First views, Chugach National Forest

Icebergs, Portage Lake

This place—a narrow strip of land stretching from Prince William Sound to Turnagain Arm; a deep valley separating the Kenai Peninsula from the Chugach Range; a not-so-secret corner of south-central Alaska—is dripping with beauty. The mist-swirling, water-falling, mountain-brooding, glacier-blue-ing, iceberg-floating, flower-blooming, bear-scatting, eagle-soaring, eye-popping, jaw-dropping kind of beauty that assaults one’s senses and overwhelms one’s soul. Round a corner and there’s a thousand-foot cascade; look up and an arete pierces the clouds; pause a second and a skein of snow geese honks overhead; inhale and your lungs fill with the fresh scent of willows. Pine. Rain. Rock. Ice. Beauty, beauty everywhere.

Temperate rainforest

Waterfalls streaming off of Maynard Mountain

Barrow's Goldeneyes

It’s too easy.

As I write, it’s 11 p.m. at 60 degrees north latitude, late May.  The sky glows with the diffuse light of rainy dusk. A carpet of moss and lichen erupts in wildflowers. Small shrubs shiver in the wind. Out one window, a ribbon of water shimmers down a dark ravine; out another, snow-covered mountainsides blend into stormclouds. Through that same window this morning, I watched a big fluffy black bear amble by, pausing to gauge his surroundings, nose twitching with curiosity. I didn’t even have to stand up; the wild beauty came to me.

Morning visitor, as seen through the kitchen window

Sunrise, Portage Lake (first clear morning)

It’s too easy.

Within a five-minute walk, I can be on the shore of a deep, glacially-carved and -fed lake. The water is surely grey and choppy right now, with little icebergs and bergy bits bobbing up and down. After the storm passes (and if there’s a rare window of calm before the next rolls in), those chunks of ex-glacier will linger by the shoreline, suspended in the reflection of the surrounding mountains, serenely glowing their impossibly blue blue. Mist will hover over the peaks and ride katabatic winds down the valleys, making it impossible tell what’s rock and what’s air. Gulls will soar overhead, their screams ringing into the silence. Beautiful.

Mist over Portage Lake, weaving past the remnants of an iceberg

It’s too easy.

When I think of the most awe-inspiring landscapes I’ve seen—the colorful clay hills of Arizona’s Painted Desert; the snow-swept ridges of southwestern Wyoming; the remoted ravines in Colorado’s Black Canyon; the sheer expanse and even more expansive, unreadable sky of Alaska’s North Slope—I think of them not as vistas or scenery, but as experiences. I had to earn them. Years prowling the Painted Desert. Frost-nippingly cold moon-lit mornings in Wyoming. Long, arduous treks scaling fossiliferous outcrops. Nearly two weeks of whirling down little-travelled rivers in a tiny red raft, ignorant and open to any and all topographical, hydrological, and meteorological challenges (and hyper-aware of the possibility of polar bears). The arduousness and uncertainty heightened my senses, and thus left me even more attuned to beauty. Richer, deeper, hard-won beauty.

(A counter-point to ponder: the view from the Arctic Divide at the heart of the Brooks Range was awe-inspiring and life-changing, but I was too terrified and exhausted to appreciate it. It was too hard.)

Portage Glacier

Here, in this place, where beauty is so easy, does it count to just look up? To stop by in a car or bus en route to or from Anchorage or Whittier? To hop out at the lake to snap a photo or spend an hour strolling one of the trails? To ride out to the foot of the glacier—to face the wall of blue ice, to float with the bergs, to hear waterfall after waterfall splashing off of the cliffsides, all from the comfort and safety of a large tourboat piloted by someone else?

Hundreds or thousands of people come to witness this scenery each day. Surely, it makes us momentarily happy. It enriches our lives to see it, to know it’s there. But if all we have to do is look, do we bother to feel more deeply? Do we care to learn the underlying processes and meanings?

What’s hidden out there, bigger, wilder, beyond beauty?

Gates of the Arctic III (a.k.a. place-remembering)

"The storm was swinging eastward...[T]he sun was shining brilliantly on countless lofty peaks without name and beyond the scope of human knowledge. All around [me] were gorges, thousands of feet deep, great snowbanks, bright green valleys, gaily colored rocks. All was peace and strength and immensity and coordination and freedom" — Bob Marshall, Alaska Wilderness

Water, rock, snow, moss, sedge, sky, fog, and my feet—that was my world, for 11 days. Seventy-odd miles through the Brooks Range along what, retrospectively, was a poorly-chosen route from the Dalton Highway to Anaktuvuk Pass. A million dangers and me trying to navigate them, alone.

Terrifying. Affirming. Elemental.

Frigid shooting stars bobbing in mid-morning light, Itkillik Valley

No, there was more than that. There were flowers—everywhere I stepped, colorful, delicate little Arctic blooms. Fuchsia-colored frigid shooting-stars rising up and arcing bashfully back down. Creamy bell-heather ringing out across entire hillsides. Tall, pink-stemmed wintergreen boasting a dozen greenish-white blossoms. Blue-purple narrow-leaved gentians barely beginning to bud. Bright yellow Arctic poppies eagerly following the summer sun as it circumambulated the sky. Dozens of species, hundreds of thousands of individual plants. How many did I crush underfoot, just trying to keep trudging, to make it across the ridges and through the ravines?

Woolly lousewort and mountain avens overlooking Limestack Mountain

And there were animals. Every now and then, I registered the anxious chirping of ground squirrels or anxious cheeping of, um, black-bellied plovers? (I’m not very good at bird identification, especially when I’m tired and hungry and want nothing more than to not be where I am.) Snipes sniped from the marshes. Ravens laughed from the ridges. A couple of moose loped languidly through the same stretch of sedges and brush that had taken me a full day to fight through. Surely, bears and wolves were watching, waiting to pounce; they’d left their pawprints everywhere, signs telling interlopers to be wary, be aware.

Black-bellied plover?

And of course there were rocks (usually my favorite part of a place, other than the clouds). Thick ledges of limestone, glinting scarps of schist, great cobbles of conglomerate, stacked on top of one another at precarious angles with dubious stability. The mountains only pretended to be solid, intact, timeless; erosion was the true master here. I lost count of the number of fresh-looking talus-fields I had to negotiate, much less the frequency with which boulders shifted underfoot. Riverbanks gave way. Rockfalls reverberated through rain and mist. One afternoon, without warning--crash...crashcrashcrash whoosh; a chunk of mountainside gave way, just across the Itkillik River from me. (I wasn't comfortable with that distance. Elsewhere on the Itkillik, at some point within the last decade or so, judging from the vegetative regrowth, half of a peak rising 3,000 feet directly up had slid off and crashed all the way down to the other side of the valley, damming the river and leaving great piles of debris. The scar is so enormous that it’s visible from satellite imagery on Google maps.)

Massive debris slide, west of Oolah Pass

Other than that, there were bogs. Meadows. Hidden pools and rivulets. Perilously steep mountain “passes”. Waist-deep rivers considered mere side drainages, not even worth a name on the maps. Add to that the wind, the rain, the ice and snow. The mosquitoes.

Good god, the mosquitoes.

That’s what I went for, no? To feel tired and cold and hungry and afraid. To feel grateful for little miracles—a break in the clouds or a stretch of solid ground. To soak in the silence. (There was never any silence. Water, always running water, usually wind, and those rockfalls.) To live consciously, putting effort into every step. (Just getting water was an ordeal: paying attention to when the bottle was running low, keeping an eye out for an appropriate stream—deep enough, not too deep; clear, not silty or sandy; with enough of an accessible bank; preferably, little vegetation around and thus lower concern for bears or moose—taking off the pack, getting out the pump, assembling the pump, being careful not to let the clean hose get in the water, pumping, being careful not to tip the water bottle, careful again with the clean hose while disassembling the pump, repacking, and—the hardest part of the whole ordeal—convincing myself to heft that awful pack back on again and continuing.) 

To be self-sufficient, comfortable with silence and self and that huge, wild world.

Alone in a tent, waiting out the rain and ice near the very headwaters to the North Fork of the Koyukuk; preparing to cross the Arctic Divide; wondering why on earth I'd chosen to do this, what I'd hoped to find

Traveling alone, I had to be self-sufficient. If I wanted a sip of water, I couldn’t just ask someone to please grab my water bottle; I had to stop, take off the pack. If my stove was slightly temperamental, I couldn’t just borrow someone else’s. If I wasn’t sure where I was, I couldn’t pore over the maps with another set of eyes. If I wasn’t sure whether a river was safe to cross, I couldn’t talk it over with someone else. I had to pace back and forth along the bank for a while, plunge in, sometimes retreat, then plunge back in again, knowing that I had to get across, even if the current was stronger than me.

(Swollen with rain and turbid with silt, the rivers were so very, very much stronger than me. But I had to cross them. Alone.)

Rain, rain, rain = raging rivers, soggy tundra, tendrils of mist

On the plus side, no one else was around to watch me crawl up onto a bank, post-river-crossing, and lie on the mud and rocks, sobbing with terror and gratitude. No one saw me swing my trekking poles wildly through the air, swatting and swearing at mosquitoes. No one could tell me that I was an idiot for crossing the dangerously steep snowbank, or laugh when I fell in the bog. Or laugh even harder when I fell in the same bog again. No one made me get out of my cozy tent, pack up, and start hiking when it was cold and rainy out. Instead, I was responsible for making myself do that.

The best part was getting to stop whenever and wherever I wanted, then getting to stay put for as long as I wanted (or until I finished off my daily ration of m&ms). In general, I hit a routine of hiking for 40 minutes and resting for 20, but I also had some luxuriously long tundra naps, nestled into a warm carpet of lichens, mosses, and tiny shrubs. It was nearly as blissful to snuggle into my sleeping bag at night, feeling warm and safe against the rain and hail and wind outside. One long hazy evening--the only cloud-free stretch of the whole trip--I chose not to put the rainfly on my tent so that I could wake periodically to see the deep pink orb of the sun circumambulating the wide headwaters of the Anaktuvuk River, painting snowcapped mountains in fluorescent hues.

"Night", Anaktuvuk Valley. Numinous.

****

Bob Marshall’s Alaska Wilderness was all celebration, all beauty and exhilaration. Euphoria, not fear of rockslides, not a stream-crossing every hour; no mention of him waking at 2 a.m. in the middle of a cold downpour with an urgently full bladder. Sure, some tussocks; sure, nearly getting swept down a few rivers. But bears? Shoot ‘em. Mountains? Climb ‘em. Sixty-five pound packs? All the more enjoyable. He made his mishaps sound fun, part of the grand adventure.

Retrospectively, I had fun, too. Certainly a grand adventure. But only because I survived. I went looking for the wildest of wildernesses, for beauty and meaning in the non-human world, but in the moment, in the place--over the passes, through the rivers, around the tussocks, across the snow, past however many bears that looked like boulders in the mist--what I cared about most was surviving, one foot in front of the other.

How wonderful, to be alive. And even more wonderful, to be alive in a world where a place like Gates of the Arctic still exists. Not just names in a book or squiggles on a topographic map, but a real place, a raw place, the ruggedy-est of ruggedy places, all immensity and freedom.

Arctic Divide at Peregrine Pass, looking toward Als Mountain. I think Al Retzlaf and Bob Marshall would be pleased to know that this place, which they first explored nearly eighty years ago, is still just as wild. 

Gates of the Arctic II (a.k.a. place-experiencing)

[T]o [a human being] just back from the source streams of the Koyukuk, no comfort, no security, no invention, no brilliant thought which the modern world had to offer could provide half the elation of the days spent in the little-explored, uninhabited world of the arctic wilderness -- Bob Marshall, Alaska Wilderness

(The following are excerpts from my field notebook / raw data from my grand experiment to experience Marshall's "Alaska Wilderness", now protected as Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve)

Oolah Pass, just before the storm breaks

Evening, Day 2, in the middle of an early-July hailstorm, hoping the tent will hold
How am I ever going to be able to lug this pack for ten more days, over more passes and through more rivers?
Good god, the rivers.
I'll never make it [on a solo traverse of part of the Brooks Range, from the Dalton Highway to the village of Anaktuvuk Pass]. Bigger, harder than I remembered or expected, how could I have ever thought this possible, much less necessary?
Why am I doing this?

[An hour later, the sun came out. I emerged from the tent for a hasty dinner between storms. Freezing cold, but fierce, beautiful, blazing.]

****

Afternoon, Day 3, having just (barely) made it across the turbid blue-grey rapids of the rain- and snowmelt-swollen Itkillik River, then crawled out onto the bank and sobbed until my heart stopped fluttering and stomach unknotted
I do NOT want to be here, do NOT want to be doing this, what on earth do I think I'm doing? Why?

[An hour later, curled up under my poncho to wait out another bout of rain and watch as the rest of the valley disappeared then reappeared under a glorious full rainbow, unexpectedly, the sky broke open to a pure Arctic blue.]

****

Midday, Day 5, having fallen in a creek, slipped again on wet mossy rocks, begun to shiver uncontrollably in the pouring rain, pitched the tent early and crawled into my sleeping bag for what would be a very long tent-bound afternoon / night, time punctuated only by the echoing crash of ice and rock falling off the cliffs on the other side of the valley

Nearly 24 hours feeling cold, lonely, and afraid in a tent at the headwaters of the North Fork of the Koyukuk. But pure wildness.

What am I doing here? What brought me here? What had I hoped to find? And why is so much beauty, so much wildness only making me feel cold, tired, in pain? Where's the wonder, the joy, the sublime?
Nothing but dread for tomorrow (good god, Peregrine Pass), and the next day, and the next.
How I wish I had a warmer hat. A dry suit. A GPS. How I wish I wasn't here, that I hadn't come. I wish life had worked out so I wouldn't have felt whatever it was that made me think I needed to come.
How I wish it would stop raining.

[The next morning: woke to ice on the tent and a glorious fog-bow.]

****

Evening, Day 6, while eating dinner under a sky rippling and roiling with clouds
What am I doing out here, so far and so alone?

Asperitas. NOT the clouds you want to see on day 6 of an 11 day wilderness trip, dozens of mountain-toothed, river-laced, and bog-riddled miles from any semblance of civilization.  But breathtaking.

****

Midday, Day 7, during a luxuriously long tundra nap
To be honest, I don't even care.
I'm sure it's beautiful—the photographs will attest to that, belatedly—but right now, I have neither the energy nor the inclination to appreciate it. In fact, except when I stop to unstrap my ungodly heavy pack and collapse down to rest, sprawling across the tundra, I can’t look up and drink in the scenery -- the soaring mountains, the sweeping valleys, the churning layers of sky. All of my attention has to be on the ground. Step by every single step, I have to focus on my feet, never sure whether I’ll sink knee-deep in wet moss, tilt sideways off a tussock of grass, slip into an icy-cold stream, or jiggle a rock in just the wrong way and send a whole mountainside of scree tumbling down the precipitous slope I'm gingerly trying to traverse. 

And yet, lying here, nestled into the soft (lumpy, wet) mosses and sedges, mosquitoes feebly failing to get through the headnet, sun weakly trying to shine, well: This is bliss.

Ernie Pass. I could have stayed here forever

****

Evening, Day 9, sitting on a hillside eating dinner as moose go browsing by and a rainbow arcs off to the east, a worthwhile end to an otherwise miserable day

Nearly got swept away by what was supposed to be an unnamed side drainage--an opaque brown mass at least a foot higher than usual, judging from how it swallowed shrubs and branches along the shore.
Should have waited. Shouldn't have crossed where I did--just one wide channel, thigh-deep, no respite. Legs weak, weaker, right calf popped halfway across. I had to stop, lean in, pray that the rocks wouldn't shift under my feet and that I'd still be able to walk. Inch by inch, numb with cold and absolute fear by the time the water shallowed to knee-deep. Just when I thought it was over, proceeded to slip on the mud-coated bank, fall in the river, soaked.
Tomorrow: another drainage, with an even larger watershed than this one. I'm really not sure I can make it. But I have to. I don't have any idea why I came here, but since I did, I now have to keep going, somehow.

Won't it ever stop raining? Mist ever stop swirling? What happened to Marshall's promise of mountains that are sharp and absolute?

****

Afternoon, Day 10, having summoned all of my willpower and then some to pack up and march toward the drainage, against absolute dread
Miserable, cold, wet, far edge of exhausted. But across.
Rain, mosquitoes, bogs. Freeing, to not care about wet feet any more.

****

Morning, Day 11, still in tent. Crying, if only to keep warm
Really, world? Really?
Fog. All fog. Can't see a thing. No idea which way to go. Map and compass are useless when the world is invisible. Yet again, what was I thinking, to refuse to bring a GPS? Idiotic wilderness purist idealism. Amaze me, wilderness!, I ask; I came to you alone, over-laden yet under-equipped. Humbled, open. Yet I demand, Give me hope, meaning, joy!
In reply, fog.

Stumbling blindly through nothingness for several hours, navigating by the sound of airplane engines echoing out from Anaktuvuk Pass, my dubious sense of direction, and a mix of stubbornness, desperation, and raw hope. Apparently, that's all I needed.

Gates of the Arctic I (a.k.a. place-dreaming)

This is how it begins: with the name of a place, boxed off on a map. A distant place, a wild place, a place that seems more mythical than real. “Gates of the Arctic,” this place is called, as if a portal to another world.

Then the idea—impossible! Absurd!—to visit that place. To see the mountains, to ford the rivers, to fight the tussocks. (To stay far, far away from the bears.)

Wholly impossible? Entirely absurd?

The dream begins to take shape. You study the maps more carefully. There are airports, roads, your own two feet. Oolah Pass, Peregrine Pass, Ernie Pass. Anaktuvuk, Naqsraq, a pass, a river, a “place with no mountain” nestled in the heart of the Brooks Range, opening to the vast North Slope. You can envision yourself climbing the ridges and camping by the creeks. Mile after mile of tundra and rocks; day after day of rain, snow, ice. Mosquitoes. That glorious midsummer light.

Before long, it doesn’t just seem possible, but necessary. Yes, you must visit this place, you need to feel the cold pull of the rivers, the cold push of the rain. You need to spend a week or more alone with the caribou and the wolves. More than anything, you need the 7.2 million acres of wilderness through which they roam.

A different sub-Arctic wilderness--the Alaska Range, Denali National Park

You’re not sure why you need this place—what is it you seek there? What is it you’ll find? It’s a pilgrimage without a destination, a quest without a task. It’s a Snow Leopard without a Crystal Monastery. And without a snow leopard, for that matter. (“Have you seen the snow leopard?” asks Peter Matthiessen, “No! Isn’t that wonderful?”) It’s a Mount Analogue without a ship or a crew. (“And you, what are you looking for?” was to be the last chapter of Rene Daumal’s allegory.) It’s not at all an Into the Wild. (Dangerous, yes, but not foolhardy, not reckless. You’ll bring maps and food; you'll follow all Leave No Trace principles; you’ve backpacked in Alaska before, just not this far north, this big, alone.)

Maybe you're just trying to escape from your daily routine, to find something more pressing and real than your life of quiet desperation. Rather than sitting here comfortably under a sturdy roof, you'd prefer to be out there, packing up a tent in the pouring rain. You'd rather be crossing a river vs. crossing the street. Facing bears vs. watching squirrels. Eating oatmeal, more oatmeal, only oatmeal vs. frying eggs and bacon. You know you’ll later regret saying it, but--you claim now--you’d rather be walking over tussocks than skipping down sidewalks. (You've never fared well in places with sidewalks.)

Or maybe you're searching for something bigger, wilder, more meaningful. Something you've glimpsed in other wilderness areas--a sense of a world that is, for all of its cities and farms, dams and fences, still dominated by non-human forces. In his thrilling account of his first trip up the North Fork of the Koyukuk, Bob Marshall--the man who put "Gates of the Arctic" and more than a hundred other toponyms on the map (and who was the first to explore the area and draw the maps, for that matter); also a "peripatetic ecologist" who devoted his life to exploring and fighting to preserve big, wild places; co-founder of the Wilderness Society; author of Arctic Village and Arctic Wilderness; eponym of the Adirondacks' Mt. Marshall and Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness; and, it seems, an all-around adventurous, indefatigable guy--wrote of the landforms and the landscape, the wildlife and the weather, the experience of being in such a truly wild place. Perhaps his most important discovery / realization: "Man may be taming nature, but no one standing on the bank of the North Fork of the Koyukuk on this gray morning would have claimed that nature is conquered."

McKinley River, Denali National Park

Now it's your turn to see this, to remember this. Your turn to splash your way across the Koyukuk (hopefully under more favorable conditions), your turn to (try to? maybe?) clamber up to the summit of Alapah, for what Marshall promises is a glorious view of "fog, and, for an instant, two barren, snow-clad peaks in the shifting mist." Finally, after years and years of perusing a now very tattered, scribbled-in and dog-eared old copy of Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape, you're going to go “walk...slowly over the land with an appreciation of its immediacy to the senses and in anticipation of what lies hidden in it.” You'll “listen…to what the land is saying.” You'll experience a “beauty you feel in your flesh," even if or perhaps because "it is sometimes terrifying to approach.” 

If all goes well, you may just find yourself sitting high on a ridge one day, far from the sea, in miserable weather, amid swarms of mosquitoes, with miles of tussock ahead, and you'll think to yourself: ahh, Gates of the Arctic. This place is real. With that knowledge comes “the familiar sense of expansiveness, of deep exhilaration…quviannikumut, ‘to feel deeply happy.’”

Caribou, Primrose Ridge, Denali National Park

The Living Mountain

"All are aspects of one entity, the living mountain. The disintegrating rock, the nurturing rain, the quickening sun, the seed, the root, the bird -- all are one... 
part of the mountain's wholeness"

-- Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

Standing on rock, swallowed by sky (edge of Alqonquin peeking through, hinting at another, more solid world)

My penultimate day in the Adirondacks this season, I shared the partial solar eclipse with a few dozen thoroughly-awed hikers atop Algonquin Peak, New York's second-tallest mountain. The sky was unusually clear (for this summer, at least); the landscape became noticeably dusky. As the moonshadow started to creep across the sun, we passed around a pair of eclipse glasses and gasped "wow!" in turn. I think all of us felt a touch of the sublime. But a full 25% of the hikers that day, including the eclipse-watchers with whom I felt such special kinship, had unknowingly or unseeingly walked right on through patches of rare and fragile Arctic-Alpine vegetation.

Air somewhat duller, mountains bluer, at the height of the eclipse

My final day was much more typical, but no less spectacular -- wind, mist, brief glimpses of sunglow, and long stretches of solitude. The first hikers didn't arrive until mid-morning. I was huddling behind a boulder, trying to stay out of the damp mist that was racing by on 40 mph winds, when a boisterous college orientation group emerged out of the opaque greyness, surprised and delighted to find themselves on Algonquin. (They'd been aiming for Iroquois, the neighboring peak.) They took photos, ate snacks, and watched one of the leader's glacial geomorphology interpretive dance before disappearing back into the mist and wind, hopefully to find the proper trail. I relocated to a spot on the leeward side of the summit. After a few hours spent squinting into the swirling vapor, watching deers hair sedge ripple, celebrating occasional moments of sunglow, and trying to self-ration my supply of m&ms, five more hikers showed up. I spoke (or rather, shouted over the roar of wind) with them, sharing weather forecasts, issuing trail closure alerts, and pointing out some of our more unique Alpine plant species for one interested and enthusiastic individual. As they left, a father and two sons arrived and immediately settled into a patch of vegetation below the summit outcrop. When I explained how unique and vulnerable the plants were and asked the group to please relocate to a solid rock surface, pointing out a few options that were out of the wind, they begrudgingly complied, but continued to tromple all over the plants in the process. Later, as they passed by me on the start of their descent, the father deliberately stepped outside the stone path to walk on the vegetation. I want to believe it was out of ignorance or inattentiveness, not malice, but his intent matters little to the squished sandwort, flattened deers hair, and broken-stalked Bigelows sedge.

Lonely summit. Lonely, that is, but for the boulders, the sedges, the wind, and the mist.

Once again, those old questions, the ones that I've been marveling at, chewing on, ruminating about, and sometimes fuming over throughout the season and for many years beforehand: Why do people climb mountains? Why go to any wild place? What is it we seek there, what is it we find? Is it -- whatever it is we seek, whatever it is we find -- worth the impact we have? The biogeophysical damage, the social, psychological, and/or spiritual intrusion -- do we learn something about ourselves or the world that overrides, outranks, forgives, and/or heals the wounds we leave on the wilderness?

Old questions, rustling, flaring, wholly unanswerable.

Cloud-dragons writhing over Wright Peak

****

Or, so I thought, unanswerable. Then I finally read Nan Shepherd's short but rich, whole book, The Living Mountain. Before finishing the first paragraph, I realized that she knew. Shepherd understood. During her lifetime of wandering around Northeast Scotland's Cairngorm Mountains, which British writer and fellow mountain-wanderer Robert Macfarlane describes as a "low-slung wilderness of whale-backed hills and shattered cliffs", the novelist and poet found what it is I seek: Beauty, Mystery, Awe, Adventure, and some mist-shrouded, rain-drenched, rock-solid edge of Truth.

Best of all, she knew that "one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it." Though substantial and well-earned, all of her observations, her memories, her knowledge, and her love were weak, small, and fleetingly human, incomparable to "the mountain itself, its substance, its strength, its structure, its weathers."

Algonquin, rising above Wright Peak

The mountain. In The Living Mountain, which she completed in the 1940s but didn't publish until 1977, Shepherd begins not with geography or history, personal or intellectual, but with The Plateau, its "essential nature".  The Plateau, then the Recesses, the Group ("peaks piled on peaks"), Water, Frost and Snow, Air and Light, Plants, and Animals, only arriving at Man (classified as merely a subset under "Life") in the ninth chapter, three-quarters of the way through. Man's desires, joys, losses, and loneliness are part of -- but only a part of -- the landscape.

From there, Shepherd builds to meditations on Sleep, Senses, and, ultimately, Being. That's what she discovered, what she shares; in describing the Cairngorms, she illuminates the process of learning "most nearly what it is to be," how she "walked out of the body and into the mountain."

Along the way, she learned that water has strength and that "the air is part of the mountain, which does not come to an end with its rock and its soil." Realizing that "the mountain gives itself most completely when [she had] no destination, when [she reached] nowhere in particular, but [went] out merely to be with the mountain," she found herself constantly "out on the plateau again," walking into the lakes, feeling the clouds, watching the birds and studying the saxifrage. Speaking with the people, feeling companionship with those "whose identity is for the time being merged in that of the mountain." Her excursions weren't about conquering, taming, or scratching resources or riches out of the wilderness, nor were they for glory or esteem. Although her words are filled with admiration and adulation, she didn't seem to have any clear purpose in writing -- to celebrate the mountains, yes, but not to convince others that "this is the most beautiful place on earth" (as did Ed Abbey) and definitely not to encourage people to come visit. (In the introduction, she bemoans "the very heather tatty from the scrape of boots (too many boots, too much commotion...")). (("...but then"), she continues, ("how much uplift for how many hearts.")) She simply shares her experiences, her observations, her process of discovery. Discovery not of herself or the mountain, but of herself-in-the-mountain, how to become a living part of a wild place.

****

Stormy days on the summits start out uncomfortably, then become boring. I do trailwork for a while, but usually need to tuck in under my poncho. Rain pattering, wind flapping, air cooling, I can't read or sketch. Sing to myself for a while. Shiver. Settle in to watch. Walls of mist. A junco here, a sparrow there, I lose track of time. Lose sense of place. Lose idea of self.

****

"[A]t first," Shepherd admitted, "I was seeking only sensuous gratification -- the sensation of height, the sensation of movement, the sensation of speed, the sensation of distance, the sensation of effort, the sensation of ease: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life. I was not interested in the mountain for itself, but for its effect on me."

"But as I grew older," she continued, "...I began to discover the mountain in itself... [A]s I penetrate more deeply into the mountain's life, I penetrate also into my own."  She knew, she understood. How well she understood -- why climb mountains, why go to any wild place.

Sun breaking through, briefly illuminating a world of rock, sky, sedges, ravens, and one awe-struck summit steward

A day on Mt. Marcy

“Who’s ready to leap free of the world’s traces: 

come sit with me among white clouds?” 

-- Han Shan, translated by J. P. Seaton

Mt. Marcy as seen from Skylight, Adirondack High Peaks, summer solstice

Join me for a day on Mt. Marcy, New York's highest peak.

Have you ever stayed on a mountain all day? Not just for an hour or two, and especially not to simply tap the top and turn back down. All day -- from the quiet dew-bright morning through the dull glare and noisy chatter of noon; as the afternoon clouds cast shadows across the landscape and the ravens swoop by on rising thermals; until the dusky blues of early evening start to swallow each distant ridge and the call of the white-throated sparrow rings out in the softening air. Or from an exhausting, muggy morning climb through an even hotter, muggier midday; as late morning puffs visibly expand and begin to thicken, darken, tower; until curtains of hail-laced rain begin to swallow neighboring ranges and the mountain reverberates with rumbles of thunder. (In this case, it is no longer wise to stay on the summit.)

Before I started working as a summit steward, I'd never stayed on a mountain all day, and I'm not sure that I'd climbed many prominences more than once. Now I spend all day, every day, on one or another of the Adirondack High Peaks -- Wright, Algonquin, Cascade, Marcy.

Join me.

First, the ascent. To get to the top of the state, you have to earn your way up -- up a long, steep, bouldery trail, made even muddier in an especially rainy summer. [See previous post / rant.] Camping out cuts a couple of miles off the trip, but it's still a long climb. (No, it never gets easier. It just becomes more familiar -- after a few dozen repetitions, you learn exactly which rocks you want to step on, which maneuvers to make, how long the steep sections last and where you'll need to pause to catch your breath.)

On this day, mid-July, the air is humid but cool, mist wafting through the forest. As you gain elevation, you leave behind the mixed stands of maple and beech and transition into a magical world of lichen-draped fir and spruce. After rock-hopping across Marcy Brook and navigating an especially steep, boulder-strewn section, the trail levels off and winds through lush carpets of moss. Normally, you'd have your first peek out to the northeast -- the shoulder of Tabletop, profile of Big Slide -- but today you only have a blank wall of white. Pause to breathe. Onward.

Trail en route to Marcy (on a slightly nicer day)

Turning at the Hopkins junction, you automatically look up, expecting your first view of the summit, but, of course, it too is obscured. Same thing with Marcy Plateau, a from your destination -- nice open vista of the inside of a cloud. By now, you begin to suspect that your day is going to be long, wet, and featureless -- instead of the arc of sun across the sky, you'll again lose track of time and space. ("Again" because the previous day had also been entirely fogged-in. In fact, mist had begun to swallow the landscape two days earlier -- everything to the north was gone by mid-afternoon, and the world to the west had mostly disappeared by the time you began your descent.) Sure enough, when you pop up above treeline, you can barely see the first cairn, much less the neighboring peaks and valleys. Pause to breathe.

You know the rest of the route to the top, winding through pockets of stunted, gnarled krummholz and past lush alpine bogs and snowbank communities, over steep outcrops and up a slight chimney, cairns standing silent guards. Although the air is calm during the climb, you should have remembered how the wind had shifted yesterday afternoon -- you're on the leeward side of the mountain. Rising over the final crest, you're caught off-guard by a gust that nearly sends you slipping backward. Catch your balance, breathe.

Two cairns later, you're at the base of the summit rock. Had you not already been there before, you'd know you'd arrived by the presence of a large plaque celebrating the centennial of the first [European-American] ascent in 1837 of "Tahawus", supposedly the Algonquin name for Marcy. (Though "cloud-splitter" would certainly have been an apt name for the peak, historians believe this is more of a wishful 19th century invention.) (Not that it's any more reasonable to name a peak after a politician who likely never saw much less climbed it, Governor William Learned Marcy.) Usually, you would spend a few minutes looking around, then settling in for the day -- changing from hiking boots into sandals, layering on coats and hats, eating second breakfast -- but the featureless sky has begun spitting rain, so you merely tuck into your raingear and poncho and huddle out of the wind, below the plaque.

Mist swirls. Cairns appear and disappear. Peaceful. Grateful, just to feel warm under your poncho.

A half hour-ish later, the patter of droplets on your hood gives way to an almost imperceptible silence. Finally, you can change out of your wet hiking clothes and into warm, dry layers. Thus cosily attired, you bring your thermos of tea and second breakfast up with you to the very top, where the USGS benchmark used to be. In the wind, the rock and your rain gear dry rapidly. A lonely little red eft is clambering over the top. You're not quite sure where he came from or where he's going, but you appreciate the bright splash of color against the greyness. Red eft, green lichen, white sandwort, grey sky, mist still swirls.

Red eft (juvenile stage of the eastern / red-spotted newt)

You pull out your sketchbook and work on adding details to previous rough sketches -- shading to the skies, shadows on the land. A half hour? an hour? later, you're beginning to get cold, so stash your gear and begin to do trail work, using small rocks to delineate the trail and help hold down soil. Although that focuses your attention, it gets repetitive after a while, so you return to the summit and pull out your dog-eared, scribbled-in, weather-beaten copy of Arctic Dreams. Just as you do so, the sky begins to spit again -- back into the poncho, out of the wind. Mist swirls. Cairns come and go.

Around 11 a.m., it stops raining and even begins to glow a little. Imperceptibly, at first -- you find yourself squinting; you cast a slight shadow. Then there's visible cloud definition -- you find yourself perched between a thick but breaking carpet of altostratus and an ocean of fog filling the valleys and cresting over the peaks. Is that the sun you see, almost visible through a sheen of cirrus?  Is that the shoulder of Skylight, the edge of Haystack? Is Algonquin surfacing off to the west? You spin around on the summit, laughing with joy, trying to see everything at once.

Skylight? Is that Skylight?

Skylight! (Sort of.)

The WORLD!

But the clouds close in again, darken. The wind picks up, bringing more sprinkles with it. Back on with the poncho.

At 11:30 a.m. -- the latest you can ever recall -- the first hiker arrives. He's obviously startled to see you, wrapped in ghostly white plastic, doing your best to melt into the mountain. Your short conversation consists mostly of comments about the weather and general bewilderment that either of you are there. As soon as he disappears into the mist, another hiker arrives, then another up the south side. Both seem happy enough to be there -- one local who'd been inspired by Heaven Up-H'isted-ness to start climbing the 46 High Peaks, another from Maine on a quest to do each "high point" in every state. While you're explaining the summit steward program to them, another hiker arrives and joins the discussion. Just as suddenly as they'd come, they all leave the summit, begin their hikes back. Mist swirls.

The rain's stopped but the wind continues to gust, so you tuck down behind the plaque again, pull out your sketchbook and nibble on first lunch. A small group arrives -- brothers/uncles, and their nieces and nephew. They stay for a while, keeping up a lively chatter (and sharing food with you!) Momentarily, it seems like the sky might glow again, but there aren't any glimpses of ridges, peaks, or the outside world. Just mist.

After the family group leaves, another 2 come and go, then the summit is once again eerily empty for a long stretch. No rain, no sun. You alternate reading, sketching, and getting up to wander aimlessly around, figuring out what plants are getting ready to bloom. This lull makes it seem like even more of an outrage when a noisy horde of 14 arrive. You can hear them coming long before you can see them. There they come, in groups of 2-3, then gathering to celebrate one person's completion of the 46. You want to be happy for them, you really do, but they sprawl out in the narrow patch of rock below the plaque to cook (yes, cook?!) lunch, leaving no room for 3 hikers who appear from up the south side, disturbing the peace for a solo hiker who shrugs and joins you behind another little outcrop, and blocking access for another large group of 10 who arrive soon thereafter. In their attempts to stay out of the wind and avoid the 14, the groups of 3 and 10 tromp all over the sandwort and alpine goldenrod growing nearby; you keep having to go up and around to try to speak with them. You can feel your anger and desperation rising: So many people on the summit, you think, are they learning anything from this mountain? Do they care at all about this place? Why are they here? [See previous post/rant.]

You know you shouldn't be so judgmental and jealous; you know you shouldn't be hoping for rain so they'll leave; you know you shouldn't feel so relieved when they finally pack up and go. But you are and you do. More than ever, you want to protect this mountaintop -- the few dozen square meters that are your whole world for the day.

Arctic-Alpine meadows, looking lush.

Quiet again on the summit, serenity. Mist swirls. The vegetation happily drinks in the dew, the red eft has continued on his way. You gradually calm down, relax, nestle back into the rock.

Another hour or so and it's time for you to begin your descent. Cairn by cairn in the fog, down from the Alpine zone, through the boreal forest, still all in the clouds. You turn at the junctions, pausing to look back. It's been a good day. You'll do it all over again tomorrow.

(What you don't know at this time is that the next day will also be spent in a cloud and in the rain, though forecasts had promised it would break open and/or storm in the afternoon. Nearly 200 hikers will be frustrated by the cold, damp, nothingness; your response -- to smile and shrug and say you haven't seen anything for three days; aren't the flowers lovely? -- won't help. Around 4 p.m., after you've already left the top but before you've tucked back into the trees, the sky will break open in a matter of minutes -- sunshine, color, a sea of wilderness; a gift, a celebration, pure joy.)



Not a typical day on a mountain, perhaps, but then again there aren't any typical days. Each season, each week, each hour different. Sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes frustrating, sometimes far too busy, nearly always beautiful. Stay a while. Observe. Learn.

Of mountains and [too many] men

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." -- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

The mist briefly parts, revealing a world beyond the summit of Wright Peak

[Warning: It's been raining for a week, and I'm angry. Not at the rain, which is quite enchanting -- mist swirling up from the valleys, droplets pattering on my poncho, sparrows singing merrily away, the whole forest reeking with life -- but at the people. Hordes of hikers in the Adirondack High Peaks who hadn't thought to check the weather forecast, who refuse to believe the trails are flooded, who don't want to get their feet muddy and/or are afraid of wet rock, so who walk around the edges of puddles and cling on to vegetation at the edges of slabs, leaving the puddles wider and slabs ever more exposed, thus creating torrents of eroded mud that course down the trails and making the human imprint a bigger gash on the mountainsides. I'm angry. Expect a rant.]

Yes, those ARE thunderstorms over the Santanonis, soon to swallow up the MacIntyres, and not long thereafter hitting Marcy. Everyone on the mountain: stop trying to check your email and/or the weather app on your phone, put on your rain gear, and get OFF the darn summit!

Why do you go to the wild places -- the mountains, the forests, the deserts, the plains? What is it you seek there? What do you learn?

Why ever you go, whatever you find, is it worth the impact you have on the place? Do you leave a tattered trail of granola bar wrappers, stacked-rock "sculptures", footprints ripped into the soft mud or moss? Even if you practice proper Leave No Trace principles (kudos!), do you absorb any of the wildness, or do you return more self-impressed than -aware? Do you become any wiser, any more attuned to the beauty, the ferocity, the reality of the non-human world?

If you want exercise, that's great, but please don't treat the mountains as an outdoor gym. If you want to spend time with friends, that's great, too, but please don't equate the forest with your local bar. If you want to challenge yourself to complete an impressive task, that's noble, but please don't approach the desert as the setting for your ambition. If you want to witness beauty, that's meaningful, but please don't view the plains as pretty scenery -- flat, small, and static. Please don't dismiss any big, wild place as merely the backdrop for your small personal exploits and desires.

Typical hikers on Cascade, photographing themselves. Staying on the durable rock surfaces, at least.

I don't mean to judge, I really don't. Everyone has their own reasons for hiking, backpacking, paddling, climbing, skiing, etc., and of course they're all valid when they add meaning and joy to life. When individuals let their interests and ambitions supersede the integrity of the wilderness, though -- when people damage ecological stability and pilfer natural beauty in the process of ill-informed or poorly-practiced "recreation" -- that's when I judge. Harshly.

My job is to try to protect the wilderness, specifically the rare and fragile Arctic-Alpine ecosystems found on just a handful of the highest peaks in upstate New York's Adirondacks (also in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, and southeastern Canadian provinces.) Every day, I hike up to the summits to speak with people about the importance of watching where they put their feet (and their packs and their trekking poles), so as not to squish the plants, which are perfectly capable of tolerating high winds, intense sunlight, freezing temperatures, accumulations of rime ice, acidic soils, and short growing seasons, but not at all adapted to withstand any sort of trompling. Every day, I witness all sorts of reactions to the place -- praise for the mountain-top views, pride in accomplishing the hike, dismay for the weather, enthusiasm, regret, sheer exhaustion. Why are you here?, I want to ask everyone (particularly those who step on or attempt to picnic in the vegetation and those who go despite acute risk of lightning or dehydration), What is it you're hoping to find here?

Diapensia: one of our classic Arctic-Alpine species, in full bloom. DON'T STEP ON IT!

Mountains. In the Himalaya, pilgrims circumambulate sacred peaks. Ancient Incans used to perform sacrifices to appease the mountain gods. To the Dine (Navajo) people of the American Southwest, mountains anchor the edges of the world. Those practicing the Shugendo sect of Buddhism in Japan climb skyward in an attempt to achieve enlightenment. From Uluru to Olympus, Kailash to Mauna Kea, Denali to Bear Butte, prominences worldwide are viewed with reverence, awe, belongingness, transcendence.

With the emergence and rise of the sport of mountaineering in the mid-19th century, when Europeans set out to conquer the taunting, treacherous, and pristine Alps and Euro-Americans set forth to measure, map, name, and extract resources from "unexplored" Western ranges, and especially since the increase in outdoor recreation in the early- to mid-20th century, when more and more people have had the ability and desire to go "back to the woods" -- to hike, paddle, climb, and hunt not out of necessity but for the sheer joy of it -- views of wilderness have flipped. "Mountains" "canyons" and "deserts" are no longer seen as dismal places to fear and avoid, but rather as precious places to preserve and [safely, comfortably] enjoy -- places to set aside as parks and pleasuring grounds.

Pleasuring grounds. What sort of pleasure? Why do we go to these places? What do we find here? More importantly and conflictingly: in the course of our personal quests into wildernesses, how much damage are we doing to the wildness?

Algonquin Peak, more cloud than mountain

Unanswerable, indeterminable. But worth pondering / ranting about.

"...you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not." -- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Morning mist on Marcy

Specifically for mountains, these are my favorite books, which delve much more deeply into the history, psychology, and ecology of hiking:

Sacred Mountains of the World, Edwin Bernbaum (1990)
Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane (2004) (And anything/everything by Macfarlane)
The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen (1978)
Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, David Hinton (2012)
Backwoods Ethics and Wilderness Ethics, Laura and Guy Waterman (1979, 1993)

Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air and Into the Wild and Maurice Herzog's Annapurna, too. Essays by Arne Naess. I'll toss in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams just because I reread it every year, up on the mountains, deep in the canyons, out in the desert.
Why is there only one female author on this list? Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust and Arlene Blum's Annapurna: A Woman's Place don't yet speak to me. I keep meaning to read Nan Shepherd's The Living Mountain. Recommendations are welcome.

Lush bog on Algonquin

Enough for now. It's stopped raining; patches of blue sky are visible between the clouds. Time to turn off the computer and go for a hike.