All Good Things, letter 1: Welcome to the Skagit Valley
Crater and Jack Mountains seen from Jackita ridge in the Pasayten Wilderness
All Good Things is a collection of letters I wrote to my dear friend Caleb Bouchard between Summer 2020 and Spring 2022. It was published as a small chapbook by Analog Revolution Press in 2022. I’ve compiled the letters here, with additional photos, for you. Enjoy.
July 17, 2020
Dear Caleb,
Long time no write man, thanks for putting in the work to get this ball rolling (I would say "rolling again" but have I ever responded to your letters with anything resembling consistency?). I demand that you harass me any time you don't receive a response within a fortnight. There's so much to say, and that in itself is a sign that I owe you much more regular communication, so let's get on with it.
Firstly, I absolutely remember recommending Travels With Charley. I discovered that book on a list of "travel literature." I found it while doing some preliminary research for my own novel I thought I was going to write, but it was thoroughly dead-ended. I still have the type-written first draft leaves somewhere. Regardless, I'm overdue for a revisit with Charley. The rest of Steinbeck, I'm not so sure I have time for now.
I'm sitting in the Sedro-Woolley (pronounced seedro, like cedar trees) RV Park, along the Skagit River, in the Skagit Valley, in Skagit County. "Welcome to the Skag', we're just a bunch of Sedro boys gettin' Woolley!" pretty much sums it up.
It's a former logging town of about 11,000 former loggers with not much left to do. Real small-town-America vibes. As my boss put it, "Sedro sucks, but we can't afford to move to Bellingham." PNTA stands for Pacific Northwest Trail Association, I just updated my instagram bio, though the circus sounds fun too. Two summers ago I hiked the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail 1217 miles from the Pacific Ocean to Glacier National Park, Montana. Now I'm an Assistant Trail Crew Leader getting paid to maintain the trail all over western Washington. It's basically the coolest job I can imagine and I'm so stoked to be here. I just got off "hitch" (a week spent in the woods doing trail work) yesterday and today I headed out past North Cascades National Park (the park with the most glaciers in the lower 48 states) to the Pasayten Wilderness. I'm camped at the Devil’s Park shelter, an old cedar-shingled snow shelter at 6000' elevation. I'm about 5 miles from Crater Peak, where Gary Snyder spent the summer of ‘52 as a firewatch, and roughly 20 miles from Desolation Peak, where Jack Kerouac was a firewatch in the summer of 1956. The first half of his novel Desolation Angels is taken nearly verbatim from the journal he kept there. I'm not going to make it there this trip, but I've been slowly hiking every single trail in the Pasayten Wilderness for the last three summers, and I'll get around to it eventually. Wilderness is a special designation of public land where there can be no structures built, no motorized machinery whatsoever (we use two-person cross-cut hand saws instead of chainsaws), and no bicycles. It’s the highest level of protection against development possible for our public lands. Basically, it's the closest thing to a world without humans as possible. It's downright breathtaking.
Tonight I'm cowboy camping in my bug-bivy (or bivouac), which is a super thin bag made of sil-nylon that my sleeping bag fits in. It has a drawstring at the head and a section of mesh netting where my face goes. If I'm sleeping under my tarp, I clip my bivy to a loop on the underside of my tarp to keep it off my face, but tonight I just stuck my trekking pole in the ground and tied it to that. This sub-alpine meadow is named Devil's Park and is basically a bed of wild flowers with a system of snow-melt ponds and streams trickling through it. The mosquitos are pretty bad, but I haven't felt the need to bust out my headnet quite yet. It's 8pm and I'm just gonna lie here and let the buzzing of the mosquitos, the call of the Swainson's Thrush, and the burping of the bullfrogs lull me to sleep. Life is not all too bad sometimes.
All good things, Ryan
