Hiking by the Light of the Full Moon

    I was coming off the East ART trail late Saturday afternoon when I passed two people just starting their hike. "It's awfully late," I thought, "to be starting a hike." Then, in a flash, I understood. They were going to do a moonlight hike.

    What a brilliant idea.

    As soon as I got home, I called the two people who had planned to hike the Mule Mountain trail with me the next day. What about if we started our hike at 2:00 pm instead of 9:30 am, I suggested, which would put us on Baldy Peak around 5:00, and we could hike back to the trailhead under the full moon? 

    They thought it was a brilliant idea.

    As we started on the trail, the late-afternoon, waning sunshine cast a lovely light for hiking. Farther up the trail, we stopped to watch a hawk circle and soar in the canyon below us, then climb, circling, into the sky. As we watched, I recited Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem, "The Windhobver": "...dapple-dawn-drawn falcon, in his riding/ of the rolling, level, underneath-him-steady air/and striding, high there/ how he wrung upon the rein of a wimpling wing." Hopkins's words and rhythms matched the soaring hawk before us. 

    We got to Baldy just as the sun was going down over the still-snowy points of the Siskiyou Crest.

The golden globe poised full over the peaks, then sank, spreading pink into a few wisps of clouds over Grayback Mountain and a deepening yellow all along the Crest. Turning around, we caught the moon just rising above the nose of Baldy, full, large, already silver-brilliant.

    In the suddenly chilled air, we put on wool hats and warmer jackets, then sat on the hillside to eat our snacks, reveling in the wild beauty of our surroundings. (Wordsworth: "'Tis a beauteous evening, calm and free/…The broad sun is sinking down in its tranquility.") It was close to 6:00 when we started back down the trail.

    At first we had both the vestiges of sunlight from the afterglow on the horizon and the ever sharpening white light of the moon, enough for us to make out the rocks and rough spots on the trail. As the sky darkened, Orion twinkled over the Siskiyou Crest. Long striated clouds began to accumulate from the east, glowing in the moonlight. The moon behind the bare branches of oak trees threw grotesque shadows on the hillside. The tops of one clump of bushes glowed so whitely in the moonshine they looked like blossoms. When we left the open hillside and entered the deep forest, we were plunged into darkness and reluctantly turned on our headlamps, sacrificing the magic of walking in moonlight for the safety of better vision. 

    We stopped frequently to marvel at the beauty of the mountains in the full moon. I thought how rare this was, to be so deep in the mountains in winter moonlight. We heard a barred owl far across the canyon. We watched the glittering stars, the clouds moving in, the mountain ridges hulking dark under the bright lights in the sky. Once Margaret, who was in front, stopped, perplexed by two pinpoints of light ahead. Were they animal eyes, reflected from our headlamps? The eyes stared, disappeared, came back, went away, reappeared lower—owls turning their heads, looking over their shoulders, then back at us. We passed respectfully under their tree.

    It was after eight when we got back to our cars. There was frost on the trail. We said quick good-byes and drove off. As soon as I got home, I took a long Epsom salts bath, had a beer, went to bed, and slept dreamlessly for many hours, as I had already been traveling a magical, moonlight dream in the Siskiyous.