How to Prepare for a Backpacking Trip

     A few days ago I got an invitation from my son: How would I like to join him and a small group of friends for a two-night back-packing trip? 

    YES!

    Then I read further. The proposal was to hike the Mother Mountain loop trail in Mt. Rainier National Park in two days. We would camp at the trailhead the first night. Day 1 on the trail: 11 miles, 3115 feet of ascent, 5644-foot descent. Day 2: 6 miles, 3250 feet of ascent, 500 feet of descent. And then we're done.

    Ooh. Intimating, especially considering that my hiking partners are all a generation younger than I, and mountain bikers and trail runners, to boot. 

    My knees began wobbling. Could I do such a thing? I'm a good strong hiker, but I haven't been backpacking for two years (COVID, Mike's death). 

    The invitation implied a trust that I could do it. Better get ready!

    I started by filling my backpack not quite full and taking my ordinary hour's walk, up the mountain and down. Easy as pie.

    The next day I had planned to hike to Deadfall Lakes and up Mt. Eddy with a full backpack, but there was too much smoke on the south side of Siskiyou Summit, so I gave up on that trip and stopped instead, on the way home, at Collings Mountain, at the Applegate Lake, and climbed 1040 feet in four miles. It took about an hour.

    So far, so good. The next day I climbed up Mt. Elijah: six miles, 1028-foot elevation gain, four hours and a little more. Full pack. No problem.

Meadows on the trail to Mt. Elijah

    I wasn't anywhere close to the demands of Mother Mountain, but I was doing so well I decided to up the ante faster than anticipated and climb Stein Butte the next day.

That is a 10-mile hike, steeply up, then fairly flat, then steeply up again to the top, then down the same. 2331 feet of elevation gain, doubling what I had been doing the past three days. I usually do it in less than five hours.

    With my full pack, it took me six hours, and I was totally worn out by the time I got back to the trailhead. My feet were killing me. My hips hurt from the weight of the pack. I drove home totally exhausted—but grimly satisfied. I still wasn't doing a Mother Mountain equivalent, but I was getting closer.

    The next day I rested.

    The next day, yesterday, I drove to Crater Lake National Park

and hiked the one-mile trail down to Fleetwood Cove with only a day pack. I took a good long swim in that most beautiful of all lakes, then hiked back up, 700 feet, all in one go, no stopping, pretty easy, and drove to Mt. Scott. I put my full pack on my back and started up.

Photo from hikeoregon.net

    Mt. Scott is a five-mile hike, up and back, with an elevation gain of 1500 feet. The sign at the trailhead rates it "difficult" and says it takes three hours, and that's what it took me, even with a full backpack. I got to the top in an hour and forty minutes, spent twenty minutes looking at the view, and was back at the car an hour later: three hours. If my math is right, I was climbing around 800 feet an hour. Dividing the first day's climb on Mother Mountain approximately equally for time (as long to hike the shorter uphill portion as the longer downhill portion)—though I have no idea if that's the case—I was doing approximately on Mt. Scott what I would be doing on Mother Mountain, at least for elevation gain. For hours on the trail—nowhere close.

    I hike the trails checking my preparedness. Cardio-vascular: excellent. Stamina: pretty darn good. Legs: strong to begin with and getting stronger. Hips: have to learn to bear more weight. Knees: no problem. Feet: hurt on the downhill! Nothing to do about that except bear the pain and stop when I need to. Back: very strong. Attitude: excellent.

    I'll do all right. I'm not there yet, but I'm getting there. I still have time for more training. I think I'll do just fine. And I am so looking forward to it!

    

Journals from the Past

 In the midst of my spring housecleaning last week (okay, I'm a little late), I came across a long shelf of journals. I didn't glance inside them as I dusted around them because I didn't particularly want to revisit days of angst and the dramas of youth. Some of my journals were store-bought, blank-page books. Others were my own hand-bound books, but there was one book I didn't recognize. The cover said, The Bronze Bow, a young adult novel. Curious, I looked inside. By covering the pages with gesso, an artist's medium (whiting in glue) usually used to prepare a wooden surface for painting, I had created the blank pages of a journal. 

   The first page reads "Journal 1992." I would have been 49 years old. The next page reveals the purpose of this journal: to help fulfill my New Year's resolution "to push my creative self to its utmost."

    The next page is a painting.

    This is not a journal of "what I did today" or a diary of secrets or a record of the weather. This journal is full of poems, paintings, drawings, pithy meditations, and artistic explorations on abstract qualities: honesty, understanding, thrift, acceptance. On some pages I play with handwriting or with the words on a page of the novel. Another page has a drawing of Table Rock and four haiku written on a hike there. 

I play with the placement of my poems on a page, sideways and otherwise. I make a drawing of lines and patterns with colored pencils, all in greens and blues. I paste a folded picture on a page and write a dedication on the front side: "Sweet Denise, Thanks for the green love beads." Unfold the paper to see the picture. I draw a mandala with colored pencils and on the facing page write a poem: 

            North hunkers down in winter

            Till: ecstatic lift of birdsong.

            How sad to live in southern climes.

 

    On another page I ink out most of the words to create an erasure poem with the words left on the page. On another I use the colored pencils feely in writing poems: 

            Caged-in dog [in red]

            Barking, howling, turning [in brown]

           What difference to him that the plum tree blooms? [in blue]" 

    On another page the wide circle of a face swirls into more loops down the page. In every loop is a poem.

    It doesn't matter how good, or not, the art is, or the poetry, or how deep the thinking, All that is irrelevant. The journal exults in an imagination free to ramble. Rereading this journal, I can see the limitations on creativity imposed by the computer. There is no play with calligraphy in a Word document, no freedom on the page. I do no drawings when I write poetry now that I write on the computer. I have no interaction with line and color and medium, placement on the page, small bursts of poetry. Glitter on some pages, 

pasted-on pictures, erasure poems, wise quotes cut from another text and pasted onto a page, with my glosses. "Be silent and your heart will sing," says the text, and I add "How can you hear the singing of your heart if you are not silent? How can your heart sing if you are not still?" A contemplation on the Tarot card of the Fool, with a drawing to go with it. A dream I wrote down. I could write down a dream with the computer, of course, but I couldn't accompany it with a drawing.

   "The medium is the message," Marshall McLuhan said. The message here is that the medium makes a difference.  If I want to push my creative self to the utmost, I see now, I must take up a pen, some drawing pencils, and a blank book and let my imagination, unhampered by the computer, run free again.

    (And then, as serendipity would have it, just after writing this, I received in the mail a birthday present from my sister: a beautiful hand-made journal, blank pages ready to receive the freed-from-the-computer expression of my imagination in 2021.)

Note the beautiful binding

The Madeleine Cakes in My Library

    Although the Cleaning Crew is coming in a few days to do a "deep cleaning" at my house, I have taken on the task of taking every book off every shelf to dust the books and polish the shelves, maybe because I don't think they'll be that thorough and maybe because once I start, I enjoy looking again at my library.

The library

    I began, reasonably enough at the top two shelves, which hold English novels, chronologically arranged—those wonderful eighteenth-century novels I taught at the University of Oregon a few years ago: Moll Flanders, Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy; nineteenth-century novels, including three or four Dickens' novels; Wuthering Heights, with my teaching notes in the margins, read so many times it is held together by a rubber band; and all of George Eliot's novels, just to read the titles and handle the bulk of which fills me with pleasure. The same thing happens with James Joyce. I probably won't ever read Ulysses again (three times is enough), but to cull it from my library would do a grave injustice to one of world literature's best novels. I couldn't be so crass as to throw it out.

    Below those books are the American novels, chronologically arranged: Hawthorne, Willa Cather, Twain, Hemingway, et cetera through the centuries, including every novel Faulkner every wrote, some of which are also held together by rubber bands. Contemporary novels, English, American, and South African, spill onto other shelves.

    And then two shelves of nature writing. Dusting Bartram's Travels, I remember again the alligator attack and shiver again. Winterdance puts me back at Island Lake, in the Siskiyou Wilderness, where I read that book aloud to Mike, beside and then inside the tent, both of us laughing ourselves silly. Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams, the Sierra Club's annual series of best American nature writing, Loren Eisley, Barry Lopez, eight books about swimming and rivers….

   Adjoining shelves hold novels in translation: Italian, Swedish, French, German, Arabic, Spanish, Icelandic, Russian, Norwegian, Portuguese. Below that are my dual-language dictionaries of French, Swedish, Latin, and Italian and books in the original languages: Latin, Swedish, French. I may not be able to read those books any more, but having them on my shelf reminds me how much I once delighted in those languages and those literatures.

    There are books on language and linguistics, on art, music (like that wonderful, little-known book, Music and Women), Bullfinch's Mythology, sixteen books on gardening and crafts and flowers by my sister (Laura Martin), other books by other friends. There is a whole shelf of drama, dominated by Shakespeare. Other shelves witness my literary obsessions: every novel Nabokov ever wrote, plus the two-volume biography by Brian Boyd, a biography of Vera Nabokov, and a wonderful book of Nabokov's lepidopteran travels called Nabokov's Blues. There's a whole shelf of food writing, every issue of the Best American Essays series from 1988 to 2017, and a pretty thorough collection of books by that best of American prose writers, John McPhee. The Norton anthologies of English literature, world literature, and short fiction take up a lot of space, but they blossom with teaching memories, especially in the marginalia.

Top shelf: drama.. Left: Norton anthologies. Right top: Contemporary novelists.
Right next: Food books. Bottom: MacPhee, Best American Essays

   I hope this isn't boring you. I love reading the spines of books in another person's house. When I discovered the whole history of English literature in a stranger's house, I felt an instant affinity with whoever that English major was who lived in that house. Maybe if you studied Old English, you would get the same delight reading the titles of books on one entire side of one of my bookcases, dedicated to Middle and Old English literature and Anglo-Saxon culture—its gardens, dress, food, art, architecture, daily life, and language. I have ten Beowulf books. Chaucer. Old English poetry. Icelandic sagas. Handling each book as I removed it to dust behind it, then repositioned it more firmly among its comrades, brought fond memories of my graduate studies only ten years ago. And there, among the other books, is my dissertation: As the Anglo-Saxon Sees the World: Meditations on Old English. I am especially fond of that little book.

    There are two shelves of poetry, including 101 Famous Poems, the vary same book I read and loved as a child, and Spencer's The Faerie Queene, which I adore, and, you know, Robert Frost and Mary Oliver and Robinson Jeffers and Rumi and Seamus Heaney and Edward Hoagland and on and on. There is a whole shelf of maps, mostly of wilderness areas, many of them with trails outlined in red that I have hiked.

Showing the loft with its books

    In the loft are the nonfiction books and children's books. History and biography are well represented including a very old book called Around the World on a Bicycle that I picked up from my parents' shelves and read when I was a teenager. Science, I'm sorry to say, takes up very little space on my bookshelves. The children's books are pretty tattered. Most were bought used when Ela was a child and I had so little money, and then they were read again and again because they are treasures. To pick them up now is to relive the pleasure I had reading to Ela for all the years of his growing-up. 

    All these books are more than their covers and their pages, and they are more than the stories they tell, the language that gives me such pleasure, or the facts and wisdom they contain. They are storehouses of treasures, each a magic carpet on which I sail through various parts of my past. Just to handle them enriches me again with their art, their characters, the memories they evoke. The tactile experience and the title together are the madeleine cakes that take me back to those rooms in my memory where that book resides.

    There is no madeleine cake in a Kindle.

Reading in the library

A Driving Tour of the Siskiyou Crest

    The mountain view from the Dutchman Peak fire lookout above the Applegate watershed of the Siskiyou Crest stretches three hundred and sixty degrees around the peak. Slowly a small group of ardent Applegaters encircled the lookout

 as Luke Ruediger, who had invited us on this driving tour of the Siskiyou Crest, named the peaks, pointed out the watersheds, showed the connections between them, identified which parts were protected, which forests were in the hands of commercial interests, which were public lands, and how increased protections would make a connectivity for wildlife, recreationists, and other dwellers and users of these lands. The map of the Siskiyou Crest and surrounding areas was alive before me.

   And how beautiful it was, that circle of mountains with its jumble of peaks and valleys and the knot of mountains where the Klamath Siskiyous meets the Cascade Range at Mt. Ashland. 

    Dutchman Peak was the first stop on this driving tour on back roads, country roads, mountain roads, and increasingly rough roads. As we walked from the gate at Observation Gap up the gravel road to the lookout, Suzie Savoie, co-tourguide, named wildflowers for us—fleabane, owl clover, wild buckwheat, bee balm, yarrow, balsam, scarlet gilia, Oregon sunshine, the Applegate's very special split-hair paintbrush, and, with special reverence, Henderson horkelia, which grows in eight places in the world, seven of which are in the Siskiyous.  

    Several redtail hawks circled around Dutchman Peak. A kestrel landed in a tree further down the slope above Silver Fork, which was named, we were told, for a man named Silvee, corrupted into Silver, who lived at Donomore Meadow, where we stopped later in the day. The largest spread of mules' ears Suzie knows of in the Siskiyous (and Suzie knows her flowers!) massed at one end of the meadow, which then dropped a level to stretch to the distant forest beyond and the Pacific Crest Trail in that forest. 

    We were on the Siskiyou Crest itself. We drove through hemlock forests and Shasta red firs, broke the trees into more overlooks of the Siskiyous on both the Applegate and the Klamath sides. We could see the Red Buttes Wilderness Area, Preston Peak, Scraggy Peak, Kangaroo, Humpy Mountain and Grayback Mountain (between which I live), and numerous other peaks. For a brief period, when the smoke lifted, we caught a glimpse of magnificent Mt. Shasta. We were in the forests of the Siskiyous and viewing the wonderland of its watersheds. We stopped to view rare wildflowers: Jaynes Canyon buckwheat and Douglas's buckwheat, in addition to the aforementioned split-hair paintbrush and Henderson's horkelia. 

Stopping to view split-hair paintbrush on Dutchman Peak

We drove on narrow roads through deep canyons, where rock cliffs loomed above us and massive evergreens stuck roots into the soil so the trunks could rise vertically as the earth slanted sharply beneath them to unseen depths at the bottom of the canyon. Our road was a narrow shelf cut into that canyon wall. We also drove through acres of house-tall mullein and masses of thistles on land owned and logged by Fruit Growers Supply. It was sobering to contemplate that this ruined land is what these other forests would look like if they were sold to timber interests. 

    Home again, my head was aswirl as I tried to grasp the momentousness of what I had seen. These are the Siskiyous, my mountains. This is the home of rare plants found in few other places in the world. This is the home of the raptors and butterflies I had seen that day, of the Pacific fisher that only the front car on our five-car caravan was lucky enough to see, of the bears, cougars, bobcats, ringtail cats, and numerous other fauna species I have seen at my home. These are the Siskiyous, my mountains, which I had seen that day from a different, entirely encompassing perspective. These are the rare and beautiful Siskiyou Mountains.

    I love my mountains.

(Above photo by Liza Crosse. All other photos by Suzie Savoie)

Taking to the River on a Hot Day

    It has been beastly hot. Over 100º in town, I heard. It's not as hot here on the mountain, by maybe ten degrees, but that leaves a whole lot of hot to deal with. Mostly I like to stay indoors with the south windows closed, the north windows open to catch a possible breeze, the fan turning its loyal head from side to side, and a glass of ice water by my side. To get into a car, even to drive to a swimming hole, sounds unbearable.

    But a day's float down the river? That's different! When I was invited, at last-minute notice, to join a one-day, two-raft float trip down the Rogue River "tomorrow," I didn't hesitate. The occasion was a birthday party with people I didn't know who had contacted a rafter they knew who asked a friend I know to row the second raft. With an extra place on that raft, my friend invited me to join them. Whatever I was supposed to do "tomorrow" would have to wait. I was going down the river!

    Could there be a better way to spend a hot day, especially if your friend does the rowing, giving you an entirely relaxed day? Greg scoffed when I commiserated for his hard work. "This is vacation," he said, pulling easily at the oars. 

    Certainly it was for me. All day my feet dangling over the raft in the water kept me cool. I let my eyes wander along the slowly passing shore, catching sight of merganser ducks swimming in a perfectly straight line and geese floating in gaggles. I watched rocks slide under the raft with smooth somnolence and white-tailed eagles soar like distant kites aloft in the wind. Occasionally a great blue heron would glide upriver and land with a silent, graceful fold of its wings at the river's edge. Now and again a kingfisher darted across the river.  Though I was watching closely, I never saw a turtle, but we did see an osprey land in a snag-top nest, from which came the eeping cry of baby ospreys, and the sleek head of an otter gliding through the water. The steep mountains rose on both sides of the river, the quintessential Rogue River sight—sometimes with a skirt of flat land: the willows, then the alders, then the hill-climbing firs, cedars, and madrones. Oaks covered other hills. Some shores were sprinkled with purple sweet peas. Occasionally I slipped into the river to swim alongside the raft.

    A feared afternoon wind never materialized. Greg rowed us serenely through the slow-moving waters, swept us expertly through the rougher waters. The Wild and Scenic Rogue, a four- or five-day float that begins where we disembarked, has a lot of Class III rapids ("medium"), two Class IV rapids ("difficult"), and one Class V ("very difficult"), but our section, from Indian Mary Park to Argo, one stop before the Wild and Scenic embarkation point, has one Class III riffle and eight very fun Class II riffles, which demanded some neat navigating from our captain and pull-in-the-feet action from me, and a bunch of lesser riffles, where the river giggled a bit before slowing down again.

    Both rafts pulled to shore at Jump Rock, where all the young guys and the over-seventy owner of the two rafts climbed the thirty-foot rock to jump off it into the river. The over-seventy-year-old didn't jump. He did a back flip. I made a couple of dives off a low rock. My days of high dives are behind me, but I still love the sudden head-first plunge into cool water.

    It was late afternoon when we ran through the Class III Almeda Riffle just before Argo. Before Greg rowed us to shore, I turned to him. "Can't we keep on going?" I asked. "Can't we go on down the Wild and Scenic Rogue, stay on the river another four days, camp on the shore, go through the canyons, run the big rapids, follow the ospreys and the eagles and swim with the otters? Do we have to go home?"

    He grinned and pulled us ashore.

    Earlier in the day, at Indian Mary Park, where I mostly stood in the river while our captains readied the rafts and ran the shuttle, I watched another group of rafters organizing gear. When I inquired of a man standing next to me, he said they were taking the five-day trip down the Wild and Scenic Rogue. 

    "Oh, you are so lucky!" I said, obviously envious.

    "Come with us!" he said.

    I wish I had said yes.