Going up Mt. Thielson

     My thighs have been so sore since climbing Mt. Thielson that I have lurched whenever I stand up. 

    It was that kind of hike.

    At first it looked impossible,

    

The hard part yet to come.      photo by Greg Stanko

but Greg, Chas, Cheryl, and I were on what was clearly a trail, so others had done it, including Greg and Cheryl, years ago, so we could, too, couldn't we?

    After several miles of gradual climbing through woods, we hit the steep parts and the loose rock. Shale. Scree. Trails that disappeared into just paths of rockfall. Even standing upright was hard, much less walking, much less climbing. (Oh, the thighs!) 

Greg and I were hiking ahead of Chas and Cheryl, who were following who knows what route. We didn't see them again until they met up with us at the top.

    Once when my feet slipped out from under me, I fell on my butt and slid a foot or so before I could dig in my heels and wedge a pole against a solidly placed rock. I planted the other pole against another rock, but when I took weight off my hips and tried to stand, I slid a few more inches. 

    Greg to the rescue. He assured me he was firmly standing, so I took his hand, he pulled me up, and on we went.

    The slippery stuff went on for miles (didn't it?). Then came the boulders and the high steps.

And then the top. Or nearly the top—a narrow ledge that was close enough to be called the top, Greg said, though there was another 30-foot climb to the tip-top. I watched a young woman do it. She was stretching hard both up and down. She told me she was 5'2". I wondered if I could make it without those two extra inches. 

    Another group on the ledge with us used ropes.

I thought I would try it, anyway, but even the first step was too high and the handholds too tenuous for me to feel I could do it safely, so I stayed where I was and could still say I had climbed Mt Thielson.

    Climbed up, yes, but could I get down again?

    The four of us started down together but quickly got separated again. Greg and I made a slippery, tenuous, unbalanced way down, both of us sliding and stumbling as we traversed across dangerous loose rock, then stood with shaking legs on a narrow ridge of solid rock before traversing to another. We had lost whatever trail there might have been but could see Chas and Cheryl and other hikers above us, seemingly on a trail, so we made our treacherous way across the slope as they came down it. When we reached the trail, we paused to put a band-aid on a cut on my shin. One of the other hikers passing by said, "You're not the only one," and showed me a big rip in the back of her shorts. 

    Greg and I were back at the trailhead by 6:00. When Chas and Cheryl joined us, Greg opened a cooler in his truck and pulled out a bottle of sparkling cider (in lieu of champagne, he said, since not all of us drank alcohol). We toasted each other in both celebration and congratulations. I especially raised a toast to Greg, who had taken me up Mt. McLoughlin a few years ago and had now taken me up—and back down—the amazing Mt. Thielson. 

    What a day.

(All photos except the first are by Chas Rogers.)

Backpacking in the Wallowas Again

    I have just returned from backpacking for four days in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area in the Wallowa Mountains of northeastern Oregon. Stupendous country and a great trip with four women friends: Cheryl, Janet, Sandy, and Cheryl's sister Karen.

L-R: Sandy, Karen, Cheryl, me                     Photo by Janet

L-R: Me, Sandy, Cheryl, Janet.                Photo by Karen

    Setting aside simply the experience of being with these friends, under these conditions, in this kind of country, what was best?

    Was it Sandy's birthday, when we were camped on beautiful Lee Lake and Cheryl presented Sandy with a cupcake-paper of rich chocolate pudding, topped with a square of white chocolate and three tiny birthday candles?

L-R: Cheryl and Karen, singing "Happy Birthday" to Sandy

Cheryl had made the pudding at home, then freeze-dried it. At camp, she reconstituted it with water, then whipped it and whipped it to silky smoothness. After our dinners of various backpacking foods, we all had the marvelous treat of such a good dessert.

    Or was it the view from the top of Ivan Carper Pass, after the long climb up—Eagle Cap looming above the valley with its blue spots of Upper Lake, Mirror Lake, and Moccasin Lake far below? 

    Or was it my long swim in Moccasin Lake, when, swimming back to shore, I was swimming to the plinking tunes of a ukulele from another campsite along the lake?

    I don't think it was the campsite on Minam Lake because my swim was hampered by a long, ankle-deep, mud-sucking wade to get far enough into the lake to swim, but it could have been the campsite on the rocks above Lee Lake or the next night's camp along the East Lostine River, beside a plunging series of waterfalls.

    Some people put on the list of best moments the lightning and thunder at the first night's campsite. I don't. 

    But it could have been the spectacular view of Eagle Cap from the valley as we were hiking out—a quintessential view of a mountain peak framed perfectly by ridgelines of trees descending to a vee in the valley, with a creek in the foreground. I stared and stared, it was so unreal.

    For me, though, I know what the best moment was: the early-morning swim in Lee Lake, when the water was glass-smooth and a round moon, ghostly in the morning light, was looking down on the dark blue lake from the pale blue sky. 

Lee Lake

And then, after all those wonderful moments, we came to the end of the East Lostine Trail and were back at the junction where, four days earlier, we had started out on the West Lostine River trail. Maybe the best part, after all, was just doing it together.

From lower left, clockwise: Janet, Cheryl, Karen, Sandy, me

Poisoned Secrets, Part 2

     The second of my two stories for The Hearth's storytelling event, on the theme of family secrets, was about another secret from my childhood. (See last week's post for the first story.) In this story I am a junior at Sandy Springs High School, in Sandy Springs, Georgia, and am taking a political science class from a teacher named Mrs. Douglas—Julie Douglas, as I came to call her.

    One day Mrs. Douglas asked to see me after class. We stood in the hall next to the closed classroom door, and she said, "Do you ever dream?"

    It was a strange question, but as it happened, I had had a particularly vivid dream the night before, a dream with a snake in it. When I told the dream to Mrs. Douglas, she became very excited.

    "You have had an initiation dream," she said. "The snake is a symbol of initiation." She didn't specify exactly an initiation into what, and I don't remember what she said after that, but the upshot was that I felt I was a part of something special and important and that Julie Douglas would be my guide.

    From that day on, I often dropped by her classroom after school for esoteric conversations about symbols and myths and the unconscious mind. And if I had had a strong dream, I would ask her to interpret it for me.

    It was all more psychic than cultic, mostly just Julie Douglas expanding the boundaries of my intellect, a kind of Jungian exploration of the unconscious. She recommended books for me to read: The Glass Bead Game, Siddhartha, Jung and Hawthorne and Joseph Campbell. I was both fascinated by the intellectual expansion and flattered by the special attention.

    But also some vague fear that no one would understand made me keep the whole thing a secret.

    Except for my diary. 

    I was writing about it in my diary, which was all right because diaries are secret, right? What goes in a diary belongs only to the writer, so in my diary, I was freely exploring the ideas Julie Douglas stimulated and recording our, if not secret at least private, meetings.

    One day I came home from school to face my mother's fury. She had read my diary, and she was furious with Julie Douglas.

    I still don't know what made my mother betray trust and read my diary. I don't know if she just picked it up idly and stumbled across the pages abut Julie Douglas or if some suspicion caused her to seek out the diary for confirmation.

    And I didn't understand why she was so angry. She wasn't normally an angry person. I think maybe what she read scared her. Maybe it sounded like I was joining a cult. Maybe she just didn't understand Jungian thought. Maybe it sounded psychically dangerous or religiously threatening. Whatever the reason she was angry enough to say she was going to go straight to the school principal and tell him what Julie Douglas was doing.

    I was terrified. Julie was my friend, my mentor, my teacher—and a very good political science teacher, too. I was terrified of being the cause of her being fired. I sobbed in front of my mother. I begged her not to reveal any of this. As startling as it is to remember, I got down on my knees to beg my mother not to do what she threatened.

    My mother didn't promise me anything, and I went to my room in tears and fear. In the end, she didn't do anything, either, or, if she did, nothing came of it. Julie wasn't fired, and neither my mother nor I mentioned the incident again. But I no longer met Julie after class for those wonderful discussions. And I had to interpret my dreams myself from then on. 

    Camp Highland (which I wrote about last week) and Julie Douglas were episodes in my life more than half a century ago. Now, at the remove of so many years, I can understand my mother's fear at discovering her teenage daughter's secret involvement in strange conversations with her teacher, and I can forgive her for her reaction. And perhaps I can also forgive the little girl at Camp Highland for her shameful secret of self-harm, too, because I understand now the psychology behind her actions.