An Autumn to Fulfill Dreams

       This is. The most. Beautiful autumn.

     I couldn't wait to get on the Cameron Meadows trail this fall. I have hiked it often in late spring, when the dogwoods are in bloom and the bear grass waves silver in the sun. I've hiked it in early summer, when pink clusters of rhododendron blossoms crowd the trail, and later, when tiger lilies rise orange among masses of yarrow, Oregon sunshine, Indian paintbrush, and dozens of other wildflowers. I generally leave the trails to the hunters in October, so I had never hiked this trail in the autumn, but this year I couldn't bear not to do it. 

       I know the trees on the Cameron Meadows trail – broad-leaf maples, viney maples, black and white oaks, and dogwoods among the big-trunked evergreens: Douglas firs, Ponderosa pines, and incense cedars. I have always thought it would be an artist's showroom in autumn, and this year promised more than usual. I imagined walking up the steep trail through masses of scarlet-red viney maples. I envisioned the woods on fire with color. I was a-twitter with excitement, but as the car neared the trailhead, I tried to let go of my expectations. I told myself it would be what it would be. Resolutely unanticipatory, I put my poles in my hands and started up one of the steepest trails in the Applegate, one I knew at other times of the year as one of the most beautiful. In autumn, it would be what it would be.

        The trail did not disappoint.

      The woods were dark under the forest canopy, but when the sun hit a particular broad-leaf maple, the color burst from it in gleaming butter-gold. 

The dogwoods were more subtle but no less beautiful in their pinks and salmon. One dogwood was such a pale lime-green it was almost ghostly. The viney maples were sometimes the flaming scarlet I was expecting, but even more often, they came out in softer yellows and, even better, in leaves ranging, each one, from yellow to orange to red. The oaks wore russet and orange. In his pumpkin-yellow hunter-deterring sweatshirt, Mike fit right in. 

Low bushes wrapped leafy yellow arms around the dark trunks of pines and firs. We were walking through a painter's paradise. A writer's paradise. A hiker's paradise. Anyone's paradise who would make the effort to climb up there.

      I was ecstatic. I stopped again and again, to take pictures, to hug trees (see thingstodoinmy75thyear.blogspot.com.), and just to gape at the beauty around me.

      At the top, Mike and I sat under an immense incense cedar at the edge of the meadow for a bite of lunch. We didn't have much time to linger because we were going to town that evening for a postcard writing session to get out the vote. But even with that time squeeze and even walking on a trail I had just come up, I couldn't just hurry through. Walking down the steep trail was like diving into yellow, like diving in and swimming  through color, the variations in shades of yellow like swimming through shallow water into deeper water, the yellow in the trees varying from champagne to lemon to goldenrod like the blues of water varying from turquoise to lapis. The orange-tipped trees were like white-caps on the ocean. Everywhere there was new beauty. 

      This was. The most. Beautiful autumn hike. I came home color-saturated and soul-satisfied.

Dogwood leaves