All Good Things, letter 3: Desolation Peak
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.
August 18, 2020
Dear Caleb,
I started hiking from the East Bank Trail trailhead last night at 8:22. My goal was Desolation Peak, 22.5 miles to my north. I've hiked this trail twice already, once each the last two years, but have never made the pilgrimage to Desolation, where Kerouac was a firewatch in the summer of 1956. Nightfall came immediately and soon I was racing down the lakeside trail beneath a canopy of Douglas firs and red cedars in utter darkness. It's been a while since I've done some proper night hiking, and it wasn’t long before I was reminiscing of my time in the Fall of 2017 hiking through California’s Sierra Nevada mountains headed for Mexico. The sun would set around fiver or six and I would keep hiking until eight or nine, trying my hardest to keep pace with Puddin as she hauled ass from pass to pass, ruthlessly covering over 30 miles a day across some of the biggest mountains in the country. It was the thrill of the chase that led to me spending hours every night walking through granite valleys, not always sure if she was ahead or behind me.
I knew from those days that it takes a few miles of darkness to settle in and shake off the nervous energy that comes with hiking alone through cougar country by moonlight. All your senses get turned up to eleven and even the smallest scurry and shuffle will have you turning your whole body around, holding your breath to hear better, and then, somehow, nervously walking even faster than you were before. You swear every wood toad is a bear.
It was with this anxious energy that I tripped and trod my way through the forest, bare-chested and hair dutch-braided. I continued like this at a remarkable pace of four miles an hour. I never hike that fast, but I was excited. Four miles an hour is like missing-a-connection-at-the-airport speed, except maybe a little faster. It's about as quickly as you can possibly imagine walking. If you've ever seen the episode of Malcolm in the Middle where Hal gets into power walking, it's kind of like that. My usual pace is closer to two and a half or three mph--if I'm feeling good. I kept this nonsense up for eight miles of looking over my shoulder every time I spooked a chipmunk before I finally called it a night around eleven. I was in Ross Lake National Recreation Area, a part of North Cascades National Park, where permits by reservation are required for all overnight camping. I didn't have a permit, but I wasn't about to let that stop me (it certainly hadn't the last two times I slept here). I'm not particularly proud of skirting usage fees and protocol, but I tend to plan things at the last minute, and the ranger station that issues permits is closed due to covid, so that certainly wasn’t making things any easier for me. I turned onto the side trail for Rainbow Point boat camp and dropped my pack onto the first flat (enough) spot I could find--which happened to be about ten feet down the trail. I set an alarm for 5:45, and let the polyrhythms of hooting bard owls, buzzing mosquitoes, tickling field mice, and streaking meteors lull me to sleep. I woke up in the morning to discover that I had five neighbors down below at the campground, each proudly displaying their permit outside their tent. I rolled up my bivy sack and was hiking in five minutes.
I still had about ten miles to cover before the climb up Desolation. I planned to make it to the base of the mountain, start the five-mile, 4000' climb, and spend the afternoon meditating, doing head stands, pondering the ineffable, and digging the void that is Hozomeen. By 10am I had hiked my usual ten miles, we call that "ten by ten" in the thru hiking community, and I stood at the base of the climb. Sure enough, I huffed and puffed my way to the top, stopping only once at a spring to fill up my water reserves. I’d been dreaming of this hike for a few years now, and was very much looking forward to spending some inward-time among my favorite mountains in the world. Little did I know, there’s still an operating fire-tower on top of Desolation Peak, complete with a real life firewatch. His name is Jim Henterly and he looks like the most haggard old piece of leather you might expect him to. But he's really friendly, has thoughtful conversation, and seemed to take a liking to me. I have to imagine he doesn't give handfuls of Mott's fruit snacks and a cup of *refrigerated* water to every beatnik pilgrim who wanders up there. He certainly didn't to the guy who was up there when I first arrived. Then again, that schmuck shelled out $130 for a water taxi to skip the 16 mile approach hike that I had just thrown down in a couple of hours. He also tried to tell Jim that Desolation Peak was a different height than the United States Geological Survey marker on the summit says, but he couldn't say exactly what the elevation was. He's gonna send a follow up email once he checks his satellite. What a way to live, to pay all that money and hike all that way just to tell the firewatch that his mountain's elevation wasn't measured properly by a foot or two.
Anyway, Jim also gave me two sick-as-hell stickers he drew. One of them is a Tolkienian Ent, and the other is like all of nature drawn inside the silhouette of a Chinook salmon. Turns out Jim is an artist and there's a fourteen-minute documentary about him on vimeo??? Sounds cool. So yeah, my buddy Jim and I hung out and had a ball talking about mountains and thunderstorms and fires and the weather, and this dude Bink we had both met in the middle of nowhere (Bink's one of my heros by the way, more about him later maybe), and search and rescues, and climbing accidents, and compound fractures, and tourniquets, and rivers, and floods, and ultra-marathons, and Canada (which you could just about spit on from here), and trail maintenance, and the national park, and the passing of the Great American Outdoors Act this month, and other fire towers, and glaciology, and the dead spots in the park where the radio wont reach, and the Pacific Northwest Trail, and the dirt devil that stirred up while we were standing there, and Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen and Hozomeen and the Void, and Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, and Camus, and the abandoned program to reintroduce grizzly bears to the north cascades, and the two ravens that hang out at his tower and have a new baby raven this summer, and how the ravens fight with the coopers hawks, and his buddy Roger who sends him pictures of cool stuff on his trail-camera as part of an ongoing study on the lynx population including a woman who squatted down in front of the camera and flashed her bare chest to the camera, and potential causes of the declining marmot population, and property prices in Whatcom County, and volunteer fire district 14, and how the park service finally moved its radio headquarters to Everett yesterday after years of wanting to do so but now they're having a hard time getting the radio operators there to understand all the jargon and tag numbers used in the park, and his daughter who had just visited him last week, and his grandson who will be visiting him the day you read this letter and every other day you reread it so be careful because it's a long hike and he's gonna get really tired if you read it too often okay? So while I didn't exactly ponder the unity of the cosmos in hours of isolation atop Desolation Peak, I did meet someone really interesting, and I think meeting Jim was better than all of that.
All good things,
-Ryan
p.s. This whole time I've been writing this I've had ants crawling all over me. Okay, gotta get down off this mountain now.
