Not Every Hike Is a Good Hike

     In preparation for an 11-day, hut-to-hut hike in the formidable Dolomite Mountains of northern Italy, I have been hiking strenuously day after day. Last week I decided to do the Mule Mountain trail, not far from my home. At 4.7 uphill miles, 9.4 round trip, it makes a good training hike.

    At the trailhead, another woman was just setting out, with her poodle. She asked if I had done this trail before, and I said, "Many times. It's one of my favorites." I stopped to adjust my boots, and she walked on.

    She must have thought I was daft. The trail was a nightmare. Weeds overhung it. I kept having to stop and pluck foxtails and burs out of my socks and shoestrings. I had to thread my way through poison oak. 

    Pretty soon I caught up with her where she had stopped to consult her guide book. Her dog was covered with burs. He looked like my socks. I explained the trail to her and passed on by, telling her she could pass me when she caught up with me.

    I never saw her again. She must have turned around. Smart woman.

    The trail left the shade of the forest and crossed a large open hillside, with patches of shade from a single tree every now and then. The temperature was over 90 degrees. I was hiking directly into the sun. I had lost my hat. Sweat poured in rivulets down my face. My shirt was soaked. The trail hadn't been maintained for years. Stiff arms of shrubs commingled across the trail, their pointed branches poking, scratching, and bruising my arms as I busted through them. 

    And then, suddenly, a reprieve from misery: a coyote appeared on the trail, just ahead of me. We looked at each other for several long moments before the coyote turned around, trotted a few steps, and disappeared downhill. 

    Finally I could see the trail's end, half a mile ahead, uphill. There was one tree between me and that goal. "If I can get to that shade," I thought, "then I can get through the open area beyond it and to the trees at the trail's end." 

    But it was beastly hot, and I was still having to battle through shrubs. I thought about turning around, but I reminded myself that if I were in the Dolomites, I wouldn't have the option of turning around.

   Then I thought. "I'm not in the Dolomites." Abruptly, I turned around. 

    When I was a child, I used to play a hand-motion game of going on a lion hunt, my hands imitating walking, slogging through mud, swishing through grass, climbing a tree, seeing a lion, and running back through all the obstacles with the same hand motions, now in high speed. That was what it was like on the Mule Mountain trail that day: faster now, through the bushes, through the poison oak, through the burs, and at last back at the trailhead with as much relief as the hunter in the game.

    My hat was sitting on a fencepost at the trailhead.

    "In the Dolomites," I thought, "I would be at a rifugio, sitting on the deck with a beer."

    At that, I drove into Jacksonville for an ice cream.

Wildflower Spectacles

     This past June I was hiking in the Swiss Alps during the peak season of wildflowers. (See post on July 29.)  I could hardly grasp the beauty I was walking through.

On the trail from First to Schynige Platte, Switzerland

Wildflowers of many varieties flowed like ocean tides. At the highest elevations they were close to the ground but still carpeted the earth. Lower than that, but still high above the valleys, they grew knee-high. Some species I recognized, though they were different there—giant blue columbines? Yellow gentians? Some I identified with my Alpine flower book—Alpine rose, bladder campion. Others I enjoyed without calling them by name. As proud as I am of Siskiyou wildflowers, I thought I could never brag to the Swiss about wildflowers in the Siskiyous.

    But maybe I was wrong.

    This summer there has been a superbloom of wildflowers in the Siskiyous. Is it because, in the wake of the Slater fire, the flowers are loving the ashy soil? Or is it because of the late spring rain? Whatever caused this superbloom I would love to bring some Swiss hikers to the Siskiyous and go with them to Bolan Lake, for instance, or on many of the trails I love. The wildflowers have been stupendous.

Me on the way up Bolan Mt. in the Siskiyous    photo by Margaret Perrow

    The Siskiyou wildflowers are just as beautiful as the Alpine displays, but different. In the Alps, above tree line, the flowers carpet the hillsides. Everything is flowered. In the Siskiyous, they climb up rock walls, crowd together in small spaces, share space with trees and bushes. In the Alps the whole hillside is a flowing mass of various colors from the flowers alone; in the Siskiyous the flowers swirl in colors within outlines of rocks and trees, in small meadows and beside streams. 

On the trail to Oregon Caves, Siskiou Mountains

    There are 3000 plant species in Switzerland. The Siskiyous contain around 3500 vascular plant species of which 215 are found nowhere else in the world. One thousand of Switzerland's 3000 plant species are endangered, according to a sign in the Alpine Garden at Schynige Platte. One hundred and eleven are at risk of extinction, and 55 are already extinct. 

    The sign in the Alpine Garden goes on to say that "the large biodiversity is because of many different elevations, diverse climate conditions, geological diversity, and long periods of traditional and sustainable agricultural management (alpine farming)."     

    The great botanical biodiversity of the Siskiyous is the result of the east-west orientation of the range, which created stopping points for plants migrating north and south, and of climatic and geological influences from the desert on the east side and the ocean on the west, which created a variety of soils and conditions in which a wide variety of plants could find a home. There are also, of course, elevation changes in the Siskiyous, though maybe not as extreme as in the Alps, but still affecting the plant life. Agricultural practices play no part in the Siskiyous, except, maybe, forestry practices, which have generally been detrimental.

    The most astonishing difference between the Swiss Alps and the Siskiyou Mountains is the trees. The Alps don't support many trees, whereas 36 different species of conifers grow in the Klamath-Siskiyous, more than in any other temperate forest in the world.

    In the end, I think I would be proud to bring a Swiss botanical friend to my home. Like the Alps, the Klamath-Siskiyou mountains are a showcase of beautiful flowers. Unlike the Alps, they are also a showcase of beautiful trees.

    

On the Silver Fork trail in the Applegate (Siskiyou Mts)

Birthday at Crater Lake

     Sometime last spring my friends Barbara and Jeanette and I decided to spend the night at the lodge at Crater Lake National Park for my birthday in late July. It was a great plan, but we were about two years too late. All rooms were booked for two years.

    The day before my birthday Barbara called. She had been checking the Crater Lake lodge web site daily, and, miraculously, there was a cancellation. Did I want to take it?

    Yes!

    And so I spent my birthday at the historic Crater Lake Lodge, after all. Barbara and I shared the room, which had a view over the lake of course; it's not worth being at the lodge in a room overlooking the parking lot. Jeanette, unfortunately, was unable to come.

    Once we got to the Park, Barbara and I drove halfway around the lake on the Rim Drive to Cleetwood Cove and walked the steep 1.2-mile trail down to the lake, where Barbara sat in the shade of a pine tree, while I took a long, royal-blue swim in Crater Lake, one of my favorite things to do in the world.

Swimming in Crater Lake. Note the snow.       Photo by Barbara Holiday

    It was a hot day. I let go of plans to hike up Garfield Peak before dinner, slowed the pace, and consequently had time to stop at some overlooks and take some short hikes I had never done before. It was beautiful to see the lake from these new vantage points.

Phantom Ship from Sun Notch trail.   Photo by Barbara Holiday

    Back at the lodge we shared a glass of wine before dinner, standing, not sitting, on the deck overlooking the lake because the usual Adirondack chairs were missing because the roof of the lodge was being repaired. The lodge, the tour boat, and other buildings at the Park had suffered damage from the late and heavy snows last spring. 

    The next morning I woke up at 5:00 to a spectacular sunrise. How grateful I was for a room with a view of the lake! Horizontal stripes of red, orange, and gold lay above the lake.

Moving quietly so as not to disturb Barbara, I quickly pulled on the dress I had worn to dinner, grabbed my phone, and tiptoed barefooted downstairs to the veranda. I watched the colors change, took pictures, then decided to walk along the asphalt path which ended, I knew, at the trailhead up Garfield Peak. When I got there, I saw that the trail was fairly sandy, so why not walk up the trail until it got too rocky for my bare feet? 

    It was very beautiful to be alone on that trail in the dawn light. The flowers

the lodge at such a distance, highlighted by the rising sun,

and the sun itself splashing color on the peaks around the lake as it rose—

it was all so beautiful.
    I walked about halfway up the peak before a combination of increased rockiness and a sense that I should get back for breakfast with Barbara sent me down again. But it had been a beautiful, solitary, sunrise hike.

    After breakfast Barbara and I drove back up the east side of the Rim Drive to hike to Plaikni Falls, another place I had never been. The wooded, one-mile trail took us to a stunningly beautiful, long waterfall that fell into a meadow of wildflowers on the steep banks of the stream with butterflies flitting through them.     

    Finally I had to face the fact that I had obligations at home. It was time to make the drive back.

    It had been a perfect birthday.