Next Time, I Swear I'm Not Coming Back

Click on the little word balloon thingy in the lower left corner to read the captions.

Greg:

The leaves turning on the maple tree across the street is making me pine for summer. I hardly got in any hiking this year. One of these days, when my dowsing stick finally hits the underground money stream, I'm going to hike my ass out of here and never come back.

When we went up to Deer Park in Olympic National Park this last time, I almost didn't come back. At one point John and I were sitting on top of Blue Mountain sharing the same fantasy. (You were somewhere downhill, avoiding the altitude.) In this fantasy, we call our wives, tell them to sell all our stuff, and to come meet us up there in the mountains where we belong. We live happily ever after. Cue sunset. Roll credits. (But who delivers the Indian food? You won't survive without Indian food. Or cable. Just sayin'. -Ed.)

That same mad, lycanthropic euphoria bubbles up every time I go into the mountains, the mania that wants me chuck it all and not come back. You know, like Col. Kurtz, but not quite so batshit homicidal crazy and stuff.

When I hiked out to Skoki Lodge in the Banff NP backcountry last year, my inner Amish almost got the upper hand and kept me there for good, too. If it were not for my very sane, very-disinclined-to-bathe-in-ass-freezing-mountain-streams wife, I’d prolly still be there, picking my teeth with a marmot or warming my hands over a blazing hiker.

Speaking of being on top of a mountain, I understand your concern about how I like to hang near the edge of the biggest drop-off I can find. I’m only doing it for therapeutic value. Honestly. I started going up into the mountains to help overcome anxiety. As folks like myself who have an anxiety disorder often do, I was becoming afraid of heights. Anxiety disorders often "morph" to include basic phobias. (The five basic phobias are water, spiders, snakes, heights and small spaces. And, if you're male, that list may include commitment. -Ed.) While I was educating myself on how to get over anxiety, I found out that the best way to deal with a phobia is through exposure. (Not of one's loins and whatnot, but exposure to the phobia-inducing stimulus.) So I started getting myself up as high as I could reasonably get without standing on the ledge of a building or filling a recliner with helium.

I’m not afraid of heights anymore, that’s for sure. But now it’s kinda like I have to get a little dose of the medicine that cured me every once in a while, lest it wear off. Call it a “booster shot”. At least I’m not doing anything truly goddamn crazy, like mountaineering. Mountaineering is not my bag, and and I’ll tell ya why. There are certain activities I abjure, chief among them:

• Falling into giant icy crevasses.
• Eating the dead.
• Sustaining frostbite injuries. (I've actually done this one before. I frostbit my face in 1984. Parts of it turned all black and fell off. And it fuckin' hurts like you would not believe.)
• Having a pulmonary embolism for dinner.
• Wigging out on hypoxia.
• Pooping in a bag.
• Starring in a book by Jon Krakauer.

These are all things that you either must do or may wind up doing if mountaineering is your cup of freeze-dried tea. But please don’t confuse me those peak-hopping, ice-axe-wielding bag-shitters. The things that I like aren't usually found where you find alpinists, f'rinstance:

• Fragrant alpine meadows.
• Piney pine trees.
• Surly marmots.
• Tranquil mountain lakes.
• Lunch.

In other words, if it's below the tree line, count me in. Likewise, if trees won't live there, why should I go?

The other reason I'm belaboring the distinction is because some hiker recently took a couple-hundred-foot drop and creamed himself into human chip dip on a pile of granite. This was of course covered in the paper which of course means Dad read it which of course means he gave me several stern warnings and admonitions (replete with the appropriate finger-stabbing of the appropriate story column in the local paper) about doing the same to myself. So I had to give him the requisite assurances that Mister Salad Bar Item was (or at least fancied himself to be) mountaineering whereas all I do is hike. I don't even use ropes. Hell, I wouldn't tie myself to something I liked, let alone some mountain.

Okay, so if I've done nothing more than set the record straight (assuming it needed to be set straight), me = hiker, not mountain climber. Hope that puts you at ease.

Picking up dog turds not as fun as it sounds

Before the monsoon season strikes (I mean strikes and any harder than is has already struck for the past few months of our goddamn soaking wet 58-degree "summer"), I'm trying to get things in and about the yard put away. This includes dog turds which - come to find out - are not as water soluble as you would think. I've been finding chalk-white turd carcasses all over the yard, or "turd bones", if you will. And come to think of it, there's no way our wee little Corgy can produce that many boluses. She must be recruiting help. She's not asking you to chip in, is she? If so, help me out and use a trowel. Or just scratch like a cat.

Hauling rat-pee-covered insulation to the dump not as fun as it sounds

Since I was over at E's house dropping off some stuff that she so graciously offered to store for me, I counter-offered to help haul another load of that rat pee covered insulation and wallboard that you tore out of her basement. I only mention this because I made an interesting discovery while at the transfer station. You know how I keep all those fancy essential oils in my truck so I can mix my own air fresheners? (Yeah, I do, so what? Shut up!) Well bitter almond oil effectively cancels the crushing, mephitic redolence that only a steaming hot garbage dump can produce. Might be a good thing to keep in your lunchbox next time you want to carry along another ptomaine-laced hot dog. Might make it easier to choke down.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone

If it gets any more beautiful here, my head will explode. Me and Teresa
near a rapids on the Yellowstone River. My hair is standing on end because of the
shocking amounts of beauty we were exposed to each day, and not because I rubbed
six quarts of DEET and #50 sunblock into it and then baked it in the white-hot heat
of the red-hot sun. I discovered on this trip that I could really give a marmot's ass
about civilization, and really never cared if I saw it again.


Greg:


Just - and I mean "just" - got back from backpacking for four days in Yellowstone. Yes, I mean capital-The capital-Yellowstone, and no, that's not a euphemism for some mosquito-infested water park that I spent the weekend at.

Where do I start? Christ, man - it's Yellowstone! The great-grandpappy of national parks! The one with Old Faithful (which I did not see) and the buffalo (which I did see) and the bears (which I had spray for but did not see)! How much more park-ier can you get than Yellowstone? It's vast, the size of something really big, like the InterWeb or maybe Stupidity. And - with the slight exception of the heavily touristed areas, like the steam vents or the restrooms - is as wild as wild can be. Animals spend their whole lives eating other animals there, and they never run out of animals! How freaking freaked out is that? It's like having a lifetime pass to Kentucky Fried Antelope if you're a bear. And you can walk for six to eight days and never, ever see a toilet. S'true.

We were hiking along a migration path for the whole of our trip, and although we did not see much large wildlife, we were constantly confronted by their bleached skeletons and almost loveseat-sized turds. We were compelled by these parts of our experience to write a new ad slogan for the park - "Yellowstone: Where Animals Come To Eat, Shit and Die". We think it'll be huge with the juvenile male demographic.

True fact that I just made up: The average weight of a single tourist at the Mammoth Visitor Complex is six hundred sixty eight pounds, not counting the Winnebago that they ate for lunch. And you can tell their age by counting the hairs on their back.

Oh oh oh! Speaking of Winnebagos - When we were driving back from the end of the trail to our hotel, Christina, one of our guides, happened to mention (apropos of nothing), "Didn't I tell you guys about the 'anal" thing?" To which we replied - in chorus - "NO." So she told us about how hilarious it is when you add the word "anal" to the beginning of the name of any motorhome that passes by you on the road. And she had just heard the so-far best of this ongoing "competition", and it was this: Anal Dutchman Express. And she was right. It was hilarious. And we howled like rabbits until we could no longer breathe. Of course I had to chime in with: "...when your usual Anal Dutchman just isn't fast enough." The Anal Pop-Up, The Anal Rimrock Express, and The Anal Sunseeker provided us with enough guffaws to make it all the way back to Jackson, where Teresa dished out an honorary self-propelled vehicular title to a wayfaring Anal Ram 1500.

Look, okay, maybe we were high on Gorp and had been massaging our bare hineys with prickly pears for four days. Anything would've been funny. I know I was in a physically compromised state. The two days previous, I drank six quarts of water per day and only peed once. Maybe I was high on thirst.

I wish I could give you some travelogue about the trip like what we did day by day, but doing that just seems so boring and mundane. Was the hiking difficult? At times, yes. On the third day, we had some pretty good elevation gain up some pretty rough terrain. Not the worst I've been on, but - hey, who wants to hear me whine about heat and exertion? I know I don't. Exertion and exposure and bug bites and all that are part and parcel of backpacking, and if I didn't like that kind of stuff, I'd stay at home and tape cheesecake to my ass. The rest of it you can probably guess, having backpacked yourself before. It's the usual pains, made completely immaterial by the unusual, unexpected, and at times indescribable glories of nature. At the end of the trail, I honestly thought I was going to cry. I saw the end of the trail come into view, and all I wanted to do was turn around and go back whence I came, back into the comfort of Yellowstone.

So yeah, maybe instead of trying to give you a blow-by-blow, I'll just include a link to the photos and let them tell the story. For now I'll just go curl up in my nice, warm, civilized bed and dream that I'm still out there somewhere near the Yellowstone River, happy as hell, face down in the weeds and the bugs and the dirt.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Yellowstone 2007

One Giant Biscotto With Dingleberry Jam, Please

Greg:

I don't know how you got your grubbies on that photo. I've had dozens of lawyers trying to track down that image and suppress it. Now my fascist inclinations are exposed. Damn you, Getty Images!

Apparently Getty can - and will - sell photos of just about anything, up to and including the moment when I brought the populace of Missoula, MT to its collectively quaking knees by threatening it with a mammoth Italian confection. Getty and its minions are everywhere. At least once a week they come by my door trying to peddle another snapshot of Fidel Castro rolling down Broadway in an Escalade loaded to the gunnels with boxes of high-end electronics and cookware from Williams-Sonoma. ("Products which fall from the back of a truck or that can be readily pried from the greedy hands of the capitalist oppressors shall become the rightful property of the people." -Castro.) Or you in your frilly under-drawers, huffing away on that tuba of yours. And I don't care what you say, that underwear doesn't make you a better tuba player.

Speaking of food and Missoula, check this out. At this restaurant in Missoula called The Shack, they have a crouton omelet. No, seriously. Jack cheese, veggies, and garlic croutons. And not small ones. Croutons about the size of Yahtzee dice. And I'm thinkin', who thought this shit up? I mean, c'mon, you gotta be pretty high on weed to think, "croutons - that's what this thing needs!" I should know. When I was in college, I used to spend all night playing the bong and then take a pair of scissors and cut a day-old Totino's party pizza into 5" by 5" squares. Then I'd spark up the toaster and drop it in. Once that popped, I'd put some jam on it and scarf it down. That may sound a little weird, but at the time, it seemed to me that anything that came out of a toaster should have jam on it - like there was some culinary law about that. So I know how these things happen.

But I must say that my hat is off to the members of the Missoula Montana Bong-estra who first cobbled this crouton omelet thing up because it's freakin' delicious. If the good people at The Shack told me they had an omelet that was made with a petrified jelly donut that they carved up with a door plane, I'd eat that too.

All this talk of food has made me hungry. I'm going to sign off now and go eat. I got a jar of homemade dingleberry jam from somewhere in Canada. (Teresa says it's huckleberry but I swear to God the guy said dingleberry.) I think I'm going to start at the east side of the kitchen with that jar of jam and work my way west. I'll let you know tomorrow what goes good with dingleberry jam and what doesn't - although I really doubt there's anything that doesn't.

Cheers,

-Thaddeus

Squirrels The Size Of Rump Roast - OR - What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Grizzlies, hell! Watch out for this little bastard. He'll go straight
for your jugular. And he carries Bubonic Plague. Or so the guide
book I read ("Nature Wants To Fucking Kill You!: A Guide to the
Wildlife of the Canadian Rockies") tells me.

Greg:

Two weeks immersed in alpine splendor have completely robbed me of the power of speech. To get a gander at the splendor of which I speak, click on the picture of the tiny, tiny bear (above). I'll write more when my sprrch gerz bhurn drrr. Frr? Hack! Kaff! I'll write more when my speech crrrmss brrr.

Shmerr vrr brrrz,

-Thaddeus

In Praise Of Jim Bergman

Jim Bergman can out-drink Immanuel Kant, out-play
Les Claypool, and out-swim Stephen Hawking.

Greg:

I have a certain troublesome neurosis, and I think it might be familial. See if you can relate.

I have friends. They're all really great folks. Problem is I just don't like to spend time with them. That sounds bad. Let me try to describe it a little better with an example. When I meet a friend for lunch, somewhere about halfway through, I panic and want to leave the conversation. I feel stuck. I feel like I left a stove on somewhere or a door unlocked - whatever it is needs my immediate attention. So that means when I think about making plans with friends, it always sounds like a good idea at first until I realize that about halfway through a conversation, I'm going to freak out and be overwhelmed by the need to flee. It's not their fault, it's mine. It's just plain bizarre. To say that I am as crazy as a shithouse rat might create resentment among shithouse rats.

Here's the flipside. I don't like being alone, either. I discovered this while I was camping solo in Port Townsend a couple weekends ago. I like hiking alone well enough, but I like hiking with Teresa better. I once described the situation to Teresa like this: if I'm home alone, I get lonely and have a hard time writing well. If I'm home and Teresa's nearby, I can't concentrate enough to write. However, if I'm at home in my room with door closed, but I know that Teresa's in the other room, I'm perfectly comfortable. (She's asleep right now, but when she gets up and comes into this room, my writing day will be over.)


This is your brain on Bergman.

Which brings me to my friend Jim Bergman, who was such good company on our recent hike up to Lake Serene that it made me reconsider this whole weird neurotic "trapped" feeling I get, and made me think that I ought to work more diligently on correcting it. Jim's boon companionship during the hike obviated what I had been cheating myself out of by maintaining this neurosis.

Side note: Bergman was incredibly impressed by your resume - the parts of it that I could recall, including the fact that you once were a luthier for Mike Tobias. How obscure is that?

Jim Bergman was born James Bergman somewhere in Washington State thirty years and some change ago. He has a brother and some parents. I'm making all this up because I don't really know. I do know that he holds a degree in Philosophy (with a minor in Cocktail Party Bullshitting, no doubt), and can throw down mind-bending Kantian dialectic with the best of them. Where I met him was during our tenure at AtomFilms. I was the Editorial Producer and he was woefully underpaid for some horrifically boring task that he performed gleefully enough in some rather Spartan accoutrements. I thought he was gay and Jewish. Wrong on both counts. (Or at least as far as I know, lo these 7 years passed.) He got fired - unjustly in my estimation - for exactly what I can't even remember now. Had to do with saying the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time. After that event, he took to relieving his frustrations by becoming a triathlete.

Bergman was also the bass player for a very fun and rather frenetic country band called Colville Melody, a group of unwashed acoustinauts that were a couple hogsheads short of a jug band. He left all that glory to strike out on his own as an enterpreneur, selling gear to his fellow triathletes. He concurrently worked for Roland keyboards, again probably performing some ponderously boring task for low wages in Spartan accoutrements. Then one day he decided to chuck all of that, sold his 1,200 square foot suburban Bellingham ranch for an embarassingly huge sum of money, and enrolled in massage school. And that's where he is right now.

You can't talk about Bergman without talking about drinking. The two are inseparable. It's also difficult to describe the manner of his drinking because the bouts don't last long enough to be describe as a binge, but on the other hand, explosion isn't all-encompassing enough to relay the short-lived incandescence and ferocity of each event. To wit, back in the day, I could out-drink Bergman if you're talking sheer volume, but I could in no way exceed his alcohol-fueled feats of personality-rending stupicifocity. You never knew how many beers it was going to be until the charming Henry Jekyll mask peeled off to expose the howling, pugnacious escapee from the boneless chicken ranch. We had to invent a whole new term for it. We called it "getting Bergmaned". It's no wonder that Bergman, charming and erudite though he may be while sober, holds the world record for alienating women.

With all his foibles, and probably because of them, Jim Bergman is my pal. Jim Bergman will make you laugh - hard. Jim Bergman is just plain loads (truly plural) of fun, just like the rest of my friends, and I should spend a lot more time with the lot of them.

Oh shit I left the stove on.

-Thaddeus

Mud Shoe Diaries: Bridal Veil Falls, Lake Serene & Mt. Index

Mount Index, seen from the shore of Lake Serene.
Two words: Oss. Umm.

Dear Greg:

Howya been? Don't say nothin' because I already have your answer: nowheres as good as me! Why the obnoxious-yet-self-assured overconfidence? Because I've been hiking, yo! And not just some lame-ass flatland hike in tiny, tiny bear territory. I've been up in the snowfields, ogling the waterfalls, huffing the mountain air, and gleefully causing myself all manner of trepidation and injury.

Last Sunday (April 20-something), me & the gang took USFS Trail 1068 up to Lake Serene at the foot of Mount Index with a side jaunt to Bridal Veil Falls. The round trip was 8.2 miles with an elevation gain of about 1,900 feet (which ain't so bad, until you figure that pretty much all that elevation gain happens within about 1.3 miles of trail). Thank God some burly-ass Washington Trail Association volunteers built stair frames (see photos at the end of this letter) to take the place of the nasty-dangerous dirt trail that used to go pretty much straight up.


Lake Serene with "just a little snow".

That doesn't mean it was easy. Oh mais non. I told you about the Hellclimber 3000 in my previous blog. Well, working out on it paid off in spades when it came to negotiating these stairs. There was also a wicked nasty patch where a gigantic blowdown roughly the size of your grotesquely Popeye-ish right forearm made us have to scramble through some really slick mud and roots. And then there was the snow which we had not anticipated - which was thoroughly my fault. You see, when it comes to outdoorsmanship, I am still what John Muir would call an "idiot". Or perhaps he wouldn't be quite that kind. He might've called me something like a fookin' penty-weest or even a flat-moufed basturt, nae bu' beef tae th' heels. I digress.

We didn't anticipate the snow because I had heard that the snow level was at something like 5,000 feet, and we were only hiking up to 2,500, so I figured... Well, snow level has to do with where new snow is likely to fall, not where the edge of the snowfields end, and since we've had a lot of late-season snow here, that means... Yeah, so, snow. Better still, I have snappy new traction devices for my boots as well as trekking poles, neither of which I had during my ice-and-tiny-bear encounter earlier this season on Mount Si. But did I bring my extra traction? Nay. And did I believe that sleekly-attired fastpacker we met on the trail who told us that there was "a little snow up there"? Aye.

Greg, never believe a sleekly-attired fastpacker. They lie and they're crazy. Subsisting on nothing but Nutella does something to their brains. They are the meth freaks of the outdoors. (Not to be confused with the meth freaks of the North Cascades, a brand of homonids from Snohomish county that cling to the undersides of rotting double-wides and paranoiacally swat at imaginary bugs.) We wound up smushing our way up, through, and over a snowfield for about a mile, at times having to balance on its treacherously rotting edge. But at the end of the trail, the gob-smacking, heart-rending beauty that you see in the photos above was enough to make one forget all about spandex-clad fastpackers and their falsehood-spewing mountebankery. And although the temperature at the lakeshore brought to mind adages of plumber's cracks, witches' bosoms, and the neutering of brass monkeys, the intermittent springtime sun was quite warm. I offered a prayer of thanks to REI for blessing me with black outer gear.

Side note - speaking of REI: the twice-yearly 20% off sale started this weekend, so naturally I had to expand my gear collection. Come to find out, I'm already geared up to about my eyeballs (which are also quite nicely outfitted), so I was hard-pressed to find anything that I actually needed. That didn't stop me from purchasing an MSR WaterWorks EX Microfilter, a ceramic and carbon water filtering system so effective it screens out Giardia, bacteria, viruses, tiny-tiny bear poop and poltergeists. To underscore its effectiveness, there's a photo on the package of a fastpacker in Patagonia using it to drink straight out of a cow's butt. It should come in handy some day when I go swamp stomping in 'Nam.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.
PS: Here's a whole bunch of photos that my friend and co-hiker Jim Bergman took of the trip. Enjoy.

-Thaddeus

I Am Little More Than A Jodhpur-Clad Bourgeoisie Horsefucker

North Face fleece vest and convertible pants: $175.
Salomon trail running shoes: $140.
Ex Officio vented quick-dry high-performance cargo shirt: $95.
Coming face-to-face with what a prejudiced
bourgeoisie asshole I am: Priceless.

Greg:

Quick refresher. Two things about me:

1. I am a terrible Buddhist. I totally suck at it. Therefore, I'm coming back as a flea bite.
2. I am also a charlatan, a ruse of a man, a hypocrite; and now a peasant-baiting, tea-sipping, fox-hunting, jodhpur-wearing horsefucker. To wit:

Have you ever been to Forks, Washington? In a word, depressing. Hardcore poverty in the middle of a rain forest, so not only are these poor people broke as shit, they're growing algae on their backs to boot. Forks is a logging community that may have boomed at one time or other, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any vestiges of that now. How I wound up in Forks is a tune that goes a little something like this:

So you know me and hiking. I hike, like, all to hell. One place that I've wanted to hike all summer is the Olympic National Forest beaches. Olympic National Park has like a beejillion miles of beach that stretches from Cape Cornhatch (not its real name - I've forgotten what the "real" name is) on the Northwesternmost tip of Washington State, all the way south to This-Is-Where-Kurt-Cobain-Was-Born (again, not its "real" name, and yeah, probably not that far south). There are only a couple points of ingress in that whole stretch, and those are many, many miles apart. So suffice it to say, I was all over hiking the coast. So I calls me the Triple A, I does, and has 'em set me up with the closest hotel to the beach that had any "star" rating at all, and they sent me to the Forks Motel.

After a ferry ride and a couple hours of semi-circumnavigating Olympic National Park, we pulled in to Forks just as pestilentially-dark clouds rolled in and began to threaten rain. All of this served to make the town look slightly shit-holier than it probably is on a nice sunny day...which are probably few and far between on the wet side of the peninsula. Here's a thumbnail. Every single vehicle in the town - none of which is less than ten years old or fewer holes than a Gypsy Cab - has a lift kit and knobbies. There is no form of public entertainment, not even a movie theater. The liquor store prides itself on its display of high-power rifle ammunition. I presumed from all of this that the local pastimes must be four-bying and teen pregnancy. I could be right. And then there was our hotel room, which turned out to be an exploration of new horizons in mustiness. We got a couple of scented candles which did a pretty valiant job of holding the stank at bay, but even they eventually subsumed to the dankness.

Okay, so, now I'm both needing dinner and dreading what it might be, and The In Place which is right across the street from the motel (which I've now christened The Under Arms for all its olfactory offense) has been recommended by the staff as a safe place. And they're pretty sure it's been a year or two since anyone contracted ptomaine from the navy beans. I kid, of course. But we head on over, grab a seat, and are greeted by water glasses embossed with greasy handprints. Nice.

So let me cut to the chase. The food was all "home made" (viz., not canned off-premises in some factory). The potato salad was outstanding, the pie even moreso. The waitress, indeed, all of the townsfolk that we encountered were genuinely friendly to the point that my urban paranoia was raised to methamphetaminic levels. The people of Forks - at least, all the ones that I met - were not just cheery, but genuine and unpretentious despite being poor as hell and (gathering from their appearances) subsisting on an entirely iron-free diet. It's this sort of thing that leads to the ill-conceived notion that poverty is somehow ennobling. If that were true, the year or so that I spent living in my '74 Ford Maverick should make me a Poet King. However, I am not. I am a elitist, snobberiffic horsefucker and my prejudice against the logger families of Forks is almost criminal in its magnitude. There I sat, in logo-emblazoned gear from Salamon to The North Face, the purchase price of which could feed a logger family for a fortnight at least (hell, my freakin' briefs cost $40), and having the temerity to entertain condescending thoughts about the maitre d' because he's wearing heavy duty logging braces and a torn-to-shit flannel shirt that looks like somebody planted M-80s in the elbows. And this most telling feature - his suspenders were frayed at about the height of his solar plexus. How else do you wear out suspenders in the middle other than wrestling fir logs, fer crissakes? So in short, this guy does not one but two honest day's work per day, whereas I sit in a comfy office and write junk email - a task which would never promote the growth of a single callous on anyone, no matter how earnestly they pursued it.

So all of this served as a lesson to me that no matter how much I sit on my well-cushioned ass and practice chenrezig, I still get smacked upside the head with my own prejudice. It is a humbling thing to find out that no matter how much I try to reconstruct myself, I still keep running into who I am. I guess the metric of progress is that I really am shocked by how much of what I once found repellent in others I now find quite easily in myself.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Mile One Hundred Nine

Rachel Lake is somewhere on the other side of this forbidding wall
of granite. Wiener dogs, beware!

Greg:

While you were indoors this weekend slaving over your hot brain, I was outdoors in the high pineys clocking my one hundred ninth mile this season on USFS Trail #1313 to Rachel Lake.

Yes, it's a repeat. And you can probably remember what happened the last time I went. No such deluge or aquatic cataclysm this time, just blue skies, hot sun and the fragrant north woods. And a shitload of dogs. And some rednecks. And some weed-huffing adolescents. But I digress.

So I know how I've commented in the past on how a trail can be judged by how many Fat Grammas and Wiener Dogs you meet along the way, and this one was no different. There was not wiener dog 1 anywhere on the 3 miles of trail up Box Canyon, nor were there wiener dogs on the "cruelest mile" - the mile-and-some of gullies and snags that you have to scramble to make it to the alpine basin, 1,500 or so feet straight up from the canyon. Indeed, I would expect that a wiener dog stout enough to endure the "cruelest mile" might have tree-frog digits spliced to it...or have compound eyes or the like. So I was pretty convinced that I would encounter neither Grammas comma Fat nor Dogs comma Wiener once I made it to the lake.

Imagine my surprise when I made it to the lake and encountered Wiener Dog Turbo Mark V with Fat Gramma in tow, basking on the shore. Let me tell you first that this hike was strenuous enough to make me lose 3 pounds (this is not a lie) during the trip, so seeing the two of them was both a shock and a mystery. Now I don't wonder that the dog made it because it was actually one of those Wiener/Jack Russell mixes, which means it's a wiener dog with a lift kit. It is a strange mixture, a wiener dog with monster truck ground clearance. And I don't wonder that the third member of the party, the fellah who ostensibly invented the Man-Teat, made it. But short of a drop from Sikorsky Sky Crane, I have no idea how the Fat Gramma in question hefted her bulk up the side of that canyon and on to the lake shore. Perhaps Rachel Lake is one of those mysterious bodies of water like McElligot's Pool, and she made her way there through a subterranean aqueduct. I did not check her for gills. Perhaps I should have.

On the way back I tripped on a snag, turned my ankle, went headfirstforemostassoverteakettle, skinned my knees and bruised my shirt. I'm okay, though. It just made me realize that I had gone a very long time without skinning my knees, perhaps since I was a kid. Which then made me wonder what I had been doing all this time that could be more important than placing myself square in danger of skinning my knees.

I'm looking forward to mile two hundred eighteen. Man it's great to be a kid again.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Deer Park

Olympic National Park: Man, what a shithole.

Greg:

Do not be mistaken. The picture above is not the road to the Deer Park campground in Olympic National Park. This is the Hurricane Ridge road, which is totally for pussies, Fat Grammas, weiner dogs, Christian Harley Riders and other assorted Honkies. As in it's paved. And it has two lanes. And you can drive it without making a streak in your Underoos - none of which describe the road to Deer Park.

The Deer Park road is about nine miles outside of Sequim, and is easy to spot because there's a movie megaplex and a Toyota dealership flanking it. That is the last that you will see of civilization, so take a good look. Then you wind through a rather bucolic national forest/countryside populated by poverty-level cooters and a handful of Jodphur-clad Horsefuckers who ostensibly own the aforementioned serfs. After about eight miles of this, you take a sharp right, and the fun begins.

The pavement ends, the road goes to one lane, and the trees get a lot thicker. Calling it a dirt road would be generous. It's clay hardpan with rocks the size of baby's heads which either cover the road or shower down from the hillside as you pass by. I was lucky that I rented a four-by because I would not have been able to make it up there otherwise, I imagine.

So you wind all to shit through the trees and when you finally come out of them you see that you're hanging out on a hairpin curve around a rocky overhang where even sherpas fear to tread. Do not - I repeat - do not look down. Look only at the road. You will begin to believe that this road is not the road to Deer Park at all, and is indeed the road to Castle Dracula. That's okay. Let your cold reptilian fear and the inescapable bloodlust spell of Nosferatu drive you onward.

And all of a sudden you're there. Just like that. And you're way the hell up in the sky, right at the crown base of Blue Mountain. Everything is in bloom, so the air is rich with incense of the alpine meadows. The snowshoe hare bark and play, the willow ptarmigan pads quickly through the undergrowth, the red hawk drifts silently down from the belly of a cloud, and the white-tailed deer comes up and tries to steal your fuckin' lunch. Aah, wilderness!

There's a short half-mile trail that circles the top of Blue Mountain. At about 6AM last Saturday, I walked up to the peak and took in a 360-degree view of the Olympics. The sun caught clouds as they boiled up from the canyons, trying to make their way over the peaks. I looked down through an iris of three different layers of cloud cover to see Port Angeles floating at the edge of the Puget Sound almost twenty miles away. I coulda crapped, I tell ya! It was beautiful! I didn't want to leave. Ever. Somebody at work asked me if I got any pictures, which I didn't, but the thing of it is that photographs never do justice to the mountains anyway. They can't recreate the specific luminescent blue of glaciers and they sure as shit can't frame the vastness of whole mountain ranges. And they can't recreate that exhilarating vertigo.

If it wasn't that Teresa was making something that smells really good right now, I'd go on and on about Deer Park. But hey - the stomach commands and I must obey. I'll tell more later.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

Screw Bambi Already, Okay?

Just another shitty day in Olympic National Park.

Greg:

As you probably know, I went solo up to Olympic National Park on Friday to do some hiking and camping for the weekend. Yeah, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's like you've gone to heaven without benefit of dying first. Yes, I really did have the time of my life. I'll get to all of that in the next blog. Let me first address this one point, the fact that the most virulent of the Seven Plagues of the Northwest Woods[1] is the deer.

Fuck Bambi. Just fuck 'im. Him and all his little fagele woodland pals. (Okay, well, not his actual pals, like the Snowshoe Hare or the Willow Ptarmigan, but you get my drift.) Here's why:

So I'm camping in the Deer Park campground on the east side of the park - what is ostensibly the "dry" side of the park, the rain shadow - and I'm cooking up my dinner in my brand new Jetboil, which is my birthday present to myself. By the way, the Jetboil is the backpacking stove extraordinaire. If you have another kind of backpacking stove, you're a fool. This thing makes water hot enough for soup in 90 seconds. Ninety. Seconds. I don't know what part of the Space Shuttle they stole to make this thing, but when I was freezing my tarts off at 3AM and I was able to make a cup of Jasmine tea faster than you can recite the Visitor's Guide pamphlet for Dayton, Ohio - let's just say I was extremely thankful for grand-scale industrial larceny.

Okay, so, Bambi. So I'm making my dinner, which consisted of instant 4-cheese mashed potatoes with some mixed vegetables thrown in. Now in the Deer Park campground, which is a primitive campground that hangs out on a ridge at 5,600 ft. elevation, there are signs all over the place telling you to secure your chow or be prepared to fight the bears for it. They even have big metal food lockers for you to store your stuff in case you didn't come with a car to lock it in. I thought I was being extremely assiduous in the way I handled my food, but the one thing that the signs don't tell you is that these fuckers will come right up and try to snatch the shit right out of your pot. The deer, I mean.

So yeah, I'm eating, and up walks Bambi, giving me the "glad eye", and licking his chops. And I mean he walked right up to me, like less than a cubit away. And I'm eating and he's huffing and so I say "shoo", and what does he do? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. Just keeps staring at me and licking his chops, like he's saying "Hey man. Hey. Whattaya got going there? Aaw, look at that. Four cheese mashed potatoes - my favorite! And look, you put the little carrot cubes and peas and stuff in it, just the way I like it!" So I go, "beat it!" And he's all, "Why you gotta be so aggro, man? It's says right there on the bag that it makes four servings, so that's, like, two each if we split it." So I stand up with my pot and start stamping my feet and walking him out of my campsite with a very stern "Go - the - hell - a - WAY!" To which he grudgingly shambles off while mumbling something like, "Yeah, way to go, you bur-zhwa-zee capitalist douchebag. Your karma blows, man. I hope you come back as a deer." To which I'm all, "Fuck you, hippie! Get a job!"

So was that the end of my deer encounter? Oh mais non. There's more.

I wake up at about 10PM (I go to bed early, like 8PM and generally get up at around 4AM), my bladder distended like a wineskin. I pull on my shoes, walk out of my tent, find the closest place to pee, and do so. I go back to bed.

Along comes 3AM, and what is this? A whole lot of huffing and snorting right next to my head. So I think it's maybe a bear, and I'm thinking I should probably get ready to make a shitload of noise and scare it off - but then - WHAM! - I get a deer-beak jammed right under the edge of my tent right next to my head. So then I think goddammit! and I grab my flashlight and whip open the tent door and shine it on the deer who does what? Yeah, that's right, just stands there and stares at me. It's the "deer in the headlights" thing, I guess. So I shout and wave my arms and the little bastard goes away. For now.

Here's a fact that I was previously unaware of. Unlike every other sensible animal on God's green Earth, deer apparently love human pee. Aside from being an abominable gustatory inclination (right up there with my little dog's love of cat turds), I suppose it's the salt they're after. So as you can probably guess, the deer come back with a vengeance, this time snorting, huffing, lapping the ground, pounding it with their hooves and ripping it up with their little deer teeth to get every precious salty drop from the humus. I know that there's a lot of talk about the gentle sounds of the north woods, the trills of birds, the gurgle of mountain streams, the gentle whisper of the wind in the pines, and all that may be true. But a little-spoke-of theme and counterpoint in the symphony of the woodlands is the huffhuffhuff thumpthumpthump ripriprip huffhuffhuff of the deer feeding on pee-soaked dirt.

So the moral of this story? It is this: if you want to get a good night's sleep in the North Woods, be sure to stow all your food in a secure place, and if you must pee, please do so at least thirty six miles away from your campsite or at the nearest Safeway.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

[1] The Seven Plagues of the Northwest Woods: 1) Deer 2) SUVs 3) Gun-Toting Mulletards 4) Insolent Teens 5) Hippies (but not Oregon(tm) brand Hippies; Intolerant(tm) brand Hippies, also known as Trustafarians, Green Party Volunteers or Christ! What's That Smell!?), 6) Fat Grammas and Weiner Dogs, 7) Deer.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Rachel Lake

Rachel Lake: After gazing upon such beauty, one
simply must consider gouging out their own eyes,
as much of the rest of life will be such a disappointment
thereafterward.

Greg:

I don't think I told you about my hike up to Rachel Lake in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness a few weeks ago. It was a journey worth remembering, I tell you what. If I already told you about it, just skip this blog and go surf some porn or something.

Okay. So. I read about the trail to Rachel Lake (trail 1313, better known as the Box Canyon Trail) in some book called "Best Hikes for Children". I took a quick glance at the informative icons which showed the trail to be "moderately difficult for children". So I'm thinking, "How hard can it be?" Plus, it looked on the map like there were some interesting peaks and some river crossings and what have you, so I decided it would make a good Saturday day hike. Teresa had a drum circle to go to, so just Elizabeth and I went.

I think we all know where this story is going. Let me say just here and now that no matter how dire the description becomes, remember that I had a really good time. And remember, no matter how much I yell and scream and beg to be let out, do not open the door to my cage!

The distance to Rachel Lake is about 4.5 miles. Then it splits off and goes up to another set of alpine lakes called the Rampart Lakes which are on the other side of a 4,500 ft. elevation ridge called - you guessed it - Rampart Ridge. The first three miles of the trail are pretty flat and wind through woods and meadows and have great views of misty waterfalls cascading down the distant canyon walls. Most of the way, you're alongside the Box Canyon River, and you actually have to cross it a few times. Needless to say, the whole experience makes you consume so much beauty that your head could explode. And I'm pretty sure that mine did. I have yet to find my occipital lobe, and I know darn well that I didn't leave it on the roof of the car when we drove away.

So at about three miles in we came to the foot of an astounding cataract that was cascading down from somewhere so far up we couldn't even see it. It's an amazing thing to have an immense waterfall on one side and an awe-striking canyon view on the other. Unfortunately, I was too freaked out at the time to take any pictures. Plus I think I was out of film anyway. So we forded our way across the foot of the waterfall and headed on toward Rachel Lake.

On the other side of the waterfall, the trail got pretty difficult. It went from being a hike to being a scramble up switchbacks consisting mostly of stony gullys and toe-hold roots. Did I mention that I had a full pack? Just for practice? Well, I had a full pack. Just for practice. And it was loaded ALL WRONG. As in the load was hanging too far back, which was something that I didn't realize until I was going downhill.

So we lose the trail. But do we panic? No. Why? Because along with my awesome num-chuck (sp?) skills, bow-hunting skills and computer hacking skills , I have developed the Awesome and Terrifying Power of Map Reading. And using a compass. (The classes at REI do not blow. No, they do not.) So with a flick of the wrist, I and my trusty Indian guide (Elizabeth) triangulate our position on the map and get back on the trail.

So - and no, I'm not setting a precedent of starting every paragraph from here on out with the word "so", I'm just lazy and a piss-poor story teller - just about one living hell and thirty gallons of sweat later, we're standing at the saddle which, according to the map, is only a hundred or so yards from Rachel Lake, when it starts raining. And by raining I mean like buckets - like Malaysian amounts of rain.

So - goddammit! There I did it again! Started a paragraph with the word "so"! Anyway, quick as a cat I drop my pack and leap into my rain gear (and Elizabeth does likewise - but leaps into her rain gear, not mine). A couple seconds later, a couple of backpackers who have way more awesome gear (and ostensibly more awesome skills) than ours come down the trail. They tell us is that the weather is moving down from the ridge and the wind is kicking ass up at the lake, but it's really beautiful to look at. However, I've frozen and/or soaked pretty much all of my balls off by this point, so I opt to turn around and head back down the trail.

The crazy thing about water is that it runs downhill, and rain is pretty much all water, so that means that those stony gullys that we had scrambled up were now mini waterfalls that we had to scramble back down. And my pack was loaded all wrong, so there was much utterance of the "F" word, even though not much sense of humor was lost. Plus, the rivers that we had crossed on the way up were ten times beefier now and much less likely to be forgiving of our bullshit river-fording skills. I think Elizabeth got soakers on the way up and on the way down. She had to stop and wring out her socks a couple of times.

So my neoprene rain gear pretty much told me to fuck off after two hours of that, although it wasn't a complete failure. It leaked a little around the wrists and ankles, but other than that, it held up. But man was it cold! And painful! It wasn't until afterward that I found out that I had overloaded my pack's rating to the tune of about thirteen pounds. I'll never do that again.

So you're thinking to yourself, "Y'know Thaddeus, as I recall, you're pretty much a pussy. And I don't mean half way. I mean all the way to the bone. So what kept you going through this ordeal?" I'll tell you what kept me going. A sandwich. We bought mozzarella and pesto sandwiches and they were calling to us from the car. Once we got back to the parking lot, we took to those sammiches like hyenas to a wildebeest. They could've been made out of cat crap for all I know, but after being cold and wet for five hours and tired to the bone, they were ambrosia.

Once my hunger abated, I went back to the "Best Hikes for Children" book to see what sort of sadistic bastard would foist such a cruel hoax as to say that was a moderately difficult hike for a child. And then I actually read the description, it said, "one of the most difficult hikes in the Cascades" and "if you and your children survive the 'cruelest mile', you'll be rewarded with a view of beautiful Rachel Lake!" Christ H. Double-Dutch Jesus! If you survive - ! What kind of kids do these people have? The kind with rhino skin, ham-thick haunches and suction-cup fingertips?

Am I going back? Yer damn skippy. I plan to spend my birthday weekend (6/24-27) up there hiking the whole Rampart Lakes region. And that will certainly be fuel enough for another blog.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.

The Mud Shoe Diaries: Monte Cristo

Monte Cristo, Washington c. 1893
Fat Grammas with Weiner Dogs,
Patchouli-Stained Dirt-Worshippers, and
Itinerant Cornholers were still
112 years in the future.

Greg:

I am discovering more and more as time goes on that I am a horrible Buddhist. I'm really bad at it. It seems so simple on the surface. Mahayana has but one guiding principle: compassion with equanimity. Sounds easy, right? To fulfill the minimum requirements, all ya gotta do is sit on your can for twenty or so minutes a day and generate compassion for people you utterly despise. To that I would add that it's easier if you do it while you're eating flaming balls of iron.

The reason that this came up is because of a hike I took this weekend to a ghost town called Monte Cristo that's about two hours north of here. It's supposed to be a very popular trail, largely because it's not difficult at all - only 400 feet of elevation gain over 4.5 miles, and it's all along a US Forest Service road. We (Teresa, Elizabeth and I) went early on Sunday to beat the crowds. And here's where the "I'm an awful Buddhist" thing comes in. The reason that I get up at 4AM to drive for two hours to a trail that's over a hundred miles out of town is not because I like a little peace and quiet. That would be understandable. It's because on some very fundamental level I really don't like people. The real reason I get up early is to avoid running into Fat Grammas and Weiner Dogs on the trail. Or anyone else for that matter. Like the usual Backwoods Pretenders, Two-Wheeled Yuppies, Vegan Dirt-Worshippers, Teenage Soccer Maniacs, Soldiers of Fortune, Hair Farmers, and Itinerant Cornholers who generally plug up all the good trails every weekend. And it's for having completely incompassionate thoughts like these that I am going to be reincarnated as a canker sore.

That aside, it was a pretty darn good hike, but I will tell you this: I'm never going out for an all-day hike in a drizzle in the Cascades without every piece of gear that I own that provides either dryness or warmth. Not that I had it so bad. I didn't. I've got that crazy "wicking" gear that you can practically wear on the dark side of the moon and still be okay. But it woulda been a whole lot nicer to be able to change into a dry shirt at the halfway mark. And have some steaming hot cocoa poured out of a Jetboil.

On the upside, my Beautiful Wife Who Is Perfect In Every Way, who hails from a tropical island, and who can withstand temperatures as high as 71F and as low as 69F, didn't scowl at the cold once. As a matter of fact, she had a gay old time the whole way, humping through the mud, through the rivers, and up and down the abandoned townsite. This led me to dub the multi-hundred-dollar wetgear that I bought for her with the title Scowl Insurance. Now she can't stop going on about where we're going next. I have a hiking convert on my hands.

Ach! My starch-filled lunch has seized my aorta in its Morpheus-like tentacles! I must nap immediately whilst cleverly maintaining the appearance of being awake. I am, after all, writing this at work.

Cheers, and give my best to Marie.