Our perfect summer days, such as I wrote about two weeks ago, have come to an end. Now our skies are white with smoke. Visibility is diminished to my closest trees, and Humpy Mountain is obscured behind a veil of smoke. 

Humpy Mountain yesterday afternoon

Humpy Mountain in the idyllic days of summer

    But smoke is not as bad as fire. Although we suffer the lung-stifling effects of the fires in other places, the Applegate itself is not on fire. At least, not yet.

    It would help if we would roll back climate change. Get busy, damn it, all you politicians and lawmakers and industry CEOs who could be making a difference! 

    According to some thinking we should be thinning the forests of their century of fuel build-up. But there are problems there. One is that BLM, at least around here, seems to be taking advantage of "thinning for fire" to do some pretty damaging logging, taking large trees that are both carbon storers and fire resistors. Another problem is that logged-over land, often the result of "thinned" forests, is seemingly more susceptible to fire than our old-growth and large-tree forests. A third problem is that even if forests thinned of small trees (leaving big trees) would create slower and cooler fires, who's to say that those areas would be the ones to get the fire, so was that a good use of money? I'm no expert on fire or on forests, but I do see that if an agency says "for fire protection," the public falls right into line with whatever the proposal is and that not all such proposals are either especially for fire protection or actually protective against fire or, even, good for the forest.

    A couple of years ago the Devil Fire burned not too far my house. It was a ground fire, burning low and slow, doing the good work of forest health that fire does. So why didn't the Forest Service let it burn? If this is a fire-dependent ecology and if a century of fire suppression has put us in this quandary, then why put out fires that pose no danger? 

    Experts speaking in the documentary film Elemental (see if if you can) and elsewhere are advocating defensible space around structures as the only sensible way to approach fire preparedness. Fire prevention, of course, is preposterous, and fire suppression has been disastrous, but protecting homes and other structures from fire seems sensible. I love my trees, but I am ready to do what I have to do to defend my house from the fire that is as likely to be here as in Lahaina or in Paradise, California. I can only hope that the fire that is sure to come will hold off till I get that work done.

Hiking in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area in the Wallowa Mountains of Northeastern Oregon

                                                                                            photo by Scott Mattoon

     After seven days in the mountains, the twelve of us on this Sierra Club backpacking trip hiked 2 1/2 miles to the trailhead, found our cars, then reassembled for lunch in Joseph. Then we hugged good-byes and headed back to Pennsylvania, New York, California, Missouri, Illinois, and various places in Oregon. I drove to a sub-par Motel 6 in The Dalles, took a shower, ate some dinner, and lay down to sleep in a real bed again.

    But I couldn't sleep. I missed the hum and thrash of the river outside my tent. I missed the chill of the night and the warmth of the sleeping bag. I missed the other hikers who had been sleeping in their own tents near me, those eleven good friends who had been strangers to me only a week before. The mediocre dinner from the Indian-cuisine food truck had left me missing the amazing camp-food dinners Leah, trip leader, had prepared for us—risotto with three kinds of cheese and tuna, noodles with Thai peanut sauce, curry-and-rice. And I knew that whatever I found for lunch on my way home the next day couldn't match Nutella on lavage bread with dried bananas, mangoes, and turkey jerky. Such imaginative meals Leah had planned!

    I missed the mountains. Several days before, as I was hiking the 1000-foot elevation gain up 8540-foot Glacier Pass, then down the other side along the West Fork Wallowa River—

                                                                                            photo by Gabe Oprea

the steep slopes streaming with wildflowers, the river cascading white through black rock, the peaks rugged and stark above the narrow valley—I thought, "I have hiked in the Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy, in the French and Swiss Alps, in the mountains of Costa Rica and Corsica, in the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Appalachians, and I can say that this is world-class hiking." 

                                                                       photo by Mark Dumont

    Everywhere wildflowers amassed in stunning arrays—purple asters splotched with scarlet firecracker flower and Indian paintbrush, sunshine-yellow groundsel, sunflower-bright arnica—occasionally a rein orchid, catchfly, pearly everlasting. Horse mint scented the air. I grew dizzy trying to name all the flowers and finally gave up.

                                                                                            photo by Gabe Oprea

    We saw picas and mountain goats. At one campsite we were awakened by a large herd of horses galloping past camp. When it rained (and it rained a lot), we just donned rain gear, covered our packs, and kept on walking.

                                                                                        photo by Mark Dumont

    Was the best day the day we hiked up to Ice Lake, a good steady climb from camp at 5500 feet to the lake at 7849 feet, followed by a beautiful long swim,

Swimming in Ice Lake. I am behind Leah.    photo by Mark Dumont

lunch lakeside (watching mountain goats descend to the lake), then a walk halfway around the lake to a remarkable white-sand beach, where I swam again? 

                                                                                    photo by Mark Dumont

    Or was the best day the day we climbed Glacier Pass (where I sprinkled some of Mike's ashes; see post on June 21, 2020, for an explanation), then hustled down the other side through that gorgeous scenery, on and on until it was starting to get dark and Leah and John, our leaders, found a possible campsite ("It would be miserable, but it would only be one night of misery"), which we rejected in favor of walking another two and a half miles in hopes of finding there a better place to camp? What a fast walk it was! But we got to a large meadow and threw up our tents just before dark.

                                                                                        photo by Mark Dumont

It had been a long, beautiful, and exhilarating day.

    The lakes were superb. I loved my swims, and the stream crossings, too, which I usually did barefooted. 

I am about to cross behind Traci, my boots in my hands. photo by Mark Dumont

    Have I mentioned the food? Did I say the leadership was great? Did I say the scenery was breathtaking (to say nothing of the breathtaking hiking)? Did I mention the company? We were teachers, a pianist, a farmer, an engineer, people who worked in tech, in non-profits, in academia. We spanned the ages of 39 to 79. Phenomenal hikers all.

                                                                    photo by Mark Dumont
Everyone is in this picture but Gabe, who is taking it. Note Leah, our leader, far right. She and John, assistant leader (4th from left), carried enormous packs.

    No wonder I had a hard time going to sleep that first night off the trail. My body was there in Motel 6, but my spirit was still in the Wallowas, among those wildflowers, in those lakes, with those friends.

                                                                                            photo by Gabe Oprea

On a Perfect Summer Day I See My Fox

    Our summer days lately have been as beautiful as they come—warm but not overly hot, balmy, gentle, smoke-free. In fact, it has been something close to this all summer—no smoke, no triple-digit temperatures. I have been hiking a lot, with a 30-pound pack, training for a six-day backpacking trip in the Wallowa Mountains, in northeastern Oregon, but today I took a rest day and sat on the deck in my new swing, now my favorite place in the house, reading some, writing some, swinging gently.

    I looked up at a strange scraping sound in the yard in front of me, on a bare, flat bit of ground downhill from the house, between the woods and the apple tree . 

    It was my fox, rubbing his back on the rough ground. Then he sat up, glanced at me when I made a slight noise, then sat there, looking around, attentive but at ease, before loping off down the hill towards the woods.

    I see this fox from time to time, and I often hear him at night. Sometimes he stops twelve or fifteen yards from the house and barks his saw-blade-sharp arf. If I come out the door, he looks at me and barks again. I greet him with a few words, then go back inside.

    He is a gray fox, very beautiful in his red-and-gray lush fur coat and long handsome tail. 

    I know it's the same fox I see every time because he is lame in one foot. He limps on his right front foot, lifting the paw off the ground and trotting angularly, though swiftly enough. I thought at first the paw might have a temporary injury, maybe a thorn in it, and I imagined myself playing the part of the mouse who took the thorn out of the lion's paw in Aesop's fable. But I have seen the fox often enough that I think the paw is permanently injured. I doubt that it was caught in a trap; trapping isn't usual around here. I wondered if it were a birth defect. Maybe the mother fox sat on the foot when the kit was born. That happens sometimes with domestic animals.  

    I know better than to be sentimental about wild creatures, and I feel strongly about the wrongness of making pets of wild creatures. But I do love my fox. We are cordial, if distant, friends. It is between us as Emily Dickinson said:

            Several of nature's fellows

            I know, and they know me

            I feel for them a transport

            Of cordiality.

    So it is with my fox.