All Good Things, letter 8: 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. So make yourself a nice cup of tea, and enjoy.
July 10, 2021
Dear Caleb,
I hope you find yourself out here one day. I'm cowboy camping on the Boundary Trail in the Pasayten Wilderness of Washington, beneath the silver firs, larches, and dozens of birds singing the sun to sleep. I wound up here by a fluke five summers ago and can't seem to spend a summer anywhere else. This area is special because it marks the transition between the Cascade range --with its innumerable confusion of glaciers, peaks and spires-- and the gentler rolling hills of the inter-mountain sagebrush desert. It's arid most of the summer, but abundant with springs and cascades of the cleanest water in the world. I'm blessed to make these waters a part of me. This wilderness area is about a hundred miles wide and has peaks upwards of 8500', but massive glacial valleys that sweep the horizon and remind me of just how small we really are.
I'm here for work. In the twenty miles I've hiked in from the trail head I've counted forty different species of wildflower. Everything is at peak bloom right now and it's utterly breathtaking. Earlier I stopped in the middle of cleaning out a drain and just stared at the meadow around me-- not a person in sight-- just the wind and the scratching of my pickaxe into the earth.
I met a man out here conducting research on bumble bees. He told me about a species of bee, the highland bumblebee, that is only found in this area and elevation. The bee is especially fond of red paintbrush, which are found in droves up here. I told him about the work our crew is doing, he showed me pictures of the highland bumble bee, taught me to identify it, and gave me a special brownie from the batch he baked just for this trip. People are truly, wonderfully, neat.
Our official assignment is to log out the boundary trail for 32 miles to Cathedral Pass 7572', the highest point on the Pacific Northwest Trail. We use two-person cross cut saws that are almost a century old to clear trees from across the trail. I'm surprised at how few blowdowns we’ve run across. We've maybe cut twenty five or thirty. Last season I worked a hitch where nine of us cleared over three hundred blow downs in five days, by the end of this one we might log out a hundred.
The nights are cold here, the bugs are charming, there are incredible outcrops of granite and granodiorite everywhere. I could spend a lifetime here learning every rock and shady spot, climbing to the top of every peak and lazing in the shade of bristlecone pines. I wish you were here to see and feel how wild and alive this place is. It's where I feel most wild and alive too.
All good things,
Ryan
