Hiking the Elliott Ridge

          This September I will be hiking the Alta Via 2 in Italy’s Dolomite Mountains for thirteen days with my friend Mike. The guide book says things like, “The day begins with a climb of the long and tortuous variety” and “An exhausting zigzag over barren scree precedes a lengthy section of near-vertical via ferrata.” I’m a little intimidated. If I’m going to do it, I have to be able to do it. To get ready, Mike and I plan to do a lot of hiking this summer.

            To begin, we did a 15-mile hike on Elliott Ridge the other day: up the Summit Lake Trail from Squaw Lakes, then along the ridge to Stein Butte and down Stein Butte to Applegate Lake.

            You who know the route are raising your eyebrows. “Diana,” you’re thinking, “that’s a 13-mile, not a 15-mile, hike. You wouldn’t be stretching the truth, would you?”

            No, I’m not, but I did manage to stretch a 13-mile hike into a 15.4-mile hike, not because I wanted to or needed to but because I made a mistake.

            It was fine going up Summit Lake Trail to the ridge – steep enough to give us a good work-out and make us sweat, but once we got on the ridge, the mugginess in the air lifted, the views of the Siskiyous were fabulous, the walking was easier, and our step grew lighter, though we were hustling a bit to get back in time for our respective evening activities. 

Then the trail started heading off the ridge, going downhill while the ridge stayed above us. This didn’t feel right. I remembered from having taken this trail before that we were supposed to follow the ridge, with some pretty steep up and down, till we got to Stein Butte, and then head down the trail to the Stein Butte trailhead at the Applegate Lake. But now, if we kept going, obviously we would end up at the lake but far from the trailhead, where my car was parked. Obviously we were no longer on the ridge. Obviously we had missed a turn somewhere.

            I should know better by now than to trust this intuitive feeling. My internal compass is utterly unreliable. My whole body is telling me that I should be “over there” or on a different trail or going a different direction. Intuitively, I know we’ve made a wrong turn. Once when I was a child on a family vacation, my father pulled into a gas station so all the kids could use the bathroom. When I got back in the car and my father pulled onto the road, I was absolutely certain he had turned the wrong way. My whole body was telling me we should be going the other direction, though of course it wasn’t true. But here I was again, feeling the same rightness, the same strong intuition that we weren’t headed right.

            Mike generously agreed to test my (always wrong, but he didn't know that) intuitive sense of direction, and we backtracked uphill to a place where we could look down into the Elliott Creek valley. There was no other ridge there, where I thought we should be. It wasn’t possible, Mike said, for us to have made a wrong turn. But that imaginary ridge was so strong in my intuitive space that I was still unsure, in spite of all the evidence right before my eyes, so I said could we just walk a little farther, just to make sure we hadn’t missed a turn (onto a ridge that obviously wasn’t there, but somehow I thought somehow might be)? Without even an exasperated sigh Mike agreed, so in the end we hiked 1.2 miles back the way we had come before I was convinced that the only route was the one we were on, so we hiked the 1.2 miles back to where we had turned around, then kept on going, and in about half a mile, we came to a place I recognized, which also conveniently had a trail sign, and my internal compass suddenly righted itself.

             I apologized meekly. Mike said it didn’t matter, since what we were doing was conditioning for hiking in the Dolomites, anyway. I reminded him that the guide book also said everyone who hikes Alta Via 2 gets lost at some point, so maybe we were in training for the Dolomites in more ways than one.

            It was a long hike, but I was never too tired to appreciate the views of the Siskiyou Crest or the spatterings of lupine and paintbrush or the occasional spectacular tree 

or the invigorating breeze and blue sky or the blue-green Applegate jade shining in the sun. We had to hurry to make our evening activities, but I was exhilarated by the success of the hike. Fifteen miles? Piece of cake. Dolomites, here I come!