, as it seems to change its mind. Blew on the fire. Applied bigger twigs.

As soon as I had flames that lasted more than 20 seconds, I grabbed a pot full of water and held it over the blaze.

“Or we could just use my stove,” Jarrett offered.

“You brought your stove?” I practically exploded.

“I thought I’d mentioned that.”

“Well, now that I’ve got this going, we’re damn well cooking over this fire.”

Because the bear can (mandated by the Park Service) only made room for my smallest pot, the meal was multiple courses, including pasta with bouillon cubes, an instant cup of pad thai, and some Spanish rice — with parsley garnish, fattened by the small canister of oil I’d brought along.

Jarrett took over fire duties, transforming my humble cook fire into a hearty camp blaze.

Venus flashed onto the scene first, leading the charge of the starlight brigade. Stars upon stars popped into existence above our fire — little sparks, the fine dusting of cosmic flame traced across the firmament.

The lake caught them, showed the sky its reflection. Even that still, dark water could not master the subtleties of heavenly detail. And I suppose it is the same with us, whether we aim our camera lenses skyward or try to encapsulate profundities with language. The thing itself, the present moment, holds the richest detail.

Earlier, I had watched the shifting gradients of color on the lake as the sun went down. Green blue in the west marched, seamless to the deep dark blues on the eastern shores. Wavelets crisscrossed themselves at the corner of the island, came to shore in the shape of diamonds. Gravel had moved away from this little place of interference and left a corridor of bare sand.

These and many other tiny aspects of the dynamic scene in front of me, danced inside my mind, which suddenly seemed a much bigger place than the night before, when I had been reading articles off a computer screen. The world seemed vaster and more full of possibilities.

And yet, the sunlight would banish the celestial tableaux from the lake’s surface. The delightful feeling that I had stepped closer to reality would also fade. It was an appreciation that required repetition, like Sunday Mass. If one can only fully appreciate the stars while under them, it is important to maximize that time.

Crossing wavelets bend around a snag in the lake

Sunrise brings glitter paths to the lake surface

Kayak deck-mounted map showing Ozette and the nearby Pacific Ocean

Morning came with cloudy skies. It wasn’t raining, fortunately.

I went out to get the bear can holding our food. You wouldn’t expect the bears to be out in January, but I learned later that the bears on the part of the Peninsula didn’t really hibernate, because it never got deep cold. A local at a diner explained that the island had been visited by forest creatures. During calving season, local deer would swim out there to give birth, hoping to escape predators. But at least one bruin had gotten wise. The man had seen it swimming out there — probably with a hankering for some tender venison.

Sure enough, there were fresh deer tracks along the shore, but no sign, fortunately, of bears.

We made oatmeal with Jarrett’s stove, packed down the tent, loaded our boats and hit the water.

There was a strait shot across the water to where we would find our trail to the Pacific. Jarrett suggested we cut in a little sooner so we could paddle up the shore. In doing so, we saw what was easily a dozen bald eagles.

They perched in the branches of pines looking at the water. A couple of them took off as we got closer. Several were juveniles, lacking the distinctive bald head and white tail feathers and flashing white and brown beneath their wings. I thought back to January paddles with my dad and others on the Connecticut River, another place that draws eagles in wintertime.

Other signs of animal life included beaver-chewed branches along shore.

A sudden scurrying in the branches caught my attention. A small dark creature was running down the tree.

“Jarrett!” I hissed. “Come here and see this!”

By the time he had paddled up, the creature had vanished.

“It must have been a fisher cat,” I said. There has been a Park reintroduction program for these cagey weasel creatures, once hunted out of the Olympic Range. They are not something you spot often, and in fact, this was the second fisher, I’d seen in my life. The first time was in high school when I was running through the woods in Connecticut.

After I found out what a fisher was, I developed a respect for the little scrappers. They are tough, and will even go after porcupines.

Later, it occurred to me that I might have seen a bear cub, not a fisher. Still, the agility of the creature stuck out in my mind, and it may have been small for a bear cub this time of year. I believe that it was a fisher I saw in that tree.

The trailhead we wanted was in Ericson’s bay at the northwest corner of the lake. A small orange marker showed us where to park our boats.

We traded life vests and neoprene booties for sneakers and rain jackets. The rainforest trail was closed in by sword fern and salal shrub. A line of rotting boards offered a place to walk over the mud and soaking moss. The slick wood was as treacherous as black ice. We pushed our way through the salal, over and under fallen trees, put our feet through the oozing ground. Hemlocks, firs and giant cedars closed in above our heads.

An hour of tromping gave way to an opening where we could see the gray waves of the Pacific.

Miles of lonely beach stretched to our north and south. Rock escarpments rose up in the distance. There was only one other hiker on the beach. He probably came in from a different trail and was far off anyhow. Another eagle cut through the sky overhead.

We ate a light lunch on a log. I went to mess around at the edge of the foamy waves.

There were so many patterns from nature here, including the lines of the waves, pods of bubbles, the arrangement of the small rocks along the sand, and the lines and dips that that the water carved around them.

There were also abandoned buoys, tangles of nylon rope, netting, globs of shattered styrofoam blown out over the sand, countless empty bottles. Here was one of the most remote beaches in the lower United States, and yet it too was part of our trash-heap ecosystem. As Jarrett pointed out, the remoteness of the beach also meant that it didn’t have the parks and recreation department, the local volunteers and other do-gooders who would clean up the refined sands in front of a block of beach hotels.

The lot of this did detract from the wild beauty of the beach, but fortunately, there had been plenty of wild beauty to start with. As in the night before, I had the opportunity to bask in the wonder of a vast and natural place.

We left the beach, having not explored much of it and I was fine with that.

If left some time to explore some other islands and camp spots along the lake for the next time.

Though, really, sometimes you don’t know if there will be a next time. I don’t mean that in the apocalyptic, kayaking down Wall Street sense — though I am severely concerned about the health of our planet — but mainly in terms of the ups and downs of our lives: the sickness, the health, long workweeks and yes, the reality that life is a fragile thing, easy to snuff out.

To Jarrett, who has had some close calls in his day, getting out on the water or into the mountains affirms that he is doing it right. Time outdoors is an invaluable facet of a life that also involves work he takes pride in and a committed relationship.

Keep hitting high notes, and it will be more likely that you will end on one.

It’s something I’d do well to remember.
* https://www.nps.gov/olym/planyourvisit/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=96997

October 6, 2016October 6, 2016

Amidst Bears and Glaciers: A Trip To The Olympic Mountains’ Seven-Lakes Basin and Hoh Rain Forest

_mg_0855 — Huckleberries in the high alpine zone of the Olympic Mountains. Good bear food.

Sol Duc

Deciding where to hike in the Olympic Mountains was no easy task for my friend Sean and I, partly because the area has so many faces.

When we researched the ideal two-night trip, we had our pick of wild beaches along the Pacific Coast, the lush rainforests of the western valleys or amidst the drier, but still massive forests in the rain shadow. Higher trails access alpine tundra, even glacier.

We knew that black bears are a very real presence, to the point that the Park Service require overnight hikers to carry their food in canisters or else use specialized cable hangs available at certain sites. That limits freedom a bit. The park is host to a heavy mountain lion population, which also grabs attention, even if there is only a slightly higher risk of an attack then, say, a Bigfoot sighting.

The more credible threat that I anticipated, was cold September rains, which would throw down the challenge of staying dry — at least warm — while we were hiking and camping.

I wanted us to avoid cold and misery, and enjoy the natural beauty of the Olympics. It would be time for both of us to unplug and recharge.

The trip was also a great chance to catch up with Sean. We go back to college, where we ran cross-country together. He lives in Brooklyn now, but has a passion for getting out, whether to the Catskills or the Adirondacks further north. We’ve done a couple of hikes together through the years, including a couple mountains in the Adirondacks and an icy visit to New Hampshire’s White Mountains this spring.

We chose a path that would show us many of the different zones within the park, including the semi-rain forest of the Sol Duc valley, up to the 5,400-foot Bogachiel Peak, around Seven Lakes Basin, thence down to camp at Hoh Lake and into the Hoh Rain Forest and back the way we came. The plan would get us out of having to carry in a bulky bear canister, because the Hoh Lake campsite had cables where we could hang our food stuff. Even though Seven Lakes is a popular park spot, we had a good shot at enjoying solitude because we would be leaving midweek in September.

I put the tent in my backpack, and gave Sean the pleasure of carrying my cook stove, bulky pots and most of the food.

The sky above the trees was gray as we started along a smooth-packed trail beneath cedar, spruce and fir, their branches draped with the hair-like tendrils of goat’s beard lichen. The Sol Duc River ran through a black walled canyon to our south. Soon, we reached a bridge crossing above Sol Duc Falls, where the river course suddenly turned and dropped into a dark crevice.

Abundant moss grew in the falls mist, further up, spiky stands of devil’s club.

The trail began to climb from here along a series of switchbacks toward Deer Lake.

The cloudy skies had begun to drizzle, then to loose fat drops onto the trees above. Sean and I were protected for the moment, but if the rain continued, the drops would begin rolling off the branches, soaking us.

Neither of us were wearing our rain gear, and we were loath to put it on and start marinating in sweat. Given the mercurial nature of the weather in the northwest, it seemed likely that the rain would pass soon anyway. One day hiker that we passed simply held a trash bag over his head. Not a bad stopgap.

Alas, the rain continued falling, and we started getting wet as we went through clearings. Eventually, we caved and threw on our rain gear and pack covers. That, of course, brought the rain to a prompt halt.

The Bears of Bogachiel

As we climbed above the Sol Duc river, Sean and I hashed out a plan for any encounter with Sasquatch Americanus,.

Say we were going around the bend and Bigfoot walked across the trail, should we tell anyone?

Sean was inclined not to on the basis that anyone we told our story to would think we were lying or nuts. Later we agreed that we would only come forward with a Sasquatch sighting if there we could get solid photographic evidence.

Photographing Bigfoot might have been a tall order, but there were plenty of other opportunities to click the shutter as we climbed past Deer Lake onto an exposed ridge.

The trees became shorter and gnarled. A grand vista opened up to the north where we could see above the foothills across the hard blue water of the Strait of Juan de Fuca out to the mountains on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

The rocks along the trail were angular, blasted by winter ice. Glacier-carved bowls opened up on either side. Wisps of cloud gathered below.

Further on, we could gaze down into the Seven Lakes Basin, a bare landscape of arctic scrub, sprinkled with water-filled depressions.

“That looks like more than seven lakes,” I remarked.

Sean observed that all of the lakes had fallen from their high-water marks. As the water levels fell, there were places where one lake had diminished into two smaller ones. It had been a dry summer on the Olympic Peninsula. At least we didn’t have to deal with the wildfires and smoke that plagued the park earlier this year.

_mg_0682 — Seven Lakes Basin view with sumac in foreground, Sol Duc Valley in Background.

The ridge climbed a saddle where we could look south to the big mountains, including the jagged slopes of Mount Tom and Mount Olympus. Both were hidden in cloud, but occasionally a gap opened where we could peek at a snowfield or glacier.

We had less than a mile to hike down into our camp at Hoh Lake, but the nearby summit of Bogachiel Peak beckoned.

We took a side trail in that direction. The valley below us was filled with low-growing huckleberries with bright red leaves. One dark shape in that field caught my eye. I squinted at it for a moment, sure that it was some shadow cast by a dead tree or boulder. But the shape was moving.

“Hey! That’s a bear down there!”

Most of the bears I’ve seen in the wild have been pretty small, but I’m sure that this one was at least 250 pounds. It grazed slowly among the huckleberries like some bovine in the pasture. If it had noticed us, it didn’t care much.

We watched it for several minutes. Hardly a lumbering brute, the bear moved nimbly among the broken rock, keeping its head down in order to graze microscopic huckleberries out of the twigs and leaves. The black coat had a healthy shine. Elegance isn’t usually the word that pops into mind when I think of bears, but even this large specimen carried itself with refinement and dignity.

Seeing that the bear likely hadn’t noticed us, neither Sean or I bothered to make loud noises or tried to scare it off. We went on along the trail to the top of the mountain.

The lakes and mountains surrounding us delineated a domain of harsh weather and limited resources— a place that played by the old, hard rules that undergird the upholstery of our day-to-day existence.

Soil on these mountain tops stretches thin as erosion constantly feeds it to the valleys below and nothing washes down to replenish it— yet this film of organic matter was enough to support acres of huckleberries and to provide a bounty to the bears.

When Sean and I walked back down the trail, there were two bears grazing. We stared again, and this time, one of them did look up, seeming to acknowledge us. The look wasn’t menacing, but it seemed wise to move on. If nothing else, I didn’t want to disrupt them.

A small blue nugget of bear scat lay in the trail further on. They must have been getting all or most of their calories from the huckleberries, which is impressive considering that the berries growing here were half the size of a pea at largest.

_mg_0699 — Two bears going berry picking

Sean and I picked a few of them as we went. They were tasty, but the picking was incredibly slow. I guessed that the bears would have to pretty much graze continuously at the berries to feed themselves. That was what they appeared to be doing.

The blue splats of bird droppings decorating the rocks along the trail indicated that bears were not the only ones who profited from the berries.

Further down the trail, Sean spotted another bear, also grazing below us. The camp area at Hoh Lake was not too much further. We felt very motivated to be careful with our food, considering that there were bears nearby who were hungry enough to forage for hours in the huckleberries, They could get the calories they needed in minutes from one ambush into our supplies.

Sure enough, Sean saw one bear grazing on the hillside above Hoh lake, only about a quarter mile from where we’d pitched tent.

We turned in early while we still had the warmth of dinner in our bellies. I hoped we would wake up warm and ready to take on whatever the next day had in store.

Descent to the Hoh

Cold and mist were in store.

Soon after we awoke, Sean went out to pick some huckleberries to make morning oatmeal more interesting,

We finished our meal by slugging down morning coffee for Sean and some black tea for myself, then we were on the trail to the Hoh rainforest. We left the tent, gear and extra food at at camp (the latter hung up on the bear cable) so that we could move along with lighter loads.

The path dropped past mossy waterfalls, into groves of cedar. Unlike the wide trails we had hiked the day before, this route seemed infrequently traveled, with soaking vegetation closing in on either side of us. Sodden branches bounced harmlessly off of our rain jackets, but my lower half was drenched in short order. One hiker coming up from the other direction wore a makeshift plastic skirt. Excellent idea.

Further down the trail, we found a pile of bones beneath a cedar tree. The massive femurs could have only belonged to an elk. But what had killed it?

Sean speculated that it was a mountain lion. If one of those big cats was about, I definitely wanted my camera at the ready — only now, I discovered that despite my best efforts to protect it, moisture had gotten in and fogged the lens housing.

By the time we met the Hoh River Trail at the bottom of the switchbacks, some six miles below camp, it was already getting later in the day, and it was clear that we would only have a couple of hours to explore.

But the wonder of the Hoh Rainforest was worth even a brief visit. In contrast to the tundra we had seen earlier, life ran rampant here. Massive conifers towered over with their lower branches draped in goat’s beard. Thick moss ran up and down the trunks of maple trees. Gigantic fallen logs supported ecosystems of sword fern moss and smaller plants growing out of them.

The environment had that fairy tale feeling to it, so much so that I almost expected to run across some Keebler elves out gathering mushrooms.

Elves we did not find, but sometimes we would stop and gawk at one of the enormous banana slugs or the black slugs that crawled onto the path.

The moist air was warm, almost sultry, compared to the exposed heights where we had hiked earlier. A whopping 141 to 165 inches of rain fall in this rainforest.*

We took breaks to explore an incongruous meadow, then did lunch at an overlook above the Hoh River, which was low and milky-white with sediment.

Much of the river originates from glacial melt off Mount Olympus. If we were going to see any of this mountainous splendor, it wouldn’t be from here. A low cloud base above the forest prevented us from seeing much above the tree tops.

The climb back up was a long one, but fortunately, passing hikers had knocked most of the moisture off the branches along the trail and we didn’t get so wet as when we started.

We stopped back at Hoh Lake to skip some rocks. There were no bears that we could see, but there was an occasional fish jump.

When I went up to the bear cable to bring the food down, the clouds broke and afforded me a view of the glaciers of Mount Tom and Mount Olympus. Miles of ice sat in the depressions between jagged crags.

I called Sean up and we watched the mountains. Even though Olympus is not quite 8,000 feet tall, the sharp profile of the mountains could have passed them off as giants of the American Rockies. The fact that there were huge glaciers helped too. In fact, we were looking at the third largest glacial system in the continental U.S. ** Altitude isn’t everything, especially when considering the 50 to 70 feet of snow that Olympus receives every year. Constant cloud cover protects the snowfields from the heat of the sun. Unfortunately, like most other glaciers in the world, the glaciers around Olympus have been in retreat. ***

As the sun sank toward the western horizon, the glaciers glowed in the pinkish light. Many hikers never get to see Olympus because it is so often in the clouds. I was glad that we had this chance.

_mg_0841 — View of Olympus from our campsite

More Bears and Mountain Views.

Early the next morning we hiked out of camp with after a light oatmeal breakfast. We had cut things a little fine with our food planning, so most of our lunch calories were going to come from bars and gel.

The morning chill left us as we climbed back up toward Bogachiel and the sun began to emerge.

Going past the plains of blueberries, we saw two black bears. One was on the trail, the other below. They were about the same size as the bears we had seemed earlier, and it seemed likely that they were the same ones.

We decided to wait a few minutes to see if the bear on the trail would move. When it didn’t, we started shouting, and the bear moved, slowly, up the hill.

We decided to add some miles to our total going back by following the High Divide trail the rest of the way around the Seven Lakes Basin, before descending back to the Sol Duc river. This route turned out to be an excellent choice because we were lucky enough to have more clear weather. We had superb views of Mount Olympus and some of the other nearby Olympic peaks.

As we walked further east, we got a better look at the Blue Glacier. Deep cracks within the ice revealed where it got the name, displaying that sublime turquoise tint you might recognize from photographs of arctic icebergs. Further down, the glacier formed a long tongue through the mountain valley.

Tragically, my lens was fogged for much of the morning, and I didn’t get any good shots of the mountains from this angle.

The warm sun and clear skies lent itself to more huckleberry picking, so Sean and I stopped frequently to load up.

We saw two more bears on distant hillsides, enjoying the same snack. That brought the number of unique bear sightings up to at least six for our trip — doubling the number of bear sightings that either of us had seen in our lifetimes. But who’s counting?

The trail took us down along the Sol Duc, offering plenty of opportunities to enjoy the sight of waterfalls in the mossy canyon.

We were no longer contemplating the natural beauty in solitude however. Several groups of hikers coming up the trail the other way to get to the campsites they had reserved for the weekend. It would be a lot busier on the ridges on the days to come. I was glad that we had seen everything when we did.

As for an encounter with Sasquatch? He stumbled out of the woods to give me a high-five — right after my camera battery died.

*http://www.summitpost.org/mount-olympus/150427

**http://www.summitpost.org/olympic-range-wa/171068

***https://www.nps.gov/olym/learn/nature/glaciers.htm