Inside the Mountain's Skin

This post isn't about me

2012-02-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

This post isn't about how the fog hung around the shoulders of the moraine, enclosing me in a grey curtain. It isn't about how a cautious rain lightly kissed the ice-skimmed surface of the glacial lake far below. It isn't even about running on what always feels like the top of the world, alone.

Instead it's about Sherry, who went out for a run on January 7th and never came home. It's about all the other women like her, most whom you have never heard of. It's about wanting to take back the trails for all of our daughters, cousins, friends, so that what happened to Sherry never happens again.

So this post isn't about how far I ran today, or my pace, or how the ice and rocks made the trail treacherous. It isn't about my shoes, soaked through, or the deer half-glimpsed behind the ridge, watching me.

No. It's about people all over the world doing a virtual run in Sherry's memory, a powerful tide of belief and sorrow and rage, proof that united, we can do anything. People are running on treadmills, on pavement, on dirt and snow and ice, none of us running alone for one brief moment in time.

This post isn't about me. It isn't even about how, inexplicably, I started to cry as I headed back down the trail and home, years of looking over my shoulder, the split-second measuring up of a sketchy van on a remote highway, the clutching of pepperspray, the statements about how women should never run alone, as if we bring it on ourselves--all of this adding up to the balance between how running makes me feel and the fear. A fear we should't have to face every time we lace up our shoes.

But I am wrong here. Because this post is about me. Don't ask me to explain, but as I reached the more sane part of the trail, the part where I can actually run, for just a moment I saw in my mind the face of a woman I will now never get to know. It was Sherry, smiling. Saying: Thanks for the run. I've only had this happen once before, years ago, someone else who passed on too soon. I believed then. I do now too.

I get to go home today. It's easy to take that for granted, but I don't, not today.

Run on, Sherry.

Part of the Problem

2012-02-08T17:48:00.000-08:00

from johnmuirtrail.org

It seems really strange to be planning something that is six months out, but we are deep in it, combing over maps, discussing bear canisters, and fretting over logistics. I usually like to fly-by-night it, only deciding what I want to do the day before. Not this time.

Here, we have dates and alternate dates, trailheads and alternate ones, lotteries and faxing permit requests 24 weeks in advance, only between certain hours. Ugh! Of course, there are reasons for this, and we are the reason. Too. Many. People. I am officially Part of the Problem.

I have to laugh thinking of how jealously we guarded our wilderness solitude in Alaska. If another boat steamed into the bay we were in, we fumed and griped. Seeing someone else on the beautiful and mysterious Red Bluffs, we jumped a foot in amazement and declared the place overrun. Even here, except in the height of summer on the most popular trails, I can be completely alone. I did a 40 mile backpack trip this fall and in all that time only saw one person. Not going to happen on the JMT!

I don't care though. Ever since I set up my Tadpole tent (which I still need a front pole for--anyone got one out there?) at Rae Lakes and saw the thru-hikers pass by, I wanted to hike the whole thing. Anchored down by my summer seasonal job of collecting native plant seeds and willing them to grow in arid campgrounds, I could only manage three days out on the trails that ran along the Sierra's spine. I always had to turn back, wondering what I was missing. If seeing people and camping near them is the price I have to pay, I will do it. I know where to go to get solitude when I get back.

So it begins. The delicious purchasing of gear, the planning of meals, the poring over maps. Really, is there anything better than planning a trip, especially one you have dreamed of for twenty years? Bucket list, people.

So we wait until 5 pm on February 14th when other desperate souls will be lunging for the fax machine. Wish me luck!
Riddle me this, Batman...What is your dream trip? What holds you back? Or have you already done it? Was it as good as you imagined?

moon, stars, snow

2012-02-05T13:33:00.000-08:00

Let's start with this: the moon hung suspended over the ridge that runs between the two canyons, illuminating the night. Stars glittered in the extreme cold. Trees popped as their bark expanded, sounding like distant explosions in the forest. The meadow was alive with snow shining like diamonds.

my camera wasn't working that well, a casualty of the cold weather, but you get the idea.

This was why I wanted to come here in winter, to feel the difference between the meadow I know in summer and this one, where once the sun dipped behind the Hurwal divide, the chill set in, a cold so strong that it felt like a presence. When I stomped out a campsite with my snowshoes, it was just above freezing, warm enough to slog a little further up the trail. But summer trails vanish in winter and soon I was floundering in deep snow, far off the path, but not so far that I couldn't see Polaris Pass and the valley opening up towards Frazier Lake. Too far to hike today, with untracked snow. It took me three and a half hours to make it to the meadow, a hike I can do in two hours in summer. My snowshoes sunk deep in the baseless snow, making each step like this: step. sink. breathe.

I was alone in the meadow, the way I had planned it. I knew that if I brought someone along, the temptation would be there to rely on someone else to do the hard things. There's a time to be a wilderness princess and there's a time to rely on yourself to survive.

And that's what it felt like, survival. My feet would not warm up, despite my -20 bag. Everything froze: saline solution, boots, snowshoe bindings, even the tent poles. On the way out I had to fasten them to my pack like an oversized antenna, since they refused to bend apart. High above my head, the poles caught on every overhanging branch.

Waiting for the sun would have been the ideal solution, but after being trapped in the tent for hours I was eager to move. I jumped up and down in an unattractive dance, my feet in agony. The chemical packs I had brought along were lukewarm, a casualty of age perhaps. There was the wrestle with the frosty tent, the prying out of stakes frozen in the snow, the forcing of boots into snowshoes in a temperature perhaps at zero, perhaps lower.

So why do this? The only answer I have is this: moon and stars, reflected in snow. Does there have to be another reason?

running through sprinklers

2012-02-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

I started running at fourteen. Decades ago now.Three of us jogged around the neighborhood on balmy summer nights, ducking through sprinklers and talking about boys we liked, but who never liked us back. We walked when we felt like it. We didn't wear watches or Garmins or heart rate monitors. We didn't know how far we went or how fast. It didn't really matter. When did that change?

Other people ran, but not that many. One of our classmates slowly plodded down our street in full makeup, inexplicably clad in nylons under her shorts. Our dads ran, more competitive than us, their forties chasing them. They were faster than we were, but we didn't care. If people passed us, we didn't mind. When did that change?

For these runs, we wore whatever sneakers we had and regular old shorts and T-shirts. The only "jogging bras" were the same ones we had, until a company came out with a white monstrosity that you had to struggle into. We didn't have compression tights, we had baggy sweatpants. But we didn't care. When did that change?

When I got home from running, I didn't think about the calories in whatever I ate. I didn't categorize myself as "bad" or "good" depending on my food choices. The scale didn't have the power to ruin the day. I didn't think fatfatfat, although honestly I could never have been called fat in my life, even though I often feel that way. When did that change?

I'm not saying I want to go back to fourteen, with its associated crazy. I like some high tech gear which makes it possible for a more enjoyable and safer experience. I like adding up miles in my head sometimes and meeting goals. But sometimes I miss the simpleness of doing what I felt like for as long as I felt like it. No drumbeat in my head saying exercisecaloriesstrengthtrainstretchYOGAwas this enoughexercisepushupsWHENDIDYOULASTRIDEYOURBIKEranoncethisweekTENMINUTEMILES
AREYOUKIDDINGME?isthatallyou'vegot? I miss meeting at the bottom of "Barry's Hill" on those simple summer nights, the sound of sprinklers a gentle metronome.

avalanche hunting

2012-01-29T12:54:00.000-08:00

Already people are worried about the canyon. When the canyon burns, only the weather can put it out. Because generations of people have fiddled with the canyon, fires in it are not natural. They sweep across the cheat and thistle with a ferocity that is unstoppable. This year, because we are not having winter, the grass is tall. This grass will cure, dry out, and become flammable fuel. All we will need is lightning.

Of course our winter could turn around. We still have the typically snowy months of February and March to catch us up. But so far we have had snow followed by rain followed by ice. I can't remember the last time I ran without ice grippers. The mountains are dangerous, avalanches waiting to happen.

But because we are adventurous souls, we have to check it out, so a steady stream of people have hiked up to look at the latest big slide. It came off the ledges above Hurricane Creek and thundered almost to the river. Before I moved here, I used to think that the flats were good places to camp in winter. Now I know: just because you are on the flats does not mean that you are safe.

Big avalanche on Hurricane Creek.

I ventured up to my favorite running turn-around, Slick Rock Creek, but as I hiked (the snow was a little too deep for running) I was aware of what lay above me, like a big creature ready to pounce. The slopes are loaded. It is only a matter of time.

See the roller balls on the slopes? Red flags.

There is snow up high, and yesterday the skiing was a particular form of fabulousness that I love, crust cruising. It is spring skiing in January, and you can go anywhere, gliding over the surface without punching through. It is not the kind of skiing I should be doing in early winter. As I write this, the temperature outside is 45 degrees.

When I used to fight fire, we celebrated winters like these, thinking that a fat fire season would pad our bank accounts, bring us lots of interesting travel to smoky mountains, and provide that rush of aliveness that we craved. Now it just makes me uneasy. Sure, maybe I can get into the high lakes early. I can cross streams with impunity. But it doesn't feel right.

Today as I ran on the treadmill (a respite from the ice grippers) I watched an OPB show on television to ease the boredom. It was about a dry summer in Southeast Alaska, the summer the salmon almost didn't come back due to the lack of water in the streams. If the salmon don't come back, the bears don't eat. If the bears don't eat, dragging fish carcasses up into the trees, the trees feeding on the nitrogen from the fish, the entire dance of interdependence stops.

I remember that summer well. It was my last summer in Alaska and each unusual sun-drenched day was a jewel. We camped without tarps. We stripped down to our last layer and paddled, sweating, through the bays. It was both glorious and frightening. We knew, even as we cursed the rain, that we needed it.

I'm sure the snow will come, and we will forget that we were ever without it. I'll wish for open trails in July and curse our short, fleeting summer. Until then, we are stuck in spring.

The Curious Attraction of Chlorine

2012-01-25T18:23:00.000-08:00

In the last place I lived, we were rich in pools. There was the one redolent of excess chlorine which made our eyes burn and our noses run, but it was often deserted and peaceful. Then there was the blissful saltwater pool, often full of aqua-joggers and so busy that I had to circle swim, desperately flailing the water in an effort to stay ahead. There was a regular group of us who gathered a few times a week to swim the tank, moaning our indoors activity but waiting for that sweet spot when our bodies floated perfectly, suspended ten feet above the bottom, a perfect alignment of body and water.

Where I live now there are two choices: the lake or the short hotel pool, which charges $5 per person per hour, and you have to call ahead to make sure you aren't displacing guests or a kid party. The lake is free, but the warmest it ever gets is about sixty degrees in August. Last year it never warmed up and we swam in wetsuits all summer, an ungainly herd of seals. Right now, with snow kissing the water? Forget it.

I like swimming, even though in the old town everyone passed me in the lanes, old, fat, young alike. (All except the 90 year old couple and the lady with a broken leg, but seriously. Can I really count them?) Learning to swim as an adult has left me with bad habits and a lack of technique, but there are times when it all works. My arms slice through the water, elbows high, my feet barely rippling the surface. It is at those moments that I can glimpse what life is like for a fish, my body just a sliver, a knife. It is like flying, only underwater.

So today I journeyed with a pal to the hotel pool. It was suspiciously cloudy and the rude donning of swimsuits was not too pleasant after being covered up safely all winter. We only had one pair of goggles between us so we shared turns using a kickboard and doing laps, only about five strokes to a length. I used to swim a mile and a half at a time, but here there was no way to guess our distance. A random hotel guest wandered through, staring. Swimming, we remembered, was hard when you don't do it much. It makes you limp as a noodle, a feeling I have found unique to this form of exercise.

But a few laps and there it was, that moment, slipping through the curtain of breath and water. Though I much prefer the outdoors and a brisk mountain lake, I will take what I can get. I will take this weightlessness, the cessation of worrying about anything but stroke, breath and what is in between.

nice try, Alaska

2012-01-21T16:54:00.000-08:00

The day I left Alaska, it started to snow. I could hear it rustling against the walls of my cottage like someone trying to get in. Out in Sitka Sound, the ocean was whipped to a frenzy, white spray foaming on the rolling back of the steep waves. "We can leave because it's not quite a gale," one of the flight attendants said. But the plane had overflown Juneau already and in truth, leaving Alaska is never quite as easy as it may seem.

It didn't take long for Sitka to start weaving a spell. I heard myself start saying things like, "Let's all meet up at Baranof Warm Springs next winter!" and, "Yes, I'd love to kayak with you next summer in Whale Bay." Like before, the island became the whole world, the mountains the only mountains that matter. That is what happens when you live on an island. You have to make an effort to leave, get on a boat, buy a plane ticket. It is hard to see beyond its boundaries. To counteract this, if you want to (and there are some who don't want to) you have to step off once in awhile. "Island fever," we used to call it, or "getting off the rock." You could tell when someone had stayed too long. On the other side of this island, people would sometimes run into the woods as we motored into shore. They melted into the trees, leaving no sign. Other times they would wave frantically, talking a mile a minute, reluctant for us to leave.

On my birthday, Carolyn and I hiked up to a frozen lake. The day was perfect, cloudless and still, the snow piled deep where wind had pushed it, the lake a drowsy blanket. Though a landslide had piled up massive trees on the far side of the lake, it was easy to believe that nothing really had changed here in my absence, that I could slide right back into living here, as easy as that.

Ths is kind of hard to see, but a skin of ice formed over the waterfall. Water was running underneath it. It was cool! Trust me.

As the plane left the runway, buffetted by wind, the island was quickly shrouded in clouds and snow. At the next stop on the milk run we sat for hours in the plane while the runway was cleared, ice was removed from the wings and the auxiliary power was repaired. "I hope we don't get stuck here," my seatmate whispered. We looked out the windows into the grey sea and blowing snow. When I lived here, getting stranded happened all the time. I was stuck in towns, in remote campsites, and in drafty cabins. Once we could hear the floatplane droning overhead, unable to land on our lake. "Have a nice evening," the pilot finally told us over the radio and my companions and I stared at each other. We had only planned to be out for the day. We shrugged, built a fire, and harvested a bright orange fungi called Chicken of the Woods (which would probably have tasted better with butter). People talked about walking out to salt water where a boat could retrieve us, but we knew that there were slippery cliffs, bears, and devils club between us and the shoreline. Going a mile could take all day. Better to stay put.

When we took off for Seattle, I was a little bit disappointed. As much as I wanted to go home, there's something about Alaska that I can't quite shake. It's the one that got away, like the person you knew you couldn't live with but that made you sparkle. I don't belong there anymore; after two days of running my knees ached from the moisture in the air. The isolation and the same ecotype would drive me crazy. But still. But still. We all have those places, don't we?

more sweet than bitter

2012-01-18T12:11:00.000-08:00

Cold. Bitter cold. That is my first impression as I return to Southeast Alaska, two and a half years since I left. Of course, ten degrees above zero is considered balmy up north, but for the archipelago this is the deep freeze. Typically kissed by the Kuroshio current (literally translated as the Black Stream) which keeps the temperatures moderate, this long stretch of clear and cold days is unusual.

When you return to a place you basically fled because your life wasn't working, you find out who your true friends are. They will drop everything to hike through a frozen world with you even though this kind of cold, mixed with an ocean wind and the punch of humidity that makes it feel even colder, can be dangerous if you don't bring the right gear (which I didn't). They will come and pick you up and transport you to their cabin overlooking the ocean and you will talk about marathons you ran with them, about those miserable 22 mile training days when the rain was horizontal and bone-chilling but you went on anyway, all the way out to the end of the only highway in town, fourteen miles in all, out and back, out and back.

Laura and I crunch along in our microspikes, the cold settling into our bones. My fingers cramp inside of their inadequate gloves. But we press on, across the Cross Trail and up Indian River. In the harbor, a layer of fresh water has frozen like plates on top of the salt. I have only seen this once before, years ago, when I was determined to escape the island for a few hours. Then, I beat at the ice with my paddle, forcing my way through to open water. Only one other paddler was out there that day, braving the bitter cold. We paddled close, exchanged a smile. People who live here are tough like that. But today, nobody is on the water. The boats are frozen to the dock, only a few brave souls in open skiffs running between islands.

Who comes to Sitka in January? The same person who goes for a run at nine degrees, the warmest it will get all day. I bundle up and run in the park beneath the big spruce trees. Ghosts dog my footsteps, all the rollercoaster life I lived here coming back to chase me down, but I can outrun anything today, my breath a frozen halo, sea level running effortless after years in the mountains. The friends I have here warm my heart, they bring me in from the cold. They have seen me at some of the worst of times and they had my back then. They still do.

A place is never as good or as bad as you remember it. I've lived enough places to stay away from the egocentric view that there is only one good place. Just like good people, they are everywhere. But sometimes I think at heart I'll always be a little bit of an Alaska girl.

(You can buy this bumpersticker HERE.)

"a woman would have to be nuts to run alone"

2012-01-14T09:21:00.000-08:00

There are conflicting stories about what happened to Sherry Arnold, the teacher from Sidney, Montana, after she stepped out the door for an early morning run on January 7th. Hit by a car whose occupants panicked, abducted, something else? What isn't disputed is that she won't ever go for a run again. Neither will Amy Bechtel, vanished in similar circumstances near Lander over a decade ago, that mystery never solved.

I've been following Sherry's story, and the comments on the news stories are disturbing. Women need to be armed, they need to use common sense, they need to find running buddies (oh wait, they say "jogging"--how patronizing) they shouldn't go out at all. As a woman who likes running, hiking, and biking solo, I know there are risks, and I hate that half the population should have to fear the other half. There's something wrong with that, and yet there's something deep and ingrained that most women can feel inside, an instinctual fear that men will never know. There is a dark shadow that I fight to ignore as I run, a looking over my shoulder that I try to erase.

I have run the back roads and trails all of my life, in the national forests and parks that I worked in as a ranger. I've mostly run solo, because I like the silence of just my breath and the sound of my shoes. I like adjusting my pace when I want to, or even pushing my bike up a hill when I can't ride it, or slowing to a survival shuffle when I need to. The wilderness and back roads feel safe to me, welcoming. I like the clarity that being solo brings me. It is a respite, a meditation, just me and my workout.

I have run with others, but the older I get, the more my running has been solo. Hiking is a mixed bag, depending on whether I want to push it or share the experience. And I'm not really accomplished enough on the bike to keep up with real riders. What I am trying to say here is that good workout buddies are hard to find, and I am angry that I should be expected to find one every time I step out the door. If I run alone, do I get what I deserve? If a mountain lion comes down from the cliff, if a random weirdo decides it's a good day to commit a crime, is it my fault?

I am not going to turn the trails I run on to places of fear. I am not going to safely stay on treadmills. I may carry pepper spray now and again, but I am not going to give in. There are enough boundaries that we have to stay inside. This won't be one of mine.

RIP Sherry.

New Running Shoes!

2012-01-11T11:57:00.000-08:00

When I used to run a lot, it was a once-a-three month event: the arrival of a fresh pair of shoes. I always felt faster in a new pair of shoes. Those shoes carried me through swamps in the Everglades, across desert mesas, up mountains, and in the dense rainforest. They leaped over rocks, scaled cliffs, and crossed streams. They lined up at the start of 5Ks, 10Ks, and beyond. Sooner or later they broke down, to be relegated to more mundane tasks like wood hauling, bike riding, and walks.

But now that I've become a cross training advocate, I don't go through the running shoes like I used to. Plus I have an uneasy feeling that I should be using my barefoot shoes more. So it's been a good two years since I got new shoes. In that time, my brand (Mizuno) has gone through two new generations.

Here are my pretty new shoes:

Yes, they are RED!

I don't feel sad that I'm not a marathon runner anymore. I don't miss the days at the track doing speedwork. I like doing something different every day and I think it's better for my body. But getting new running shoes always reminds me of those days when running felt easy. There were ten mile runs that went along the Red Cedar River, through the woodlot and out onto the farm roads. There were 22 mile trail runs in the hushed corridors of the Elwha, on the Olympic Peninsula. There were the runs where a pilot named Bill buzzed me in his SuperCub, opening the window and screaming down to me that if wanted a ride, come down to the dirt airstrip. There were the times I saw panther tracks (Florida), bears (Alaska, the Sierras) and a wolf (Idaho). I had names for some of my routes: The Dreaded Pictograph Loop. The Playground Route. The Hunt Club Run. There were my running companions, who made me faster or just shared the miles: Juls, Roger, Jen, Ken, Brian, Julie, to name some. On my feet I explored the boundaries of each new world. It was how I combatted loneliness, anger, and sorrow. Running gave me confidence, purpose and hope.

It still does, but I share the love now with other things. My first run in my new shoes was only three miles, a short snowy jaunt through the park. In the old days that would have just been a warm-up. But there was yoga to attend, a trip to pack for, and a man to kiss hello. Balance in all things.

"wreck yourself on the weekends"

2012-01-07T17:38:00.000-08:00

Among the funny, insightful and interesting comments to my last post about the travails of working 9-5 (or, in my case, 6-4:30), Titanium wrote what is now my new philosophy, wreck yourself on the weekends. I hope you don't mind, Titanium, but I am stealing it.

So the weekend arrived, finally. I awoke determined to use the most of a free day. Rogers Lake was in my sights, a hike that continues resolutely upward until you reach just shy of 7500 feet. There's something about the combination of the climb, the pushing through snow, and the elevation that makes this hike seem harder than it should be for its overall distance. I've tried to run it in the past and given up at mile 2. Basically, it boils down to a slog, winter or summer, but a slog that becomes worth it when you top out in the sunny meadows near the lake.

Looking back where I started. That's Wallowa Lake.

There was a skiff of snow over ice for the first two miles and I stopped to put on my microspikes, realizing that despite my gear addiction, nearly everything I had on was old. I wore soft shell pants from the early 2000s, an early synthetic shirt from 1992, a fleece vest circa 1997, and an ancient Patagonia fleece from the nineties. My mittens are down ones that my mom made me in I think junior high, but they are the best ones for cold weather I have tried. Sometimes old school is best.

Chained up, I continued onward through a mess of downed trees. This winter has brought little snow but plenty of wind, and I crawled under and over dozens of trees. Because I have often been on the hard end of a crosscut saw, I know exactly what it will take to clear these. I will no doubt feel compelled to go back and help clear out these behemoths. But not today.

In two hours I had crossed the snowy bridge over the East Fork and was nearing the flatter meadows, only an hour to go to the lake. Here, untouched snow with the consistency of small flakes shimmered in the sun. In the distance, Aneroid Peak loomed over the valley, a good someday goal, but not today. There was no wind, only a breathless calm, the sense of peace I always get in the wilderness. In winter, that peace is tinged with something else unnamed, a voice inside that is constantly checking in: Hands warm? Need another layer? Boots dry? This voice keeps me from wandering off in a daydream of sun and diamond snow, so I listen.

This is a lake. Really.

At the lake I could not tell the border between land and water, so I paused to gnaw on a Clif Bar. The water in my Camelbak had frozen in the first mile (I will learn this lesson someday) so I scooped up handfuls of snow to melt deliciously in my mouth. Skiers had passed this way a day or so ago, bound for the private cabins a half mile higher at Aneroid Lake. But few people venture this far for a day hike. The miles, too long, the daylight, too short.

This lake gets no glory, most people barely sparing it a glance on their way to its more glamorous sister. But I like this lake's unpretentiousness. I like how it sits half-hidden and you have to climb down to really see it. Because of the cold, I can't stay long. Maybe one day I will camp here. But not today.

Darkness fell as I drive up to my cabin. The fire is out. The floors need sweeping. My memoir sits balefully unwritten. If my husband wonders what there is to eat, there's cereal. I am wrecked and happy.

revenge of the cubicle dwellers

2012-01-03T19:31:00.000-08:00

In all my checkered employment history, I have never had a sedentary job. Of course, there have been extended periods of butt-sitting, mainly in winter, but each job had its share of hiking for dollars. (Or kayaking for dollars, as in the case of my Alaska years.) These outdoor moments kept me from feeling like an old office slug. While working for the Firm has its downsides (if I was tasked with catching up with a trail contractor, I couldn't just run up a peak instead) I mostly loved every minute of hiking, clearing trails, cleaning up after trashy people, and yes, even cleaning toilets.

All of this changed today, my first day of a new job. I'm working on some interesting projects across the country, and I get to work at home, finally shedding the dreaded "Cube Farm." True, I can listen to Pandora Radio with impunity. I can take my laptop outside when it's warm. I can eat lunch whenever I want and I don't have to share a bathroom (oh joy). It's pretty much the perfect setup. But..it's not fieldwork.

The sunlight slanted in through the windows, the temperature soaring to a freakish 50 degrees. The mountains beckoned. It took serious willpower to keep working away. It did at the old place too, but my fellow cubists kept me honest. There was always some meeting to attend or a discussion to have (although to be honest, all conversations did seem to end up being about William Shatner). In this new job, I have to...gasp...be a grown-up.

"Going to the field" is the great divide in my Firm. It is what makes people labor at jobs well below their skill level into their fifties because they just can't face the awfulness of pushing a keyboard indoors. It is what holds some of us back, because the weirdness of working for a natural resource agency means that if you want more money, you have to go indoors. Sooner or later it's easy to forget just why you work there.

In my field going years, I paddled twelve foot seas in the Gulf of Alaska. I backpacked with a seventy pound load, off trail into some of the wildest country I have been fortunate to see. I've built bridges. I've set prairies on fire. I've gathered pungent cones from trees and planted new trees. I've cleared trails and slithered through caves. It has been a glorious run.

But every now and then a person needs a new chapter, a chance to change things up a little. The mountains aren't going anywhere. They'll wait for me.

If you work 9-5, or some version thereof, how do you deal with the reduced outdoor time?

First hike of 2012. NOT on a work day.

2012 outdoor goals

2011-12-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

Let me emerge from remodeling to write a post about 2012 outdoor goals. (Actually, if I am honest, my husband has done ~~most~~ all of the remodeling. I just make decisions and write checks to pay for it. I did sand some tile, though.) We are fixing up my little cabin because the former owners did not like lighting or kitchens. (If you are reading this, former owners, I appreciate your small footprint, but my husband does not like cooking with a headlamp and I would like some counter space. Love the cabin though.)

But I digress. It's that time of year, right? I have already seen the Resolution People march resolutely into the gym. Unfortunately, they won't last, because it's better to exercise because you want to. That's why I like to say I am training for life, not for an event. It is great to know that you can kick it on a 16 mile hike without having to specifically train for it. So here goes, some outdoor (and one indoor) goal for 2012:

1. Hike the JMT. This is assuming that a) I get a permit; b) that everyone does not bail; c) I can figure out the complicated transportation logistics; and d) I can bear to drag myself away from my mountains during our short summer. But no worries! I have another plan in place. Plan B includes tracing out and doing some similar (but perhaps harder) long hike here, of at least 100 miles.

2. Finally make it to Deadman Lake, one of the few on the north side of the mountains that I haven't figured out how to get to. I won't be denied in 2012.

3. Run. I don't set goals for this because for so many years I defined my life by how fast and how far I ran. No more. Just....run. But if all the stars align, do more long backcountry runs with my wonderful Nathan hydration pack.

4. Winter camp. I was all set to do this over the holidays but it...rained. I have spent many, many nights camping in that kind of weather. I want fluffy snow and a beautiful frozen lake, not slush and ice. Ugh!

5. DO MORE YOGA. Yoga on a sunny rock by a lake is the best.

6. Speaking of lakes, jump into ten wilderness lakes. THAT is the best.

7. On a full moon, do one or all of the following: paddle Wallowa Lake. Sleep on top of Eagle Cap Peak. Ski. (obviously these are not on the same day)

8. Bike singletrack. Even if I have to walk down ~~some of~~ all of the hills. (The trails here are not for beginners)

9. Swim in tropical water. I know, I'm dreaming, but I can still include it.

10. And my indoor goal: Get the darn novel published. And, finish the firefighting memoir.

That's it! No marathons, no ultras, no freezing/scary/challenging races. I admire those who do those things and I love reading about them, but I have no trace of envy. For me, being outside is different. It's not that it doesn't include moments of exertion, fear, and the occasional desperate slog, because it does. But what I like is the spectrum, the long haul of it, each day its own mini-adventure, strung together without the worries of tapers and having to do a certain mileage. I like choosing to go hard or easy and making up my own challenges and doing them, all in obscurity and often alone.

The goals I list above are really attainable, even easy. It's kind of silly to even list them as goals, because anybody could do them. They're not hard. But the older I get, the more I see that life is made up of these small things, not the big ones. Sure, the big ones are great and all. I remember being close to tears as I finished my first marathon. But what I remember more clearly are the long, slow runs through the gloomy Alaska darkness that I took with Julie, Brian and Ken, all of us chatting away about something or another. I remember crossing a snowfield with other friends, bound for a wild and lonely campsite. I remember when, as an adult, I was finally able to swim across a pool. Those were all parts of a whole that add up to a life that isn't remarkable or special, but it is one that is mine and I love it.

Happy new year everyone.

a wilderness year

2011-12-26T11:25:00.000-08:00

First, the stats:

Number of backpack trips: 16
Goal fulfilled: Backpacking from Moss Springs to Two Pan, 40 miles, 2 days
Longest backpacking day: 25 miles
Number of bears seen: 3
Number of day hikes: too many to count
Times hiked into Hells Canyon and back in a single day (+ - 5,000 feet or more each way): Afraid to count because it's just crazy
Longest run: 11 miles, on 9/11 (don't run long anymore due to past injuries, so pretty proud of this one)
Favorite trail run: Hurricane Creek trail to Slickrock and back
Lakes jumped into: ten at least
Goal not met: Didn't get to Deadman Lake, darn it.
Best day in the woods: all of them

I didn't run any 100ks, race a planet or finish the JMT like some of my bloggy friends. In fact I spent most of my year right here, in one single place. Somewhere the twenty-year-old me is horrified, but I found I kind of liked it. I also found that there are many more places to discover, even if you think you've been on that trail many times and have seen it all.

Here are some of my favorite places in 2011.

I did a lot of hiking on what I call the "hot ridges"..mostly waterless expanses of sweeping grassy outcrops that go on forever. This one is Cougar Ridge, where we hustled due to a threatening sky.

This was nearing the end of a 19 mile day as I hiked back over Hawkins Pass, surely one of the most magnificent passes in the Wallowas.

In spring Sweyn, John and I hiked from Cherry Creek down to Salmon Bar and back, following a disappearing trail by dead reckoning. Dropping through the elevation zones, we arrived at summer on the Snake River, and climbed back to late winter on top.

Kent, Jon, Rick and I spent two magical evenings over the pass from Copper Creek in an uncrowded lake basin catching fish for a mercury study.

The end of the earth. Love this place.

Ken and Clare showed me a new lake. It was just over the hill from a lake I had visited several times. Just goes to show, you never know.

My favorite new discovery. Frazier Meadows, where I'd love to build a cabin and live forever.

This was late fall and bittersweet, because it was one of my last backpack trips. The lovely middle fork of the Imnaha.

Too busy in August, Mirror Lake was all mine in July.

I can't wait for 2012!

solstice skiing

2011-12-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

When I lived in Alaska, the local radio station (love you, Raven Radio) would announce the minutes of daylight we were losing each day. After December 21, we would be gaining minutes, and all of us looked forward to that. Light is not as scarce or precious here in Oregon, but I still breathe a sigh of relief on the solstice, because someday summer will be back.

But not yet, so the best thing to do is go skiing. Classic, old-school Nordic skiing. Can there be any better exercise than that? Many times I attempt the white knuckle drive to Salt Creek Summit to find hard ice or deep, deep snow. Each of those has its challenges. Often I have to walk down the Hill of Death instead of incurring yard-sale face-planting in the trees. Sometimes breaking trail is so arduous that it takes hours to go a few miles. But today is perfect: a skim of fresh over packed, my skis gliding as if I am skating instead of on two (free from my former boss) skinny boards. The woods are blue-shadowed and quiet. The only sound is my breath and the slide of skis on snow.

An icy wind burns the tips of my ears where they poke out from my wool hat. It is probably about fifteen degrees, with the wind making it colder. The breeze tosses handfuls of snow across my tracks, burying them. I am the only one out here, the rest of the unlucky souls at work.

As I ski I think of all the Decembers and solstices before this one. A few stand out. There was the party at a friend's yurt where we all scribbled on pieces of paper the things we wanted to let go (I can't even remember what I wrote). There was the time a group of us skied into a backcountry cabin, pulling sleds. It was well below zero and later, in the hot springs, steam obscured our faces and our skin glowed with residual heat. All those friends have scattered now. Then there were many years where I was on a fireline, the Florida years when snow was just a memory. There was the New Zealand December of only a backpack and no plan, and many Decembers on a little island. There were the two Decembers of relentless marathon training, and the one where I had to learn to walk again after knee surgery. There was the December that my marriage fell apart, and the one when I knew I would be all right, that winters come and go and things always get better.

I lose the blue diamonds and ski blind for awhile, not really worried, but with that undercurrent that can run through your head in the wilderness: Hmm, not really sure where I am. Didn't bring a pack. Warm clothes on? check. Somebody knows where I am? check. Plenty of daylight? check. Eventually I stumble upon my tracks, a lot farther downslope than I have expected. It's time to develop the winter eyes again, the ones that can pick out subtle changes in a white landscape. Time to fine tune the sense of direction, not really needed in summer.

I've come into this winter a reluctant participant. Our summer was so short, with snow in June and the backcountry melting out only late in August. It couldn't be winter already. I had to swim all summer in a wetsuit! We were owed some more summer! But surely as the minutes were lost to darkness, here it came, ready or not. And I wasn't. I grumbled, I complained, I tried to run the icy trails in my IceJoggers. I rode my bike, freezing my feet. Maybe if I ignored winter, it would go away. Denial could only work for so long.

I arrive back at the parking lot in a clatter of skis on ice. My fresh tracks stretch behind me. The sun slants at an ominous angle, soon to dip below Redmont Peak. Snow flurries dance from passing clouds. It's undeniably winter. Though summer is always my first love, I can work with this. Winter and I can become buddies, mend our fences, and get along. It's solstice. Summer is on its way. Happy solstice, everyone!

Old

2011-12-18T13:36:00.000-08:00

As a twenty-seven year old wilderness ranger, I was amazed when Valerie joined our seasonal crew. Admittedly she was in incredible shape: she surpassed us all on the firefighter "step test", as inaccurate and male-biased as it was. Her legs in Forest Service shorts were muscled and strong. But she was....forty-one.

I couldn't imagine being that old. How could she even strap on a seventy pound pack and hike the huge miles that we were doing? Now I know better, because I know I could still do it. But back then, getting old seemed like a death sentence. Sometimes I thought that I could beat it by running farther, hiking faster, moving across the country and back again. And it seemed like there was just so much time. Years and years, during which I would gain wisdom but not wrinkles, my life falling into place like a freshly opened map.

As I stare another birthday in the face, I am both grateful and sad. Of course I'm glad I'm still around when some of my friends aren't. But sometimes I really miss being young. There was so much room to make mistakes and rebound from them. The stakes weren't as high, because there was so much time left. No money? I can always fight fire for a season and earn some. No men? One would always come along. Nobody wants to publish my book? Plenty of time for that! No job? I'll clean toilets at a campground, no problem! Marathons? Sure, I've got great knees!

So far there hasn't been any wilderness adventure that I have had to give up because of age, except for pavement marathons, which are no good for anyone's knees. I hope there never is, but I have noticed that the ranks are getting thinner around me. It's sad that people my age, which really isn't that old, have decided to give in to the couch. Luckily I live in a mountain town where seventy-year-olds still backcountry ski. Many of my friends are older than I am, and they take on amazing feats of wilderness endurance. It gives me hope. Many of them have their own challenges, but they still get out there.

Maybe it's not the body that changes but the desire. Unlike when I was younger, I have no desire to pay to run a race. I will, though, go out and cover that distance on my own. I've turned more inward: it's more about the solo experience or the one with a shortlist of friends, not the spectacle that I like now. I used to love the crowds, the aid stations, the cameraderie. Now I like it when I pass nobody on the trails or on the road. I don't even keep a training log anymore, but I remember everything.

Valerie only lasted one season, and we hardly ever saw her. Most likely she was over our immaturity, our bunkhouse parties, our firmly held belief that we would never grow old. You just wait, she probably thought. If I had to bet, though, I'd say she's still out on the trails somewhere. A little slower, perhaps. Older, definitely. But still out there.

Patterson Peak, 1995.

a letter to sixteen year old me

2011-12-14T11:43:00.000-08:00

Dear me,

I know you think your life is over because M. dumped you for G. and he dedicated your song to her at the roller rink. But trust me on this: he is not the last boy you will love. In fact, you won't find the one you are meant to be with when you are 20. Or even 30. It will take years and years, and finally when you have nearly given up, there he will be. It will be so worth it, because you will appreciate love more than if you had it for the taking early on in your life. And even though you will be alone so many years and spend so many breakups sobbing on a series of kitchen floors, you also will met a series of fascinating, odd, unsuitable men who weren't quite right, but who will take you all sorts of places and teach you all sorts of things: how to fly fish, how to walk in the steep mountains, how to fix your own brakes. You don't want to miss out on that. And BTW, Air Supply? Luckily, your musical tastes will change. P.S. You dodged a bullet. M. gets fat.

Cherish your independence. I don't know where you found it, but keep it. In the years to come you will fight fires, drive across the country alone numerous times, hike off-trail, rappel into caves, skydive, and backpack solo. There are few women who will do some of these things. Don't wait around for a man to come along. That's not your style.

Lose the self-criticism. Your New Years resolution is to "Walk Better." I know it's hard to be sixteen, but rest assured: soon, very soon, you will find a place where you feel beautiful. In the wilderness, you can forget your hairbrush (and use a fork instead) and it will be the one place where you feel completely comfortable. It's coming, just wait for it. High school does not last forever. And it's true, you will never need to know chemistry.

But speaking of that, do you have to think you are going to major in English with an emphasis in creative writing? I realize you love writing. But think about it. You love being outside. Take a biology class, would you?

Don't run so much. You will be obsessed with it for years, and your knees will take a beating. You will run marathons and half marathons and countless 5 and 10Ks. On second thought, keep running. There's no other feeling like it. You will run in the coastal rainforest, in the baked-hard desert, in the swamp, you will run everywhere. Enjoy it while you are young and fast and can run a sub-21 5K. Your times will slow as you get older, believe me. You won't like it, but you will learn to love running for its own sake, not for a PR or a medal. But stay off the pavement!

Honestly, you don't have to work every month of your life. You will never take unemployment, even when you are stuck washing dishes. You will pass up some interesting turns in the road because of this. A man with ice blue eyes will offer you your own cabin, accessed across the Salmon River by a cable bridge. You will hesitate, not because of the man, but because of the chance to live winter-deep, writing by a wood stove, skiing out your back door. I know what you will do, but you don't, not yet.

Yes, you will get out of this town. In fact, you will travel for years and years, trying to find a place you can call home. Even when you think you have found it, there will still be times when you think: New Zealand. Bali? Costa Rica. Stanley, Idaho. You're just one of those restless people. Live with it.

That perm? Lose it.

Sunscreen. Stop that "lying out" with Tanning Oil. Sun-In will not turn your hair blonde either. Wrinkles are not pretty.

Take care, sixteen year old me. Your life ahead is full of excitement, tragedy, rivers, mountains. Go out and live it.

Love, Me

Please share! What would you say to your sixteen year old self?

facing the gear shed

2011-12-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

I'm willing to bet most of you have one too...a closet, a garage, or a shed stuffed with outdoor gear, one third of which you used to use, one third of which you never use and one third that you actually do use. Because I live in the House of No Closets, my outdoor gear lives in a small shed along with the lawnmower and paint. I admit it: over time and due to last minute trips (the contractor calls and needs help finding a trail, like tomorrow) the shed has become a black hole from which you may never emerge.

It was fairly warm yesterday and I finally felt ready to tackle the Shed of Despair. Let me say this: I did a huge purge before I moved here so I really don't have that much stuff. But it had become a miasma of seething gear that needed to be dealt with.

I approached with trepidation. There were numerous milk crates that I had (ahem) liberated years and decades ago from XXX business on Mackinac Island, full of mysterious rope, parts of first aid kits, sporks and the like. There were Rubbermaid containers of the same. It was a big, huge mess.

Once I started sorting, though, it became enjoyable. Here was a linear history of gear development! Here were the older thermarests, first generation, fluffy and heavy, and in another historical layer, the incredibly lightweight NeoAir. Tents in various mutations from an early North Face lightweight prototype to a two pound Big Agnes. Running fanny packs from the bulky back sloshers to the Nathan one I love without reservation. It was a gear archeological dig!

I found incredible gems. My silk sleeping bag liner, long since thought lost. A pair of sweet pink flip flops. A UDig it and a candle lantern that I had resentfully thought that the ex harbored. A collapsible bucket. It was like shopping without spending money.

Now my shed is a thing of beauty. All the backpacking items, in one Rubbermaid. Minus the thermarests, in their own box, and the tents, in theirs. Stuff tossed that I no longer use or cannot identify. The one item I wavered over was my first adult tent. A North Face tadpole, all mesh. I bought this tent about 1990 and it accompanied me on many Sierra trips. I hauled it out three years ago without setting it up, only to arrive at the lake to find it was missing (broken?) its front pole. Disaster. My boyfriend at the time sighed. This was only another omission in a long line of camping disasters, including forgetting a camping stove. We broke up soon after. Coincedence?

I threw the tent in the garbage but later fished it out. It's still a good tent. I can maybe get a pole from North Face. I couldn't bear the thought of it going into the landfill.

I'm ready for another season. We'll see how long this organization lasts. For now I love creeping up to the shed and flinging open the door to gaze fondly on the clear floor and the stacked Rubbermaids. Order is a wonderful thing.

I heart sleeping bags

2011-12-06T18:39:00.000-08:00

Errata: My husband would like everyone to know that on the hikes he picks, we are *NOT* lost. (The one hike where we were unsure of our location was "my hike," he tells me.) He also thinks it sounded like he takes me into dangerous situations. So here is a clarification. He feels much more comfortable than I do in many places, but he is also quick to beat a retreat if I want to. (Is that better, sweetie? Love you.)

But now the real reason for the post: I am in love! It loves to cuddle, and it's soft and fluffy and warm, also a pleasing shade of orange. It has a water resistant shell. It's my new -20 sleeping bag! It's a Mountain Hardwear Wraith SL. It is usually very, very expensive but I found a screaming deal at Oregon Mountain Community. Yeah! Now I have no excuses. Winter camping I will go! I am really looking forward to being toasty since I sleep so cold. I have a minor case of Reynauds, and if my feet and hands get cold enough they turn white and take forever to warm up.

The only problem is the lack of snow. The trails are a sheet of ice; even with grippers on you fall in an angry heap. This in-between time makes us all miserable. Too icy to bike ride, too icy to run, too icy to hike. The awfulness of the gym it is, and many of us are in the same boat. I went there today at 3, a time when I am typically the only one there, and can tune the TV to HGTV with impunity. Today the gym was packed with treadmill walkers and puffing weight-lifters. Ugh! I can think of few things worse athletically than running on a treadmill.

But back to sleeping bags. I think you can tell a lot about the type of person you are dealing with by the amount and types of bags they have. I have these:

1. Ancient REI bag I remember from my childhood, that rides in my truck as an emergency bag;
2. Go-Lite +20 that I use for summer camping, very light;
3. Marmot +20 that I use for work and is in fact a"work bag". Synthetic cause I used it in the rainforest.
4 LL Bean 0 bag that is plenty warm but does not stuff. Used for car camping.
5. Marmot +15 (I think) that I bought with husband #1 because it zipped together with his bag. Nice synthetic bag but I always feel kind of sad when I look at it. I know, get over it.
6. North Face Blue Kazoo, once the wilderness ranger standard, but in its old age has lost some insulating properties. Had since the nineties.

Holy carp, I have seven sleeping bags. I am the Imelda Marcos of sleeping bags. I belong in a support group!

Now it's your turn. How many bags do you have and what type? Don't make me the only sleeping bag hoarder out there.

JMT dreams

2011-12-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

Ever plan anything so big and complicated that you could not get your arms around it? It looks like my John Muir Trail hike might be coming together. This is both exciting and scary. The logistics of backpacking a 221 mile trail--the time off from work, the food, pick-up and drop-off, coordinating of differing paces and desires--it is all overwhelming and I can only imagine what someone hiking the whole PCT must feel like. Then there is the lottery: would it be better to hike in from Toulumne Meadows and have a better shot at getting a permit? Bear cannisters, resupply, gear, oh my!

I had at first envisioned hiking it solo, but you know what? I've spent miles and miles solo, starting as a wilderness ranger. I get enough solo time. As a writer, and now working at home, I always tread water just above the hermit level. I want company, someone to point out sights to, people to talk with at night at camp. Just like an old shampoo commercial, my friend told a friend who told a friend...and now there are potentially four of us women interested. I only know one of them but the trail bond is strong and I love how it weaves strangers together.

The two best things about planning this is a return to a place I once called home and...gear shopping! I spent two glorious seasons in the backcountry of Sequoia-Kings Canyon, roving for miles in alpine country and tablelands wild and remote. I fell in love with a firefighter, marked hazard trees with a lanky chain-smoker, and planted native seeds in places trampled by many feet. None of those things lasted--the romance burnt itself out in a firestorm, Jack died of lung cancer, and the trees did not survive the human onslaught--but I long to return as a much older woman to find remnants of my twenty-year-old self.

And gear: so much to think about! Megamid or bivy? What clothes will I despise least after wearing them for three weeks straight? Maps, I need maps! How can I overcome my notorious dislike for oatmeal? Jetboil or alcohol stove? A gearhead at heart, I love pondering these issues.

Outside, the snow flies. I pack up my spikes for a struggle up an icy trail at 24 degrees. I huddle by the wood stove, dreaming.

Days Without Wilderness

2011-12-01T17:24:00.000-08:00

Ever since I've been back, it's been conference calls, the Can't-Help Desk, meetings meetings meetings. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful to have a job. But to live in a mountain town yet not be able to get to them is a special kind of torture. I need a date with a lake, a rendezvous with a river.

I don't know about you, but I am a caged animal without the wilderness. It starts with a new-wool itchiness under my skin. In the worst of times, I become a snarly creature. It is like going cold-turkey, this change from my summer fieldwork to the winter office routine. The 20 mile backpacking days are only a faint memory, almost as if I were someone else back then.

A trail run really isn't enough, or a ski, though they serve as band-aids. What I want is total immersion, days and nights on the trail. At the same time, I know winter is for writing (just nominated for a Pushcart Prize! Yay!), a return to yoga, dinners with the friends I have neglected. It is for breathing deep of cold, clear air, watching stars prick the sky, remodeling the cabin. It is all those things, and still..

Maybe I'll try winter camping.

the cold desert

2011-11-27T16:34:00.000-08:00

The high desert, in November, is mercurial. For about five hours the canyons are bathed in a warm red light. By four thirty, though, the cold sets in like a vise. We gathered our winter camping attire and our juniper wood and steeled ourselves for a long night. It went on like this for two weeks: camping somewhere on a lonesome mesa, blue sky days, bitterly cold nights. We saw nobody. Sometimes it seemed like we could do this forever.

A double arch in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

Looking into Capitol Reef National Park

On the mesa above Fence Canyon, Glen Canyon NRA

We backpacked to this wonderful campsite.

Some of the narrows of Little Death Hollow

We chased the sun for two weeks. It was a brief escape from the winter that is beginning to grip our mountains, camping in a lonely and wild section of the country. We'll be back for sure.

Goin' Where the Climate Suits My Clothes

2011-11-12T08:55:00.000-08:00

For years, I went down the road feeling bad. Every six months I drove solo across the country, down the blue highways that connected to the soulless interstates, the truck stops, the rest stops, one hundred more miles, more. Cheap motels with flashing signs, the enormity of Texas, small towns with lights like jewels glowing far away on a distant horizon. I don't remember how many times I drove across the country in a small Chevette, only that I did it, the rubber hum of the road, a heartbeat, a song.

Always there was a knot inside my heart because always I was leaving someone behind. It could have been a friend who would sit with me on a porch beside an inland sea, watching a luna moth, it could have been a faithless smokejumper who loved fire more than he loved me. It didn't matter: it all felt the same, the leaving.

I always left, though. There was something comforting about those road trips, that transition time between the person I was and the person I would be. A clock ticked in my head: Must see it all. Must see it all.

That clock is mostly silent now. I don't want to leave people behind anymore. I have no desire to pour myself into a car anymore and drive alone across the country. I know I can't see it all. Instead, I want to see a lot of a few places, to really know them down to the core.

I often wonder about the ones I left behind. They seemed so secure in their lives, rooted trees, tied to a piece of land in the way I never thought I could be. Now I am one of them. I heard about two people I know last night who are pulling up stakes and moving to Portland. How can they leave? I wondered. Then I had to laugh. I have come a long way down that road.

I'm heading to the southwest for two weeks. This time I'll have someone with me. This time we can stop, dawdle, soak in the hot springs. This time I'm coming back.

There was a lot I loved about the road: the delicious uncertainty of a bend, the unknown possibility. Sometimes I can admit that being anchored feels like it: a boat swinging on a chain. I want it both ways. That's why I keep traveling, in short bursts now, returning to a known shore.

running in a new place

2011-11-09T18:38:00.000-08:00

Why is running somewhere new always easier? I feel faster, thinner, stronger. I race up the street towards the trail system, headlamp in place. It's 6 am and still dark here near the Oregon/California border. Cars stream towards Medford from the Applegate, but I leave them behind as I climb to the leaf-covered trails that wind up the hills above Jacksonville. I don't have time to go far, but everything is easy. Before I know it, it's time to turn around. Behind me, I see the headlamps of other runners.

It's still fall here, the leaves drifting lazily down, the oaks and maples unfamiliar and interesting after a diet of conifer, conifer, conifer. And there's no snow.

Doesn't this look like the perfect running trail?

When I arrive at a motel, the first question I always ask is: where are the running trails? I lucked out in Jacksonville, because they were a mere .8 mile from my door. Score!

The street that leads to the trail system. Cute!

When I used to move every six months, running was how I learned a new place. I would head out optimistically, figuring out the easy and the hard trails, the side streets, the places other runners went. I still remember some of my favorites: the Tranquil Bluff trail on Mackinac Island, a rainforest trail in the Elwha, and the bear-haunted Cross Trail. Sometimes I picked up running companions: Peter, the firefighter who always ran inexplicably in jeans; Ken who liked to belt out sixties tunes to keep bears at bay. But most often I ran solo, letting my mind spool out dreams. I still do.

wing ridge

2011-11-05T17:33:00.000-07:00

For whatever reason, the outings my husband picks end up with one of the following:

1. Terror (me)
2. Whining (me)
3. Out of water (both of us)
4. Heinous uphill climbs
5. Brief periods of being unsure of where we are.

But I go with him anyway for the following reasons:

1. He always picks something adventurous, a place I wouldn't go on my own
2. Since I married a village, I don't get to see him all that much with all his community obligations
3. He knows all the names of the plants
4. He puts up with my whining
5. I kind of like him.

Today was not really an exception. We would start out on the old stock driveway and head up towards Wing Ridge and come down somewhere (this said with a vagueness that should have alerted me to trouble).

It's the transition time that neither of us has a sport for. Too snowy to bike, a little too much snow for hiking, not enough snow for skiing. We headed uphill with a slippery mix of powder snow, rocks and grass under our feet. The old trail wound to a saddle with a breathtaking view of the wilderness.

I hiked here all summer but it looks completely different. September seems like a long time ago.

"Well, we could backtrack," J suggested, knowing that I hate to backtrack. "Or we could go up there and come down that ridge."

With a minor feeling of foreboding, I agreed. After all, I usually am a summit chaser, and from the distance, it didn't look too bad. We climbed and climbed through scattered trees and drifted snow. Evil-looking clouds poured up the valley below us, but the sun stayed firmly on the ridge.

The summit was wind-swept and remote. I could have stayed up there a long time, drinking it all in, but it was late afternoon and we were sandwiched in between two snow storms.

It was two thousand feet down, the terrain a dangerous mix of rolling rock and snow. I was the only one having a problem, but it was a big one. My Sorels, chosen to keep my feet dry, slipped and slid. "I can't go down this way," I wailed.

"Okay, we can go back," J said. He never tries to make me do anything that I think is scary.

But then I heard myself. Ugh! A whiny princess. Hate her. "I think I can make it through these rocks," I said, tiptoeing over to a better line. It was marginally better. J went and found me a stick for balance and we sidestepped down the mountain. "You didn't whine THAT much," he said as we gained better ground.

The thing about me is this: I'm generally not all that fearful. But my husband is not afraid of gravity. I never used to be until a fall on green slime in Alaska stretched out my PCL and forever ended marathon dreams. I can still run less than double digits without it bothering me, and I can hike as much as I want. But I know: one fall can change your life.

So I kept going, one slow step at a time, envying my husband and the dogs their sure-footed grace. I got down the mountain, though, and that is all that counts. And to tell the truth, I like our crazy, let's-just-try-it adventures. I like that I finally found a man who will take me places that make me a little afraid. I like that he will go with me when I pick the outings. I like looking up at the mountain from the road and thinking: You know what? I was just up there.

the last nice day

2011-11-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

"This is the last nice day," Michelle and I agree, playing hooky from work to walk in the park. It is true that snow is in the forecast, two inches by tomorrow, just the start of our seven or eight month winter. But it is also true that our definition of a nice day imperceptibly changes with the seasons. In August, it was a sun-washed 80 degrees when a swim in a glacial lake was not out of the question. In September we accepted days ten degrees cooler with a spunky bite to the evenings. Now in November, sunny and brisk 45 degree days are cause for celebration. A few months from now, shiny diamond snow and a windless 20 degree day will be our new nice.

Abandoning my plan for a power hike, I was lured up to Falls Creek to stare at this icy sight:

Ice already, the waterfall slowly freezing. Time to get back to yoga, edit the novel, bake rustic bread, split endless piles of kindling, find the snowshoes and the skis. Time to shift to a new kind of nice day even as I dream of summer campfires.

tramps like us

2011-10-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

My husband drives up beside me as I pedal up the dirt road. "I thought I saw a cute girl biking, then I realized it was my wife!" he says. Ha. Ha. I shift to my lowest gear to pedal up the Hill of Many Stones. The road has recently been graded and the shifty rocks under my tires are only marginally better than what he calls "chatter bumps" but I think of as washboards. I hang on to my $150, shockless rental fleet bike with white knuckles on the long descent.

I'm not a mountain biker, only a person who rides a mountain bike. There is a huge difference, and I am closing the gap very slowly, in inches. I visit a mountain bike shop and slink away, intimidated. Groupo? Five inches of travel? It is a new language, though I see a mountain bike of my dreams and plan to return one day. I read my husband's Mountain Bike Action magazine, kind of a goofy title with everyone in the pictures standing up aggressively on their pedals.

When you try to learn something new as an adult, you bring all your years with you. All the times you tried something and it didn't work out. All the times people told you that things were impossible, too hard, why the hell do you want to do that because normal women don't? You may have figured out here that I am talking about more than mountain biking.

But let's stick to that for now. I turn around and head for home, past the Grange, the ancient truck dreaming in the weeds, down the long sweet hill where I practice standing up, even though my post-knee surgery leg still believes it does not have the strength to turn the pedals while doing so. I cruise to the place where I have to shift down, make the turn into the town that has turned, in some strange and amazing way, from the town that I am living in now to the town where I live and will probably always live.

It's like that sometimes. You change, imperceptibly, by inches. You get better at things. You learn to stand up on your pedals. You may have figured out that I am talking about more than mountain biking.

Now if someone can explain why four inches of travel is soooo much better than five, I'm all ears.

Too cold for shorts

2011-10-22T15:46:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, in a universe far away, I worked for a man who hated wearing long pants. Especially our fashion forward green Forest Service pants, which rise to a high waist and do not look good on anyone. This man would grimly hang in there in shorts while the rest of us gave in, shivering in the frosty mornings. Once he put on his pants, you knew that summer was indeed over.

Today this man is fighting for his life and would probably give anything to even have the chance to walk in the woods in pants or shorts. I thought of him as I hurried towards McCully Basin, the victim of a bad clothing choice. It's here, that downturn, the end of shorts.

Just last week I was able to stay warm in shorts, but there has been a subtle shift that should warn the unprepared and the foolish. The larches are in full, glorious color now. The sky spits snow on the passes. No longer can I get by on a 12 mile hike with just water and a long underwear top.

Still, I kept going, wanting to get as high as I could before the weather turned me around. From the yurt location I could hear chopping, the outfitter getting ready for the ski season, laying in wood. The campsites were bleak and lonely, the pass I sat on just a month ago layered in snow.

Pants don't let you move the same way shorts do. Even running tights feel faintly and constrictive. And long underwear under shorts, while it gets the job done, feels faintly ridiculous. After a season of bare legs, it's hard to make the transition.

The wind picks up at the top of the basin and it is time to go. I race down the steep hill, running to stay warm. I think of my former boss, a man so fast in the woods that we had to run to keep up with his walking pace. I hope when spring comes around he can put his shorts back on and keep them on, for as long as he wants.

changes are scary good.

2011-10-19T19:22:00.000-07:00

The aspens up Hurricane Creek are slowly turning. They look as if someone has dipped them in a pot of molten gold. I love this time of year on this trail, with an icing of snow across the peaks and a brisk sunny breeze.

I strapped on my Nathan hydration vest (LOVE) for a short power hike to Slickrock and back. My legs felt springy after a day of rest and a leisurely bike ride. I thought about running but I wanted more time to think than running this trail allows, where I have to watch my footing at all times or faceplant.

A big change is coming in my life. I've taken a new job which will take me out of these mountains and into the world, although I get to work from home (yay, yoga pants at work!). This new job will be national in scope, and I hope I can make a difference to a lot of places, not just one. I won't miss the screamers, the supervision, or the gatekeepers who blindly follow a rule book, placing obstacles in the path of getting things done.

But still. I think that in order to really be part of your backyard you have to put in the time to work there, and I don't mean backpacking or running. In this job as in all my previous ones, I swung a pulaski and pulled a misery whip, clearing trails. I cleaned toilets. I met with outfitters to look at campsites. I hauled trash out of the wilderness left by the clueless and the uncaring. Until you put in a few hours of work, you are just passing through. You have no idea what the place is about. I don't like losing that connection, or working with a small group of dedicated people on the ground, doing actual physical labor.

So when the time is right I want to start a "Friends" group that will adopt this wilderness and give it a voice. This place has given me so much. I want to give back.

In the end, though, change keeps you young. I don't want to be 62 and shoehorned into the same cubicle. I don't want to grow old at work, and the surest way to do that is to take chances. So I throw my eggs in one basket. I take the leap. I'll let you know how it turns out.

end of the season

2011-10-16T19:17:00.000-07:00

We hike towards Maxwell Lake under cloudy skies. The sun has been evasive these days and six inches of snow blanket the ground. This piece of country is under snow eight months of the year. It barely wakes in a profusion of flowers before it is smothered again. The lake itself is not frozen. Not yet. But soon.

Ken and Claire show me a secret lake I never knew existed, only minutes away. A mean wind bites through our clothes. The mountains are changing.

There is nobody else in the canyon, the tourists having fled back to the city and our trail crew long gone to scratch out an existence until summer comes around again. We retreat a thousand feet and watch the fog sidle up the canyon below us.

Backpacking season is well and truly over. I had hoped to sneak in a quick overnight, but at this time of year, in this weather, you have two options: stay on the move or sit in the tent. For hours.

Trail running won't last too much longer either, snow drifting high enough that any run turns into a survival shuffle. The skiers are starting to reappear from their summer hibernation, peering into the distance at snow-iced bowls and speculating on the charms of another La Nina winter. "Winters are so short here," J says, meaning it despite the evidence to the contrary. This is a country of winter, summer just a pause.

We wind back down the switchbacks to the trailhead, still the only car in the lot. That night it rains hard, and I know that more snow has fallen in the high country. I feel like we've gotten away with something, sneaked in a trip to the lake in the last few moments. Nobody will be back up there until July.

The next day I run up the trail to the Bear Creek cabin in search of items that went missing from my pack this summer. The larches fool me into thinking they are the sun. It rains and I splash through puddles. I catch up with some wolverine researchers, setting out cameras. They are the only people I see. The mountains are changing. It's a long time until summer.

Losing It

2011-10-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a shoe appeared on my desk. It wasn't just any shoe. It was my Merrell Pace Glove, lost months ago in the wilderness, mysteriously reappearing at the trailhead. I had hung on to its mate, hoping beyond all reason that somehow the wandering shoe would come back to me. Where it has been, I can only imagine.

This started me thinking of things I have lost in the wilderness. Two Leathermen (in the same wilderness. Hmm). A pair of sunglasses, left hanging on a tree on a tiny island in Klag Bay, Alaska. A first aid kit. Mittens. Pepper spray.

And things I've found: Barbie doll heads (very disturbing). A rubber chicken. Sunglasses (not mine). Headlamps. Knives (not Leathermen). Old crosscut saws. Lipstick. Shoes. Hammocks. A sleeping bag. A fire shelter. Tarps ad nauseum. Underwear. Books.

And things I've forgotten while packing and realized with a sinking feeling as I approached the campsite or trail: Tent poles. Sleeping bag. Stove fuel. The food that was in the fridge to bring. Hiking boots. Hiking boots that match.

Any other stories out there of things forgotten, lost or found?

oceans edge

2011-10-11T11:07:00.000-07:00

I lived by the ocean for seven years. When I drove off the Alaska ferry in Bellingham and turned my back on the sea, it was like leaving someone I loved. In this landlocked country I see mirages everywhere: the long expanses of field, rippling like an inland sea. Snow on lakes like frozen waves. Sometimes, briefly, a small surf on the pebbly beach of Wallowa Lake.

But it isn't the same. For seven years I heard the ocean's heartbeat, the breakers pounding on the reef, the insistent chime of the buoy out in the Eastern Channel. It was like living with a moody stranger--you never knew what you would get. Sometimes, a placid calm, the fog kissing the water so that we had to navigate with compasses mounted on our kayaks. Sometimes an unexpected swell, rolling in from Japan, tossing our boats like driftwood. Sometimes the bright diamond sparkle of sun. Rain, pockmarking the grey surface. The extreme low tides of late winter, and the sneaky high tides of summer. The ocean was a presence I could not discount or turn away from. Its moods shaped my days. Would I be stuck on the beach under a tarp, unable to paddle? Would our skiff's anchor hold, or would one of us have to swim for it? Would the tide drain out, a plug from a bathtub, leaving us high and dry until it flooded back in? These were all things to know.

Mountain life can be compared to this. It has started snowing already, the line of white marching down the golden tamarack slopes like an incoming tide. If I go out, I need extra of everything, hats, gloves, socks, is it safe to stay overnight or will snow fall, muffling footprints and closing the trails? It is in one way the same and in others, not the same. Finally this weekend we pried ourselves like clams out of the county and drove west.

There it was, the ocean. I felt like I could breathe, great wet breaths of soft, rainy air. My hair curled. A soft rain fell without a sound. I remembered this.

The dogs weren't quite sure about the ocean. Aluco (l) was scared; Sierra ignored the water, and Cale wanted to run and run. A dog after my own heart!

An admission: when we pulled into the campsite, I sat there in the truck watching the rain bead up on the windshield. A thought crept into my head: A motel. I remembered all the days of rain in Alaska: hiking in the rain. Running in the rain. Camping in the rain. After awhile, I forgot that there was anything other than rain. It was the constant heartbeat I lived with, like the ocean. So we threw up the tent and slogged around in our little-used rain gear. The next day, we were rewarded with this:

The rain came back in, like it always does, and we had to leave for home too soon. I don't want to live in a rainforest again; my knees ache and it feels too isolated in a curtain of fog. We used to say that when the sun came out, it was the most beautiful place on earth, and it was, but that does you no good when the sun rarely comes out.

I'll miss the ocean, but I'll take the landlocked mountains. I'll take the certain stars at night and the sun-drenched afternoons by an alpine lake. But I'll be back to the coast again for a tryst or two with the waves, because I can't stay away forever.

mountain snow

2011-10-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

The clouds floated in the valley like remnants of someone's dream. They didn't look real, but something made up, wisps of thoughts or wishes. Above them, a light skiff of snow on the highest peaks.

First snow. Bittersweet. The lakes will freeze, the passes drift over, no more sitting on sun-drenched rocks, no more swimming. The trails will be closed to us for many, many months unless we attempt them on skis. Sweet, though, because of the gliding over snow, the only sound that of our skis, a blue tinge to the air and the trees shrouded in white.

It's hard to give up summer because we fought so hard for it, a rainy and cold spring stretching into June. But I made the most of it, fifteen backpack trips, many, many miles, new and old country in a delicious mix. Not nearly enough but it will have to be, the gear put away until another season.

This is my husband's magic time approaching, just like summer is mine. We are seasonal opposites but I love that. He teaches me to appreciate winter and I love to watch him ski, effortless turns down an untracked mountain. He points at slopes too steep for me, ever, and talks about how he has skinned up them and skied down, no big deal. I like his enthusiasm for winter.

Winter/Summer. The time of change is here, with not much inbetween, not here in this corner of Oregon where it is one or the other. I look at my growing stack of firewood. I hunt down mittens, Kahtoolas, running tights, hats. As much as I want summer to hang around for another month or two, I know it's over. I get ready.

Coming home

2011-10-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

I rarely go back to the places I've left behind. Like the men I left behind, it seems better to let each landscape fade into amber memory, fuzzy around the edges and somehow perfect in the recalling. The mountains I used to love belong to other seasonal workers now, not me. Going back as a tourist wouldn't be enough; I would want to slip back into the skin of the twenty year old I was. I would start questioning: maybe I should have stayed in that cabin for the winter instead of moving on. Written a novel. Instead of what did happen. And that kind of thinking gets me nowhere.

What is now is not what was.

But one place always calls me back, tugs on my heartstrings. It's a little mountain town with a river at its heart. I lived there for five seasons and almost stayed. It was the only place I ever truly loved without reservations.

As I hike the familiar trails, I remember it all. There's the rock I sat on for a break one summer, my pack too heavily laden. The slippery decomposed granite sketchy spot on the way to Goat Lake. There's where I pitched my tent that one moonlit night. There's the overhanging rock that Firefighter Todd took a nap under while I checked a smoldering wildfire. The dirt road I used to run. I remember everything.

For years this place has been the reason I never stayed put. It was the standard against which I judged every other place. It was the place that I secretly always believed I would return to live.

I don't believe that anymore. The winters are too long, the jobs too few. The place stays with me though, as a time in my life that was as close to perfect as it can ever be. I was a wilderness ranger, the best job on the planet. I was in my twenties, no need to think about commitment or tragedy, neither of which would touch me for years. A group of like-minded adventurers shared the bunkhouse, always ready to throw sleeping bags out under the stars or head to the hot springs next to the river.

Sometimes it's hard to admit that those days are over.

But they are, and as I drove away from the mountains, my mind a stew of emotions, I realized that a tie to the wandering life has unravelled. That to look back at anything with longing is to not allow room in my heart for what is, not what was. As I dipped over the Snake River and back up the other side, it finally felt like I was coming home. Coming home to a place beautifully flawed, not perfect. A place where I might be able to stay.

Face Plant!

2011-09-25T13:43:00.000-07:00

I felt tired and clumsy as I ran up the trail. Normally Hurricane Creek is my very favorite trail run. There are some steep pitches, but the scenery is inspiring (Obviously these were taken earlier in the year.)

You can run as far as you want on this trail but I almost always turn back at Slickrock, a cascading waterfall spilling over white rock into a gorge. I thought about going that far today but I knew it wasn't happening. My pace was sluggish and I kept tripping over rocks. Obviously I needed a rest day but at the same time, I hadn't run in a week. I had to run, I thought as I twisted my ankle, fortunately not severely.

Something just felt off, though I was quick to condemn it as laziness. My inner coach cracked the whip. So what if you backpacked 30 miles this week? That's not running! Pick up the pace!

Then as I was crossing Deadman Meadow, two miles from the trailhead, I caught my foot on a rock and did a full on face plant. It was the best place it could have happened, in the soft dirt instead of on a rocky section. I got up gingerly, uninjured, and slowly jogged to the trailhead.

What I had ignored was my body telling me that it was tired, a cumulative effect of the last four weeks of backpacking and interrupted sleep, both in the tent (Is that a bear?) at at home (The dog comes up the stairs. Pants. Runs back down the stairs. Runs back up the stairs. Pants. Runs...You get the picture). Tiredness/Overexercising=Face plants for me, because I am normally sure-footed.

It's a fine line and one I'm never sure about. Cut a run short because I'm wheezing up the Hill of Despair, or power through? Give up on a bike ride because my husband drives by (cringe. I did this) or stubbornly keep going? Take a nap in the hammock or go to the Gym of Awfulness? Oh and what about your vow to do yoga every day, Missy?

I envy people who have no such dilemmas. They seem to fall in two camps. The ones who pound it out, regardless. Oh, I ran fifty miles yesterday. Today, I'm going to ride my bike for 100 miles. Then, I might swim a few miles. I have typhoid fever, but that's no excuse! Or the others, the ones who say, I'm kind of tired today. I think I'll go for a walk.

There's no right or wrong here. To the freaks of nature, I say, run on! I'm trying to fit into the other camp.

pushing the season

2011-09-21T17:19:00.000-07:00

I hold my breath every day until I see the sun blaze over the canyon. I want to bottle up this cinnamon-sweet fall weather and save it against a November, an April. I know I am lucky with every golden day that passes. It could be so different. In my two previous fall seasons here snow has come early, breezing in with the confidence of the self-absorbed.

Not so this year, and I cross my fingers as I head out on my fifteenth backpack trip since May. J pokes fun at my habit of hiking from dawn to dusk, racing the sun, but I feel compelled to drink in as much country as possible. After two years in this mountain range, there is still so much to see. I should draw it out, make it last decades, but I can't seem to do it.

Dark falls early, leaving me hurrying for a campsite. I bargain with the trail: Fifteen more minutes, and then I'll stop. The pass, I'll camp there and listen to the elk bugle (or perhaps the hunters attempts to bugle). Okay if not there, then Bonny Lakes. I'll stop there for sure. But it's still daylight, so maybe...just a bit farther. I end up setting up camp by headlamp, once again.

Pushing the season and I know it: Though the days are still a serene yellow and blue, shirt-and-shorts weather, there was frost in the high meadows of Big Sheep Basin. The nights turn cold like the flip of a switch. Everywhere, signs that the short, glorious summer is nearly over.

This has been a long, spectacular run courtesy of the trail contracts, many miles (hundreds?) starting in the poison ivy and heat of Hells Canyon, climbing down from 5800 feet to 1600 and back up again in one day. Now I am on the tail end, the contractors just about finished. This is what I dreamed of when joining the Firm..paid backpacking, the rarest jewel there is.

I think I have wrung out every golden drop of summer but I am greedy, wanting more. Wanting things to stay the same forever. Never to change, although I know the inevitability.

The nights in the tent are long though, too long, staring at the nylon walls, too tired to read but too awake to sleep. Each morning could be the one the snow falls, irreversible and final. Each morning, so far, it isn't.

walking the line

2011-09-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

What is the line between obsession and desire? Would you know it if you crossed it? How would you find your way back? Would you even want to?

"You seem kind of...obsessed." The words hit me like a wet washcloth. I've been thinking about it for a few days now. Lately my outdoor adventures have hit a fever pitch. I keep trying to go farther on the bike and on foot. When I only go a few miles, or an hour, I agonize. Maybe I should go out and run three miles. Four. Because I didn't get enough out of that hike. You know, just because. I ate brownies today. I don't want to get out of shape. Winter is coming.

I have met obsession before and I know its bittersweet taste. In my early twenties I ran and ran. Everything I did revolved around my next run. I wouldn't go away for a weekend because I might miss a run. I ran inconveniently, in storms and ice. I stared at my running log, looking for that perfect number--40 miles a week, at less than 8:00 pace.

That was obsession, but the flip side of obsession is passion. People without it bore me. Even if it is something I would never do in a million years--tele skiing, snowboarding, the Western States 100--I like to see fire in their eyes. It is fascinating, primal, seductive. I get those people.

If this post sparks something in you, riddle me this: What's the line you walk? How do you keep from falling in?

Forty Miles of the Minam

2011-09-16T11:03:00.000-07:00

I lay in my tent hearing an unfamiliar sound, the light finger-tap of rain on the fly. I have grown accustomed to sunshine and packing up a wet tent and the on and off dance of rain gear is not as smooth as it was in the rainforest. (Crap! It's raining harder! Put on rain jacket! Rain pants! Pack cover! Five minutes later: Crap! It's not raining and I'm hot! Take off everything! Repeat.)

Over across Frazier Meadows, a light glowed in the elk hunters' wall tent. They had come in late the night before and I had not seen them. In thirty-two miles of walking I had in only seen three people, my friends who were caretaking Red's Horse Ranch and a woman riding a horse up from a private inholding. It was fall on the Minam.

Beautiful river valley.

Near Frazier Meadows, in light rain.

Fall on the Minam and the landscape reflected the season in subtle ways. The grouseberry was turning yellow, the grasses amber. The light slanted in a different way, softer. The river was low and harmless. The whole place looked as if it had been painted with a smudged finger, more like a dream than real trees and water.

A wildfire burns in the mountains.

Fall on the Minam and I felt like the last person on the trail, completely alone but self-sufficient, carrying everything I needed.

Hovering all of it was winter, its presence an unseen thing, real only by feel and touch. Soon this rain will be snow. Soon this river will be ice. I feel an urgency to see it all, do it all, before winter comes, slamming the gate to the mountains shut. You can still go there, but it is different, tinged with the deep ache of cold and the fear of avalanche.

On the day before I had backpacked 25 miles, wanting to get out of the river corridor and up to some alpine views. There were some perfectly acceptable river campsites, but something drove me on. I was reminded of my marathon running days. Before them, my long run was only six miles. It was amazing to see what the body can actually do when asked. Soon a sixteen mile run became short. I am the first to say that I am not an exceptional athlete. Plenty of people run and hike more than I do. But there are a lot of people who don't ask enough of their bodies. They might be surprised at what they can do.

This is the Lostine River after passing Minam Lake.

Two miles from the trailhead I encountered a white-haired man, probably in his late seventies, dressed in camo and toting a bow. When I told him I hadn't seen any elk, he grinned cheerfully.

"Oh well, I'm old and I'm just tottering up the trail," he said.

Later that day, after a shower and pasta, J shook his head when I told him I had backpacked 25 miles in one day.

"Normal people don't do that," he said.

Maybe. But who wants to be normal?

Eleven miles on 9/11!

2011-09-12T19:43:00.000-07:00

It's time for a HAPPY POST!

I noticed that some of my bloggy friends were running 11 miles on 9/11 and I decided that this would be a worthy way to remember those who died on that day and those who have died in the ensuing occupations (ahem. Wars. Whatever. This is not a political blog).

To understand how much running eleven miles means to me, I take you back to the summer of 2007. I was on a fire outside of Missoula. There had been something creeping around in my knee for awhile but I was doing what I usually do, ignore and hope it went away. Then I stood up and my knee locked. I can't describe the intense pain. Not only did it lock, but it kept trying to unlock in spasms. I hopped over to the med tent in tears, but there wasn't much they could do. Over the next couple of days the knee unlocked slightly so I could limp around, but it was clear that life as I knew it--as a marathoner--was over.

There were months after the surgery when a one mile jog was a victory. Even two years later there were residual spasms. The farthest I dared to run was about an hour. I biked and hiked instead. Double digit runs, I thought, were a thing of the past.

Did I dare dip back into the way things used to be? I decided to try. I could always walk. I started in the predawn darkness. It was already seventy degrees as I shuffled slowly up the Hill of Death and its lesser cousin, the Mountain of Misery. Drift smoke swirled around my face. I had picked a rollercoaster run, but a beautiful one that winds by the lake on a dirt road.

I was completely alone. No lights came on, nothing stirred. I thought a lot about the firefighters who went into certain death, just because that is what they do. I thought about all the people at work, maybe surfing the internet, thinking about what they brought for lunch, or just working away. I thought about the people on the planes. I thought about how lucky I was to be running. I thought about the last ten years--from Oregon to Alaska and back. From bad times to good.

To my surprise the first half went smoothly. I felt great! For a few moments I was back in the zone, the marathon zone, the one that made all the pain worth it. You know what that's like. Reaching the marina trail, I turned around and headed back. I was moving slowly, slower than my marathon pace used to be, but I didn't really care. It wasn't about time.

I had a few bad moments between miles 8 and 9 when my body rebelled a little, wondering what I was doing. The knees and hips felt a little out of alignment. I slowed down. But everything smoothed out again and before I knew it, I was racing down the Hill of Death, with only one mile to go. I felt a smile fan out across my face. I'm baaaack, I thought.

But not really. I can't make runs like this a part of my repertoire very often. I need to protect my knees, which have been doing remarkably well lately. Still, I cruised up to my house, looking around for Cute Neighbor or Fun Athletic Girl to tell.

Nobody was around. I hugged my accomplishment like a sweater. Eleven miles is nothing to most of my runner friends-just a warm-up. But to me, it's everything.

lunatic fringe

2011-09-10T15:56:00.000-07:00

Deep breath. Just ignore it. That's right, don't breathe the smoke that tinges the air a cinnamon shade. Don't notice the sun, turned blood red. Those air tankers and helicopters that bumble through the sky? Don't listen. Drive fast so you won't see fire camp at the rodeo grounds.

This is the big one. The big test to see if you have overcome your addiction. The canyon burns and burns. It is hot. A project fire on your doorstep. People bustle around self-importantly. And you? On the sidelines. Not needed.

One of the casualties of moving to a new place is that you lose all your history. You are a blank slate for people to scribble on. Woman who wears dresses to work=could never have been a firefighter. You are not one to fill the air with decades old stories. "In Yellowstone, in the fires of '88.." "Back in two thousand, in Montana.." This behavior irritates you. You are not that person. You prefer to seep in slowly, a trickle instead of a flood. One day you look around and realize: Nobody here really knows me. They will, someday, at least in a way you can accept. But there are big gaps. They don't know the you that drove a swamp buggy through the Everglades. They don't know the you that rappelled into caves. There is so much they don't know. It will take years, and sometimes you wonder if you are, once again, up to the task.

Instead, think about why you wanted to kick it. Never being home. Nobody willing to wait around that long, to give you a chance at love. Instead, men who whined about your love for fire, thinking, correctly perhaps, that it trumped your love for them. The uneasy balance of keeping them happy but feeding your soul.

Other things too. The chance to have real summers, to hike, to run, to know people outside of that culture, to wear shorts instead of Nomex. Too, the effort of keeping up qualifications when your real job has deadlines to meet. Losing those qualifications, demoted to only a handful. The thing is, you can't really just dabble in firefighting. You are in or you are out, with these big fires anyway.

And still. Like any addiction, it lurks. It waits for you at odd moments. It is more than an addiction, you think. It is your old life. The purr of a helicopter coming to pick you up from a mountain. Your crew, a tight bond after only a day or two. You really don't want to go back to those days. Not really. It was hard, and it was lonely. It is not your dream anymore. But for a long time, it was.

You will get through this. Today you sat at the lake with friends. You swam to the buoy and back. You hugged your pets. You missed your husband, away on another fire, and you now know a little about how those men you left behind must have felt. Tomorrow you will try a big thing, for you anyway, running 11 miles on 9/11. You will think that your problems are very, very small.

The canyon burns without you. From now on, it will always burn without you. Most of the time you are okay with this. Just not today.

when things go wrong

2011-09-08T17:41:00.000-07:00

Years ago I worked for a very short time as crew on a rescue helicopter. This time was a braid of excitement and terror, so closely entertwined that I sometimes could not tell the difference. I would be sweeping the bays, pulling weeds, or some other menial task and the paramedics would swoop in.

"We need this, this and this," they would say and I would pull out backboards, oxygen, short haul supplies. Eddie would fire up the helicopter and I would take the front seat next to him, his eyes in the sky. We would lift off and dive deep below the rim of the Grand Canyon, all the layers of rock one dizzying progression. As we spun through time, tourists turned their faces upward like flowers.

The victim could be on a trail, on one of the sandy beaches along the Colorado River, or just out there--somewhere. Eddie would wait on me to open my door and check the position of the skids, to see if we were on solid ground or if rocks were in the way. Sometimes he would hop the helicopter to a better place.

When it was safe we would pile out, the paramedics doing their thing and me helping. The faces of the victims never really stayed with me. Instead it was the relatives--hanging around with a look of puzzlement. How could this happen, they wanted to know. One minute you are hiking on your vacation. The next, intubated and fighting for your life. The dots were too hard to connect.

I thought about all this yesterday as I helped talk someone down a trail. To protect his privacy I will only say that sometimes the wilderness turns on us, either physically or mentally. It is not always some happy go lucky adventure. Sometimes people don't make it out alive. Sometimes they do, but are changed forever.

Someone falls from a mountain. Ultrarunners are caught in a brush fire. A plane falls into Deadman Reach---we think, because we find no trace. It is the risk we take, the dark side of the moon.

Be careful out there, friends.

cross country, or how we went on a deeply annoying, severely frustrating adventure and somehow stayed married

2011-09-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

I have a love-hate relationship with off-trail travel. Sometimes it is seamless, an easy climb up granite to reach a hidden lake. Two off-trail hikes loom large in my memory as spectacular, one a talus scramble up a mountain unstable as Grape Nuts to peer breathlessly at a wilderness ranger grail: an enormous lake so remote that there were no fire rings to clean up, no trash to pack out. Another time, in Southeast Alaska, a girl named Amelia and I zigzagged through brushy cedar and treacherous rock outcrops to stand above a lake frozen in mid-July. So yes, I can say I love off trail travel.

Sometimes I hate it too. Case in point, Warm Lake. I have seen it on maps and daydreamed. Warm Lake. Warm Lake. Could it be? Could this lake possibly be..a hot springs lake? Nobody I questioned knew, which should have sent up some serious crimson flags, but didn't. I was consumed with the vision of a rockrimmed hot springs pond. What if, I thought, What if?

J was game for the adventure but as we struck out into an old burn, flinging our bodies over deadfall and squelching through questionable boggy spots, he asked if I was sure about this. "I'm not ready to turn back yet!" I answered blithely. How bad could it be? The map showed the lake only a mile and a half from the road, for Pete's sake.

Two hours later we dragged ourselves to a vantage point. Unfortunately I had worn shorts, and also unfortunately I have the habit of banging into every stob and branch there is. Several scrape marks decorated my legs. Streaks of black from burned logs completed the look. But my breath caught. There it was--the lake! A few hundred feet below, it glimmered seductively.

"It doesn't look that bad," I said tentatively. J looked concerned, but he knows me by now and figured I wouldn't be satisfied until I swam in the hot springs lake. We picked our way through scratchy brush, more tedious deadfall, bees and tiny trees repopulating the burn to emerge on the (swampy, impassible) shores of Warm Lake. Our feet teetered on a floating mat of vegetation. We paused, uncertain.

"We should put on our sandals and head for those rocks," J suggested. Neither of us wanted to negotiate the deadfall again and besides, that side might be better for swimming. Slowly we slogged along until something went horribly wrong. I took a step and began to sink in bottomless mud.

"I'm in quicksand!" I screamed. I sank further.

To his credit, J came to the rescue, even when my sandal was sucked off my foot and I had to execute a tricky maneuver to save it from disappearing forever. He did feel compelled to say, however, "Well, it isn't really quicksand. It's mud without a bottom."

I could have done without this remark, but I was so grateful to be released that I only slogged along, now muddy and out of sorts. Gradually I became aware that the water under my feet was not only decidedly not warm, but was very cold. Warm Lake indeed!

After a brushy and curse-inducing detour through a brush patch, we stopped at the rocks and regrouped. Swimming was out. We had hoped to continue our cross country adventure with a trip to nearby Frances Lake. The map showed it only 200 feet higher and less than a quarter mile away. We looked up. Deadfall. We looked at each other. I looked at my watch. Three. Sadly we decided to retreat.

The hike back was, if possible, worse than the way in. In an effort to stay out of the deadfall we climbed the rocks, climbed down the rocks, and up again. But the deadfall and brush were pervasive, the result of a stand-replacing wildfire ten years earlier. It was unavoidable.

Whiny Girl made a brief but show-stopping appearance. I hadn't seen her in several months, but there she was, her pace slow, stopping to sit on logs and complain. In the last half mile, hunters watched us curiously from the campground, only their stares preventing a full scale tantrum.

The lake of my despair.

I can't say that anything about this hike was fun. I have new gashes on my legs, got caught in mud with no bottom, discovered stinging nettles, did not get to swim in a hot springs, or any springs, didn't have enough food, and let myself down by whining. On the bright side though, we didn't scream at each other like the couple I saw on the trail a few months ago ("Take it easy, I'm carrying a LOT OF WEIGHT!") and we made it back to the car without throwing each other over a cliff. That's what it's all about!

same as it ever was

2011-08-30T19:41:00.000-07:00

Dear Wildfire,

I have to admit it, I'm still in love with you. I don't like what you've become: a massive, bloated machine that takes up over half the budget, but I still love you in your purest form, like yesterday, two lightning struck trees and some ground fire, the four of us with our pulaskis and bladder bags, no overhead, no teams, no media hype. I don't always agree with putting you out, because the forest here is starved for you. It needs you and we've denied it for so long, that dance of fire and forest, that delicate balance.

For years I chased you through the Everglades, the mountains, in Alaska's interior. Gradually things changed and I was no longer welcome as professional firefighter ranks swelled. It didn't matter that I knew you well, had seen you in many forms. I was sent to the sidelines because my job didn't begin with fire.

I missed you but I learned to live without you. I didn't need you as much once I found some mountains that I loved and a man with blue eyes whom I wanted to be with every moment. Life is short, memories are long, and I still watched lightning kiss the trees, remembering. I recalled hiking up endless hills gripping a pulaski, trying to close the gap between the firefighter in front of me. I remembered working my way up through sometimes hostile male ranks, swinging the lead pulaski, taking command of dozers and engines. Being with you was something I could do and I did it well.

I almost broke it off with you completely this year. There are so many young men who want it more than I do, and women too. I remembered a morning in Colorado when I found out that my friend had died at your hands. It didn't seem worth it, love and hate enterwined in a knot of pain impossible to unravel.

But just like a man you can't shake, I came back to you this week. Lightning pounded the forest and I hung around the dispatch board until I got my chance to see you again. There you were, creeping through the grass, chewing up the logs, just like always. The years melted away. I was thirty again, my mistakes still ahead of me, life a wonderful and unpredictable adventure. The guys were kind and let me take charge, though they didn't know of my long and colorful past with you. How could they? They've only seen me without you.

In the end I only got to play with you for two days. You winked out and were gone. I'm left the way I have been when lovers left me, heart in my throat, wondering how to go back to the ordinary. But I don't think we are done yet, Wildfire. We may only tango once a year, but we will never be completely through.

Singletrack!

2011-08-28T14:48:00.000-07:00

I'm not a mountain biker. Yes, I have a mountain bike. It's a Trek that used to belong to a rental fleet (Sitka Bike and Hike) that I acquired for $150 before I could ride a bike at all. (In case you haven't hung around this blog very long, I taught myself how to ride a bike last year. I was one of the Adults Who Never Learned to Ride a Bike, the few, the ashamed).

Anyway, I have worked my way up to 18 miles on dirt and gravel, but lurking out there is the mystical singletrack, you know, the kind you rode when you were eight. The granddaddy of them all is the Redmont trail, which I am clearly not ready for. But maybe, I thought, I was ready for the state park.

To real bike riders, this would be nothing, a well-packed trail with no obstacles, and mostly flat (I stayed off the steep stuff). To me, this was an exciting adventure into a world that had been closed to me for decades. Gingerly I rode along, admonishing J to stay far away. If you could have heard my thoughts, this is what you would have heard:

"Okay. Okay. I can do this. Gosh this is narrow. Uh-oh! Turn! Turn! TURN! Okay. Be calm. Around the pond. This is fun. AAAAAH Rocks! Narrow! Rocks! Gonna crash! Can't do it! Have to walk! Damn, J saw me walking. Oh well, he married me. Too late now, buddy! Okay. Get on the bike. Brake! Brake! All right. Here we go. Obstacle! Old guy fishing! Don't take him out! Okay. Safely past. Back on the more open part. Fun! Oops-Gate! Brake! Danger! Bail!"

If you think back to a time when you accomplished something you never thought you could, you will know how I felt once the tires hit pavement. Yes, it was short and somewhat pathetic. No, I'm not ready for Redmont. But I did it, I rode singletrack!

Switchbacks are for sissies, or the cure for mountain envy

2011-08-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

I've seen the Seven Devils etched against the sky for two years from over on the Oregon side. I look towards Idaho and there they are, peaks sawtoothed against the sky, a green blur on a map, a mysterious place perched near the canyon rim. Finally I was able to go there.

We were continuing the mercury study and hiked into a semi-remote area to gather fish. I slogged up the unrelenting inclines, bent under the weight of my pack. We carried nets, paddles, water sample bottles, forms, and other mad scientist stuff.

The Devils are humbling. There is no easy cross country here, no little skips across passes to reach the other side, no flat terrain to be found. It is an angular place, no soft curves, instead basalt cliffs poking their faces to the sky. The trails scribble across the talus slope. This is no place for wimps.

As I hiked along, I wondered why I have this mountain envy. When I see a new mountain range I have to explore it. I can't just let it be. I wonder how it relates to my twenty years of traveling, how I always looked at the unknown places on the map and wanted to dive in.

On our way up the pass to drop into Ruth Lake, the kind of trail that you plod along, head down, each step a victory, we passed the turn-off to Horse Heaven. I knew from an overflight that Horse Heaven is a sprawling alpine field, gloriously upturned to the sky. There's an old fire lookout there, perched on the canyon rim.

I stared longingly at the weatherbeaten sign. Only three miles! I can totally do it! But in the end, common sense (and our nine mile hike, up and over two 1000 foot passes) prevailed. It tugged at my heartstrings just a little to turn my back on the sign.

But that's what choosing to stay in one place, with one person, is all about, isn't it? You leave some trails unexplored, some rivers unrun. You learn one mountain range enough to love it through all seasons. You study the lines on one person's face, trace their known skin with your hands. You are home.

I have only skimmed the surface of the Devils. There is much more to see, and I may see it someday. I may go to Horse Heaven, lie cartwheeled under the big sky. But dropping over Big Sheep Hill to the valley I live in, I felt invisible arms encircle me and welcome me home.

Even freaks of nature get tired

2011-08-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

My husband likes to call me a "freak of nature." He is, sweetly, mistaken: I am no faster than anyone else. In fact, my running times have become spectacularly slow. It takes me forever to pedal a bike or swim a half mile. I know real freaks of nature: women who run 50ks, 100 milers, Ironmans. I'm not them. What I do have is a strong dose of stubbornness that makes me keep going.

So it can go something like this: Backpack ten miles, set up camp, then day hike three miles over a big, formidable pass to visit an outfitter, then go three miles back? In one day? After a few days last week of combat backpacking over other formidable passes? Why not?

I admit, I have become smug about my hiking prowess this summer. After all I started in May chasing after contractors, climbing in and out of the canyon, gaining and losing 8,000 feet. Hiking is what running used to be; my feet know it, my body knows it. It's a dance we know.

"I'm impressed," I heard another hiker whisper to her companion as I passed. Chatting with them, they learned I had come from the trailhead that day, in contrast to their camp at Eight Mile. As I slogged through the white talus, I didn't feel so impressive. The heat pressed down like a hand, mocking my choice of carrying a down jacket and mittens after a frosty night at Swamp Lake last week. The trail climbed, and climbed.

Little Frazier Lake.

The pass itself was windless, a breath caught and held, still eighty degrees at seven at night. I felt unfamiliarly tired. On Day 2, a supposedly easy downclimb of ten miles, my pace plummeted to 2.5 miles an hour. Each landmark passed with excruciating slowness. Finally the trailhead appeared, none too soon.

J met me at the door with a box of ice cream sandwiches. I ate two. "How was it?" he asked.

"Um. It was a bit much to do for an overnight," I said.

He laughed. "You're a freak of nature," he said.

I was too tired to correct him.

llamas are cool.

killing fields

2011-08-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

The Copper Creek canyon is, I think, one of the prettiest places on earth. You have clear, green-tinged water:

Perfect bowls of snow, trees and wind..

Sun-splashed lakes...

Sherbet sunsets...

It was hard to reconcile all this beauty with what we were doing, which was killing. Killing in the name of science, and killing an introduced species but killing all the same.

I somehow managed to get through years in Alaska without ever killing a fish. I chowed down regularly on salmon and halibut, but I only dragged them up to the surface, never delivered the final blow. Hypocritical? Yes. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Some people can pull the trigger. I'm not one of them. So these little brook trout were the first fish to die at my hands.

An unseen enemy may lurk beneath these placid waters--mercury. Borne into the wilderness, it accumulates in the flesh of fish and can spiral up through the food chain, wreaking havoc. The fish I killed will help determine if initial results are accurate. So it's important.

Still, I kind of hated to have their blood on my hands. Sappy? Hippie-ish, sentimentalist drivel? Perhaps. But I think that when you kill a creature, you should feel something besides elation. I believe in the work we are doing. But those fish stay with me. They will for a while yet.

I guess this (writing) dream's gone away

2011-08-13T10:38:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that the subtitle of this blog is "writing and wilderness." I don't write about writing all that much mostly because I blog about it here: http://www.cheekteethblog.com/ and also because lately my writing fairy seems to have skipped away. My novel languishes at 65,000 words; my next one is only five pages in. My sarcastic attempt at a romance novel, "Love in Xtra Tufs", is only an idea. Contest deadlines flit by; I haven't written for High Country News in months.

When I graduated proudly with an English degree I was positive I was going to be a Famous Writer. So what happened?

Wilderness happened. I fell in love with mountains, rivers and lakes. I wanted to work and live in national parks and forests. I wanted to feel the sun on my face, not artificial light. I wanted to climb and run instead of sit. I wanted to be with other people who felt the same tug to the wild.

And so I did. It's not that I didn't want it enough. More that I wanted to have it all. I didn't want to choose, didn't want to give up anything. I thought it would magically all fall into place: an outdoors job, marathon running, true love and books.

Of course it doesn't work that way. In order to be good at something, whether it's ultrarunning or mountain biking or writing, you have to put in the time. You have to give other things up.

As my songwriter friend Chase says, I guess this rock star dream's gone away. I'll pack up my guitar and sell my things. I watch Chase sing, his eyes closed, completely in the moment. I think, He's so talented. Why doesn't he go somewhere, really try to make it? But Chase is happy. He loves playing with his band and he loves being here.

I realize I am happy too. I don't need to be a Famous Writer anymore. I love my life. It's packed full of sparkly moments and love and sunshine. I wouldn't change a thing.

(Although I may start on Love in XtraTufs just for fun).

The romance writer at home with her family. This shack is unbelievably where she wrote the best-selling "Love in XtraTufs", a tale of Forest Service workers deep in the Alaskan rainforest. Is it a true story? Can love be found among the devils club? She isn't saying.

Who notices a swamper?

2011-08-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

The sawyers get all the glory. They strut along with a 24 pound chainsaw over their shoulder, chaps on their legs, chips flying as they cut. Who notices a swamper? There you are, scurrying along hefting a 21 pound dolmar sloshing with gas and oil in one hand, a pulaski in the other, a handsaw shoved into your pack. You are the one who picks up the rounds and heaves them into the brush. The one who watches for barber chairs or trees twisting uncertainly in the wind. The one who is bent over clearing the trail of branches.

Who notices a swamper? You are the clean-up crew, not the one admired for the perfect row of holding wood, the clean cut of the saw. You are the satellite, the moon around a planet.

I used to be a sawyer. I roamed the Florida woods cutting down fire-roasted trees and upstart invasives, just me and a saw. But like a lot of things I've left behind, cutting is one of them. It takes practice to keep a saw steady, to judge a lean, to not screw up. Mostly, I'm okay with swamping, if I don't think too hard about what I've lost.

John and I hurried up the Bearwallow trail, scorched in last year's fire gone bad. We had heard terrifying reports of winter-fallen trees, stacked like matchsticks, impossible, impassible. We carried wedges, a falling axe. We were prepared for battle.

Only.. a chainsaw vigilante had arrived before us. Disregarding the prohibition of chainsaws in wilderness, this person had marched right past the wilderness boundary at 3.5 miles and cut all the way to the Standley Cabin, 5 miles in. Here is not the place for a treatise on wilderness trails and chainsaws, I have heard all the arguments for and against. What was disturbing was the callous disregard for the boundary line. We had two trail crew people behind us armed with crosscuts and bowsaws, to do it right. Young guys who aren't afraid of work, who have learned the importance of a traditional tool and the pride in cutting something out by hand.

John and I stopped at the cabin, formerly a fire lookout's residence, to fill our water bottles from the spring. We returned to our cache of tools at the wilderness boundary. Just before it a tree leaned dangerously, flirting with the ground, a head-thumper. John took the pulaski and chopped it out by hand. Golden chips flew around. I grabbed sections of tree and pushed them off the trail. This, we thought, is how it's done. How it's been done for hundreds of years. Feeling the tree resist then crack under our tools.

Standley Cabin. Isn't it cute?

Who notices a swamper? Maybe nobody. Who cares if the trail has been cut out by hand or by machine? Maybe not the hikers, the trail runners, the horse people who only want to get somewhere and don't think about lifting a hand to help. Maybe nobody. But I do. I notice. I care.

Kinda pretty up here. Colorado-like.

A day on the pass photo essay

2011-08-07T16:40:00.000-07:00

Here's the lower Bonny Lake. Pass is in the background.

There's not much I can say that is better than just showing where I was today. Though it was a sluggish start, I made it up to the pass in record time and was alone in the bright blaze of sun and wind.

The trail continues down into the East Fork of the Wallowa River. Those mountains are a chain that separate the two forks of the river.

Happiness is: no thunderstorms, wilderness and chocolate chip cookies.

I had to cross a snowfield. Katey, recognize these shoes?

Perfection.

A big open playground.

I passed a group of retired smokejumpers who were doing volunteer trail maintenance. Love them. And two backpackers. That was it. I'm afraid I'm becoming a hiking snob. Do I really want to hike the JMT with crowds?

Looking back down at the lakes.

This would be a great trail run. But today I wanted to move at a slower pace and take it all in. I'm becoming attached to these mountains, inseparable from the rivers. It's happening, finally. A piece of country is sinking into me and I into it. I finally know why people stay.

I'm (not) too old for this

2011-08-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

Work. Hard work. Just you, a pulaski, an axe, or a crosscut saw, each swing thundering through your arms and down to your feet. Sweat dripping down your back and your three-day-old shirt. Waking up so stiff and sore you can't touch your toes and it takes a half hour of yoga to unbend the kinks so you can walk back up the hill to start again. Your hands, slowly uncurling from eleven hours of grasping a smooth handle, the dirt and rocks and roots, each one a blow, a victory, a challenge.

For years I lived this life, digging fireline, chopping out downfall from a trail with only a pulaski, swinging a swedish brush axe through palms, building a pole barn in the oven of a Florida summer, all in a series of short and sometimes brutal jobs where your value lay in how hard you could work.

Somehow I've gone away from that, turning to trail runs and long hikes instead. More days than I like, I sit in a cubicle. There's a big piece missing, the satisfaction of working hard, doing something most people couldn't, or wouldn't want to do.

I got to experience it again this week as I and four others dug a new water line for a historic set of ranch buildings on the Minam River. Ninety in the shade, 8-10 inches deep through swamp, tall grass, sod, rubbery roots, enormous rocks requiring a pickaxe. Hard work is humbling. You can think you are in the best hiking or running shape ever, but try something like this and you quickly learn how much more there is.

I often hear people say they are too old to do work like this. Let's be clear on one thing. The minute you start saying you are too old, you ARE too old. The people I was working with, three days in the hot sun? 35. 59. 59. 62. When we were done we packed up and hiked out, eight miles up from the valley floor. It took us three hours. And I chased after more than one of the "old guys".

I liked going back to the world of real work. I'm not sure I want to live there all the time but I know I want to visit more often.

The tally:

Bee stings: three.
Hours digging: 25
Swims taken in river: four
Times I went for a trail run because I didn't get enough exercise at work: zero.

Running down a dream

2011-07-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

Everywhere I've lived there has been some nearly unattainable goal or destination, shrouded in mystery. In Nevada it was the fabled Moon Dome, a cave room with walking passage, decorated with delicate formations. In Idaho it was Swimm Lake, reachable by a death-defying scramble up Grape-Nut talus, a lake whispered about by wilderness rangers because it had no footprints, no messy fire rings, no signs that people had ever been there. In Florida it was Royal Palm Hammock, a grove of rare silver-barked trees rumored to grow deep in the swamp. In Alaska it was the sub-four marathon. Some of these I achieved, others I never found.

Here in the Wallowas, for me, the place is Deadman Lake. A small scrap of blue perched just below the Hurwal Divide, it remains elusive. A few people I know have glimpsed it from the ridge above. A couple of people have actually been there. I have my sights on this lake; for two years I have stared at the map, the daunting contour lines, the fin of rock where it lurks, but have never made it there.

The first serious attempt occurred yesterday. In retrospect, we made all the classic mistakes. Leaving the trailhead at 8:30, way too late. Hiking on a 90 degree day. Not knowing the route beyond "you go up near Slickrock Creek." Still, we pressed gamely on, finding ourselves on a loose, shifting mountain. The phrase "I'm scared" was uttered more than once. Clearly this was not working.

This is Slickrock Creek. The brown looking stuff is left over snow from an avalanche.

We decided to angle over to an area of retreat, but then noticed that the climbing got easier. "Let's just go up a little ways," I said. We started up a much saner route, finding a line of footprints of some lone soul perhaps bent on the same destination. It was then that a small storm decided to blow through like a child's temper tantrum. We retreated to a small grove of trees to think things over.

Here's a couple of dorks waiting out the storm.

The sky was dark; rain lashed the trees. In this country it is impossible to tell what can happen. There are no clear patterns. Prudently, J decided we should go back. "We're only at 6100 feet," he said, studying his GPS. Deadman Lake is at 8674 feet. "We still have four hours of climbing," he said. "I don't like the look of the weather."

Childishly, I sulked, which led J to observe that I am goal fixated. "It's the journey, not the destination," he said cheerfully as we picked our way downslope. Sullenly I looked up at the sky, which taunted us by clearing to bright blue. Still, it was a sweet summer day. We paused by the river to eat our sandwiches. The journey, not the destination. I hope to get better at this. But goal fixated or not, I'm going to try again. I kind of like having a destination that isn't easy. I may get there, I may not. It gives me something to journey towards while I learn to stay in one place. Staying, I find I need those markers, those places still mysterious.

The lake is up there somewhere.

Here's a big show-off crossing the creek on the top log. (I walked on the bottom one).

This isn't my first rodeo

2011-07-27T20:20:00.000-07:00

Here I sit, fooling with my blog, eating way too many chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, deliberately skipping the rodeo.

Chief Joseph Days, an unfortunately named series of events that rarely seem to have much to do with Chief Joseph, is going on in my small town. Once again I failed to rent out my yard to tents, though many people in town have. People pack the streets. There are parades. There's music. There's rodeo ad nauseum.

I just can't get into it. Other people lather themselves up into a frenzied state of excitement, but I guess rodeo just isn't my thing. Cowboys aren't my weakness. (Smokejumpers, that is another story. Sorry, J!) This is a horsey place, and sometimes I want to be that girl, long hair flying, riding bareback across a field. But, so not going to happen. I'm a fan of my own feet. If I fall, it's because I took a wrong step. I'm in control of my destiny. Deep down, I don't trust horses.

To say this here is to be branded a hippie in sandals, so I mostly keep quiet. There's nothing wrong with horses. Or rodeo. They just aren't for me. I know this in the same way that I know I will never learn to surf. Or climb big mountains. Or run 100 miles at a time. In a life you have to distill down your passions, or at least I do. It's hard enough with a rare free afternoon. Do I kayakrunswimbikehike? If I'm not doing one I feel like maybe I should be. I'm probably not the easiest person to live with (sorry, J!).

At any rate, I don't wanna be a cowboy. Or a cowgirl. You won't find me riding the range. You might, however, find me running it.

alone in the mountains

2011-07-24T16:29:00.000-07:00

I arrived at the trailhead to find about forty cars gleaming in the sun. I knew the Lakes Basin was a popular place, but forty cars? Inwardly I steeled myself to a hiker brigade, the clatter of cooking pots and the unavoidable (after you've been a wilderness ranger) noticing of glaring gaps in camper low-impact etiquette.

None of the usual suspects could go with me so I had decided to go anyway, fueled by curiosity over the reports of monstrous snowdrifts and impassible creek crossings. As I headed up the trail, a steady stream of backpackers were coming down. "You might be able to get to Moccasin Lake. But there's no way you can get to Mirror," they chorused. The water crossings? High and scary. Mosquitoes? Terrible! Everyone looked happy to be leaving. "Only a mile to go? Good!" one kid exclaimed, rushing towards the car.

Then a strange thing happened. The wilderness emptied of people like water rushing out of a drain. I climbed the nine miles to Horseshoe Lake to find complete solitude. A couple of day hikers headed back to the meadow three miles below and nobody else appeared. The logs across the creeks were friendly. The mosquitoes, bearable. The day spun out like a dream, quiet, peaceful, still.

The next morning I walked the loop to the high lakes, climbing up over snowdrifts. Surely I would run into campers. This was the Lakes Basin after all, the most crowded destination in the Wallowas there is. But I passed by each lake, a glimmering link in a chain, completely alone. On the far side of Mirror, I followed a single hiker's footprints, he and I the only ones to make it up here this year.

Mirror Lake, still mostly frozen in late July.

Wintery Eagle Cap Peak. The sun made taking pictures difficult but I wasn't complaining.

I live in a postcard, don't you think?

It's always like this here, surprises, just when you think you have everything figured out. I don't know why I thought staying in one place would be boring. I'm finding every reason to stay right here. I don't need to chase adventures around the globe anymore. All I need is an afternoon at a sun-warmed alpine lake, and then, later, hiking out to find people happy to see me. It's the balance I looked for, it seems, forever.

I know there will be days when this isn't enough. I haven't lived with myself for this long not to know. There will be days when I want to be anywhere but here. But today is not that day.

lake swimming (and pack giveaway results!)

2011-07-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

Step 1. Struggle into wetsuit.

Step 2. Drive to lake in wetsuit, because nobody needs to see Step 1.

Step 3. Find a place free of boats, novice stand up paddleboarders, and kids on floatee toys.

Step 4. Gather up courage.

Step 5. Swim!

This is a deep glacial lake, fed by snowmelt. As I swim I imagine that I absorb small pieces of mountains through my skin. I glide over rocks that the glacier left behind thousands of years ago. The lake is shot through with golden sun as sweet as brown sugar, but a primordial cold lingers beneath the surface, enough to let me know that it is not as tame as it appears. Wildness is trapped beneath.

I learned a trick from another solo swimmer: take off your wetsuit in the water. It is much easier. All that is left is a quick two step to shore. The coolness in my body lasts for hours; inside I am a column of ice, slowly melting.

Now for the pack giveaway! There were 8 entries. I used a random number generator (random.org) and the number that came up was #4, Ingunn! Ingunn, please send me an email to maryellenemerick AT gmail.com with your address! If the pack doesn't work for you, you have plenty of other people here who want it!

Everyone else, don't despair, there may be cool giveaways coming soon. I have way too much outdoor gear, some barely used. Thanks for playing!

if only

2011-07-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

I was that girl in the car stuffed with belongings that you saw at the rest stop off of Highway 2, 395, 50, more. Where was she going? I was the girl with the seventy pound backpack and Forest Service uniform, packing a shovel and a pulaski in the White Cloud Mountains of Idaho. I was the girl leading cave tours at the park, planting trees, the one the news cameras scanned past at a fire camp. For years I was that girl. I walked the independence road because I didn't want anyone to tell me I couldn't go into the mountains when I wanted to. I didn't want someone's jealousy if I was on a fire crew with a bunch of guys, or anyone's smothering neediness when I wanted to go off to the coast to write. I know too many women who live those lives.

I thought I would be alone forever and that was okay, because I was fed up with wishy-washy men who didn't know what they wanted and men whose only outdoor experience was sitting in bleachers being participants. If I were ever to be with someone it had to be with a man who plunged in over his head just like I did, who wandered off the map, who didn't follow team sports (no offense to anyone reading this who does), who got it.

This week after my wedding has been the best week of my life. Sometimes it's easy to let the if-onlys creep in: If only this town had a pool. If only I could sell my memoir. If only I didn't have wrinkles. If only my knees were perfect and I could run a trail ultra..

The if-onlys have dogged me plenty in my life, but I can choose to beat them back. I can swim in Wallowa Lake with a wetsuit. If I don't sell my memoir, I had a lot of fun writing it. Not much I can do about the wrinkles. I can't run an ultra but I can run five miles and that's a lot more than some people can.

The other night I was at an outdoors restaurant listening to my friends Chase, Charlie, Brian and Spence play music. The whole town seemed to be there, a swirling kalidescope of color. The moon was full. This is a town where if they know you, they hug you. The band played on in defiance of the noise ordinance. Everyone danced. I held my new husband's hand. This is as good as it gets. It is worth the time it took to get here.

PS! If you wrote something for the backpack giveaway, it will happen next week, mid-week! My back is healing and I feel much more kindly towards Osprey. I did, however, order a Deuter. I have a Go-Lite that is on thin ice too, so stay tuned!

Free Backpack! Or, how I hiked 31 miles by accident

2011-07-13T18:19:00.000-07:00

Ultra runners do it all the time. Thru-hikers do too. But let's face it, 22 miles up and down, holding a GPS and a map to find the actual trail, sliding on eroded, ball-bearing rocks, climbing across washouts, and crossing the same darn creek seven times with an uncomfortable backpack, is a long way.

Can you see the trail here?

Just to clarify things, I didn't intend to cover 22 miles in one day and nine the next. I hiked out the ridge with good intentions of doing a shorter out and back. But two things intervened. Lack of water and plenty of bear sign. A dry camp, I'm okay with. Bears in camp, not so much.

So I looked at the map and thought, Hey! I can make this a big loop if I drop down Saddle Gulch (losing 3000 feet in elevation), hike along Horse Creek until I find a good campsite, and then climb back up Monument Ridge!

What I didn't know was that campsites along Horse Creek are a scarce commodity. The river canyon narrows to a steep gorge; elsewhere the creek has changed course, chewing away at the banks until the trail is in fact the river. On I plodded. I had two mini tantrums, but without anyone to witness them, tantrums just seem silly. I stumbled into an okay but dark camp at 8 pm.

My oh-so expensive Osprey pack was on thin ice, having rubbed my back raw in three previous outings. I discovered that it had done it again, to the point where it was painful to even lie on my back. This pack has to go. More on this later.

What else? I sat in sap. I got my feet wet because I gave up on taking on and off the sandals. I got a blister. No bears showed up. The moon was bright. The next day I climbed painfully out of the canyon and back on the ridge.

Luckily there were big cairns on top of the ridge, because the trail disappeared.

I thought I was home free up there as I headed to a road labeled 4WD. Mistake! It was completely logged in. I crashed around in the woods for awhile before admitting defeat and heading back down the ridge to a connector trail. This added four miles to my “easy” second day.

Okay. About the pack. It’s an Osprey Aura 65 women’s. Read about it at Rei.com. Unfortunately it does not work for me. In making the pack light, the manufacturers have taken away the cushy hip and shoulder padding. I am giving this pack away to someone who can use it, not hang it on a wall. It’s been used four times. There’s a mysterious stain (coleman fuel?) on one pocket. The pack retails for $239. If you want it, post a comment. In the comment say how you found this blog and what you like reading about. I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winner. If you win it and it doesn’t work for you, all I ask is that you give it away to someone who will use it, not sell it. Pass on the trail gear! If nobody wants it, I will donate it to a kids’ backpacking program here.

Hike on, friends.

Look at Osprey, sitting there all pretty and innocent.

Outdoors and marriage

2011-07-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

There are definitely things I would not want to do with a partner:

Move heavy furniture.
Back up the truck to the boat trailer.
Paddle a double kayak.
Run a marathon (unless you both totally run the same pace)

Things that always go better with a partner:

Figuring out where you are on a map.
Scaring off a bear
Planning an epic adventure
Navigating across rivers

I'm always amazed at the men who marry women who don't like the outdoors, and then they sit around and complain that their wives don't like the outdoors. Hello? For me, I like a balance. I like that my husband (as of Friday! Yay!) will sometimes backpack with me, but not always. It forces me to go with other people, which turns out to be really great. I like that I run and he doesn't, because I can run at my own pace and not get into my competitive my-partner-is-better-than-me-at-this-grrr mode. (I'm not competitive at all. Really).
I like that watching him has made me get better at mountain biking, and I like that he has his own thing, tele skiing, which I don't want to do but makes him happy and jump around when it starts to snow. I think it would be super boring if we did the same things together all the time.

And no couch potatoes. I love my couch but I don't want to live there.

Our party was yesterday at the volunteer ski hill. I can't believe how many people showed up, a testament to this town and the many interwoven strands of outdoor people (The award for most outstanding entrance went to Peter, who flew in on his parasail). There's the backcountry ski crowd, the hike to tops of peaks crowd, the hang out on the brewery porch crowd, the artists, the musicians who could be famous if they really tried, and the horse crowd, some belonging to more than one group. I am still a newcomer here, but the great thing about these people is that their circle can expand to hold more.

the same thing I always write on July 6th

2011-07-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

It's been seventeen years since the South Canyon fire.

I haven't forgotten.

I will never forget.

Miss you, buddy.

Used to be

2011-07-03T17:55:00.000-07:00

Of all the things I used to do, giving up fighting fire has been one of the hardest. This might seem strange, because wildfire fighting is scary, painful and often boring. You can have hours and hours and days and days of swinging a Pulaski through stubborn, root-bound soil to create a skinny fireline. You can spend hours and hours poking bare-handed through gently smoking soil to find hot spots. You can be gone from home for weeks. You can cough, afterward, for weeks. You can die.

But there were days, months, years, when I loved it, just me and a band of strangers turned friends, off somewhere on a mountain, spiked out with our Meals, Ready to Eat and our bladder bags that we filled up at far-away lakes for squirting water on the fire. We huddled around the ashes, our bond after twenty-one days as thick and tightly-woven as braided rope. We ran into each other again and again in pockets of the country: Yellowstone in 1988, Wyoming in 1989, Idaho and Florida in the nineties, Montana in 2000, Alaska in 2004.

When I was on a fire, I felt as though I knew something. I could put it all together: the wind, the terrain, and make a map of what would happen. I knew when we should dig a cup trench to prevent rolling material from igniting outside the line, and I knew when we should cash it in and call for water drops. I spoke the language of relative humidity, helicopter payloads and hose lays.

That was before everything changed, in myself and in the world of firefighting. It has mushroomed into an even bigger juggernaut, more and more professional crews so that us Call-When-Needed (or, more patronizingly, "The Militia") are not summoned or wanted, and are looked down upon as second-class, ill-trained, last resort. Gone are the days when a burly crew of rangers and trail crew dug hot line. With shrinking budgets, our bosses won't let us go anyway; they have targets to meet and their backgrounds aren't in firefighting anyway. A gap has widened between the ones who are paid to do it all summer and those who come when called.

I've changed too. I don't really want to spend my summers digging fireline. I want to hike and swim and be with people I love. With each summer drawing down I know time is limited and short, and I want to drink it all down before I get old. There is so much country and so little time. So much love and so little time.

So while everyone else is in Arizona, I am here. And though I have mostly made my peace with ending twenty-five years of some sort of firefighting, full time or part, I can't say there isn't some little twinge, some half-remembered spark. Remember when? And I do.

going to the river

2011-06-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

It's a relief to leave the canyon heat, poison ivy and ticks behind and travel into the river country, just waking up from winter.

If a wilderness can have a soul it would be like the Minam River, a powerful pulse of energy flowing from the melting high lakes down through the forest. Right now it is at flood, and impressive.

Ain't nobody crossing this puppy.

I was in the Minam river country to walk the hot ridges. That's my name for the broad-backed spines that tower above the river and loop down to its banks. They are beautiful but broiling, the only water far, far below. You have to carry water with you if you ascend the hot ridges. You have to be prepared.

Dana on a higher ridge a few days back. This time I was on my own, on a parallel ridge below this one.

This is ultrarunner territory without the ultrarunners and if I didn't have to carry so much pesky work gear I would be tempted to break into a run. You could go for miles and days up here, making long loops down to the river and up again. It's so undiscovered, and I'm glad.

I was checking contractor work but I was also letting the ridge and river country do their magic after a week of trying to make unhappy people happy. At my job I catch a lot of weather: people venting about everything under the sun and wanting me to fix it. Sometimes I feel like I absorb their unhappiness like a sticky dark cloud and I have to unwrap it somewhere, let it go. That's really why I come here.

Sometimes I think that the complainers are way too entitled. I'd love to shove a pulaski in their hand or put them at the hard end of a misery whip and have them clear trails for a week. Clearing trails is the hardest work I've ever done and it puts everything into perspective. But since I can't change anyone, just myself, I come here.

Tally: Days: 2. Miles: Lots. Elk: 2. Bears: 1. Thunderstorms: 2. Scary water crossings: 2. People: Zero.

solo on the western rim

2011-06-26T14:17:00.000-07:00

Every so often, a woman needs a solo trip. Solo, you can pick your own campsite. You can decide how far you want to go. You can get up as early as you want and hike before breakfast. While I like hiking with a group, sometimes I get bogged down by its complexity. It's easier to go alone sometimes.

I am always amazed by how few women will backpack alone. Ones that do often say it is "empowering." I respect their feelings, but I have never felt un-empowered,so going on a hike doesn't change the way I feel about myself.

When I was a wilderness ranger in Idaho, other hikers would often approach with questions. "Aren't you afraid of bears?" they would ask. Or just, "aren't you afraid?" They would never ask this of Andy, or Doug. I never understood that line of thinking.

This weekend I went for a quick solo hike on the Western Rim Trail. It drops steeply off a mountain road down to a saddle outrageously decorated with flowers.

Snow patches still dotted the north-facing parts of the trail. I found a nice campsite on a ridge and settled in to watch the sun slowly drop over the canyon.

It's bittersweet, spending the night alone in the wilderness. I want this, to be under the robe of sky, to fall back in love again with wind and trees and silence. There is a pull though, now, to the person I love and miss. I used to say I could never love a man as much as I loved the mountains. I am beginning to believe that this is no longer true.

Readers, men and women alike, do you backpack alone? If you do or don't, what are your reasons?

Now kids, what have we learned?

2011-06-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

My nemesis, the wheel.

So let's recap from the last two days in the canyon. What have we learned from Cow and Horse Creeks, Summit Ridge and Fingerboard Saddle?
1. Pushing a wheel uphill (to measure trail length) can result in face plants because you are holding the wheel in a death grip (don't want to make the contractors clear more trail than is in the contract) and bouncing over every obstacle in the path, not to mention steep, eroded terrain.
2. If someone tells you, "Oh, you can drive that road, no problem," get a second opinion. The next person might say, "Oh, we never drive that road," which would be good information to get before you terrorize yourself driving that road.
3.You can't hike 14 miles when it's 100 degrees. Don't be overconfident in your ability to hike three miles an hour. In the canyon, this is not possible. Also, it is possible to sweat more than you ever thought was humanly possible.
4. If you look away from the trail to contemplate some nice campsites, there is a good possibility you will step on a rattlesnake. (Yes. I did. I felt something squishy, heard a rattle. Dana said, "You just stepped on a rattlesnake!")
5. If your work partner sees something and yells "Ostriches!" there's a good chance that they are not ostriches, but only large turkeys. Try not to laugh too hard.
6. Don't trust the map when it looks like only three miles. It will be 5. At least.
7. The trail signs will inevitably seduce you into dreams of going in a completely different direction. Tryon Ranch, anyone?

8. There's good swimming holes near the abandoned ranches. This is the Litch Ranch, owned by the Nature Conservancy.

9. Water is powerful. This is only a small section showing where Horse Creek, a very large stream, changed its course completely and charged down the trail, obliterating it completely.

10. While racing down the trail, take time to appreciate small butterflies.

looking for legore lake (and other things)

2011-06-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

In my many outdoor adventures, several things have befallen me. I've been charged by a bear. A mountain lion came and snarled next to my sleeping bag. I've walked in alligator-infested swamps. Fire has chased me. I've crossed big rivers, hunkered during lightning storms, run out of water, and gotten lost.

Now for something truly scary:

It's easier to commit to the John Muir Trail!

In my brief first marriage (still feels kind of weird to write that) my husband preferred to hike only as a means of killing something. He wouldn't bike in the rain, wasn't a backpacking fan, and the kayak I got him hung unused on the house. In another relationship my BF thought the relationship was doomed because we "didn't talk" when we hiked. It is really hard to find that balance--someone who likes some of the same things but not all. I don't want someone stuck like glue. J likes to backcountry ski. I don't. I like to trail run. He doesn't. It works out.

Three weeks, folks. We are wavering between a spot by the (flooding) Hurricane Creek or a (trespassing) tramp to the moraine behind J's house. It's simple, the way it should be.

Yes, I wish I had found him when I was younger. I wish I could erase all the dumb mistakes I made, all the people I thought would be my outdoor companions and who sadly proved not to be. But I can't. I had to learn some things first. It's like the hike I took today up Falls Creek. Somewhere way up there is Legore Lake, the highest lake in Oregon. This is what I saw:

I floundered through snow at about the three mile mark after gaining 2000 feet or so in elevation. I really wanted to get to the lake even though I knew snowshoes would be needed and perhaps more winter clothing. And more food than a Clif Bar. But I've learned patience. So I turned around. It'll happen. August maybe.

two days at the end of the world

2011-06-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

Dug Bar is a long way from anywhere. You have to want to go there. No, you have to need to go there, enough to put up with hours of teeth-rattling, hope-I-don't-meet-another-car-and-have-to-back-up road that goes to sticky clay in the rain. You dive down to the end of the road to an anticlimatic set of drowsing old buildings, remnants of the flush times when there actually was a year-round Hells Canyon trail crew. Heck, when there even was a Hells Canyon trail crew. And before that, when it was an actual ranch, the Dug Bar Ranch.

It was quiet at Dug Bar, the only sound the river, high and chocolate-covered, and a stray meadowlark. We hiked far into the hills, gaining several thousand feet in elevation.

It's a late spring, the hills still green, the creeks still running. We hiked ten miles, short of our plan of 14, but we had forgotten: in the canyon you throw out all the rules. Your normal pace does not apply here.

We were looking at an area that has been free of cattle grazing for some time, but the proposal is to put them back in. I can't lie, I don't want them back. The streams were clear and cool, the bunchgrasses long as hair.

But of course it's not up to me, so I enjoyed what is here now, not what will be or what was.

Well, enjoyed some things. After a sound sleep on the riverbank we all headed our separate ways. I decided to check out a connector trail that leads to the Snake River. After a mile of swimming through poison ivy, I called it quits and Technu'd up by the river. I hope it worked...

The prickly pear cactus was in bloom!

In the end, you always have to go home, so we packed up and left, back to the world of computers and meetings. We left Dug Bar to the intrepid tourists who somehow find their way there, the kind of tourists I like because they are willing to seek out places like these.

I like finding these little cups of silence, these places at the end of the world.

the same old thing

2011-06-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

When your life is the road, you don't have time to get used to anything. Everything is always new, exciting, not tinged with repetition or the insidious curtain of boredom. I spent most of my life as a seasonal worker and even in the last two places I alighted, five and seven years each, I spent much of that time on the hunt for new places, in jobs that involved frequent floatplane travel, camping and kayak trips. I was rarely home, and when I was, I chafed at the reasons that kept me there. Surely I was wasting those hours, I thought.

Now that I have decided to stay in Wallowa County, perhaps forever, it is a struggle to break out of the current I am used to swimming through. Often I run the same trails. I paddle the same lake. I see the same people. It is taking me time to appreciate familiarity, a view that rarely changes. The excitement of something new is gone but something else is slowly taking its place: layers and layers of experience, the kind that you need to really know it. In the past, I passed through places at a gallop, sure that I had seen them. Now I know it takes forever.

I pulled my kayak out onto the grass yesterday. "I have to kayak the same old lake," I complained. After the ocean, it seemed small, hardly worth the effort.

J, who has lived here 24 years, looked worried. "The same old lake," he said. "Are you going to get tired of me, because I'm the same old person?"

But he's not, of course, and neither is this place. It is more subtle change, the drawing of snow across the face of Ruby Peak, the waterfall I had never noticed before on this morning's trail run. And just like with people, it takes years to discover everything. On Friday Dana and I hiked Cougar Ridge, a sprawling, open spine of land that drops precipitously down to the wild Minam River. Snow was just giving up here and flowers taking its place. Unseen, a river gurgled below us. Beyond us many more unexplored ridges stretched lazily.

In my travels, I always wondered about the locals who were dug in happily near the parks. Naively I felt sorry for them. Didn't they ever want to just pack up and go? Didn't they see that their lives were passing them by?

Now I am beginning to appreciate those who stay. I won't ever be completely one of them--I have plenty of traveling plans, and I'm not one to broadly proclaim that where I live is the best place in the Universe. I also have moments where I have to go somewhere, anywhere, just to get out of this valley. But it is a rich life when you plant yourself. The same old thing isn't really that at all. It is a friend, changing slowly with the passage of time but still capable of surprise.

the strange world of cold springs ridge

2011-06-09T16:54:00.000-07:00

This week I got to go to another place I've never been: a long, wide ridge poised over Hells Canyon at 5,800 feet. Though only fifty miles from town, it seemed like another world. Strange and mysterious things lurk there. For example:

This is called Frog Pond. It is a teardrop lagoon. Actually I think it's a stock pond, but I can pretend it's an amphibian palace. The froggy chorus is deafening.

The trail signs are weathered and sometimes unreadable, a mute testament to when we used to have a trail crewin the canyon. A victim of budget cuts, that crew is gone and the trails are vanishing.

Often the map and the GPS were both wrong. The trails go down entirely different drainages. You have to tease a faint blur of ancient trail out of the landscape.

This stream was called "Dry Creek". Hmmmmm.

Up on the ridge, someone left me a toilet! Sweet! (not)

And then as I dragged myself back to the Liberty Sport after a 4000 foot elevation gain, after not seeing anyone for 24 hours, I looked up and saw this:

This is Bart Smith, and he is walking the neemeepoo trail. It's 1000 miles and he will end up in Yellowstone. This is the route Chief Joseph's band took when they were chased out of the Wallowas. There are actual trail sections and road sections. Bart's website is http://www.walkingdownadream.com/.

You just never know what you will find out here.

backpacking the hells canyon wilderness

2011-06-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

The window of Hells Canyon is closing. It usually is only a sliver, a brief slice of time where hiking is not dangerous. Before the creeks have dried up, the heat turned up so you bake in an oven of brown, waterless slopes. We made a run for it before it was too late.

The trail heads down from this high point and then winds along mid-canyon, two thousand feet above the Snake River.

Freezeout Saddle, about 4.3 miles and several thousand feet above where we parked the truck.

Just as had been predicted, summer came with the flip of a switch. It snowed Thursday. Saturday it was 80 degrees.

We set up the tent on a grassy knoll with a spectacular view. There were several cars parked on the road but we only saw one group. This wilderness is big enough to absorb multiple parties; it swallows you up.

We're in Oregon. The snowy peaks are in Idaho.

We wandered along the bench trail and finally just sat, taking it all in. I could stare into the canyon for hours.

Some pink alpenglow from our campsite.

Harsh, rugged, serious country, Hells Canyon is. It's not for everyone. We passed a group clearly unprepared and hating life. Clad in unbreathable clothes, gaiters and gloves, they toiled uphill, most certainly deluded about their final destination. When I first got here I looked at the trail mileage and thought, eleven miles to the Snake River? No problem! Elsewhere, maybe. Not here. You have to respect this landscape. You make few miles here.

Amy on the saddle, homeward bound.

So long, Hells Canyon. See you in the fall.

Stormy weather

2011-06-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

I'm lucky that I spent seven years in a rainforest because I am okay with rain. Rain and me, we get along just fine. This spring has been spectacularly rainy here in the Wallowas, and people are pissed off.

The creeks are rising, lawns are growing, everyone wants the usual sunny days we are known for here. But for seven years I lived with near constant rain and the other side of the coin, sun mania, so I can adapt.

Today I inspected a trail contract over in the Buckhorn area. It rained softly most of the day. Because I descended and then ascended three thousand feet it was easier to just get wet rather than sweat miserably in a raincoat. There were a lot of creek crossings, and I forgot my sandals (I always forget something). At first I tried to tiptoe across the creeks....

But it's kind of hard when they turn into waterfalls...
So I just gave up and sloshed across.

Then I drove a rocky road that was a challenge for the Liberty Sport, in search of the contractors. This is a long, spectacular ridge but you would not know it because it was completely encased in fog. It drifted in and out and it felt like I was the only person alive in the world.

The fog and drizzle made it hauntingly beautiful. Deadhorse Ridge, you are one of my new favorite places.

It will be sunny soon enough.

Trail Sense

2011-05-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

"Either you have it or you don't," John said. We stood on a grassy knoll, searching for remnants of trail tread. Far, far below the muddy Snake River rolled, chewing away at the banks. An abandoned line shack, a relic of the sheep herding days, sat among the whispering grass.

He was talking about trail sense, the ability to read the landscape like a map and figure out where a trail should pass through. The ability to find old sections of trail and where to build new ones so they flow through, not fight, the country.

In Hells Canyon many of the trails are no longer used. They were built from the high places, down through the benches and eventually to the Snake. Heat that presses like the palm of a hand, breathtaking elevation change, the disappearance of the grazing allotments and the growing unwillingness of people to get out and exercise have all conspired to hide these trails. Built on open slopes, the bunchgrass has grown in--"Haired in" as John called it--and it is anybody's guess of the actual trail location. The maps are often wrong. It takes trail sense to find them.

We combed through a vast, open country. What I love about the canyon is how big the landscape is and how small it makes me feel. There is something I like about being humbled by sky. All of your problems and heartaches seem insignificant. Standing there I realize the bare bones of importance--clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, big swatches of country wild enough to hold all of us.

John has trail sense. He spent several minutes searching the tall grass and found ancient switchbacks. We dropped steeply to Salmon Bar, going from winter to summer in a few hours.

I'm not sure about my own trail sense. I am more likely to be seduced by a game trail or an interesting feature on the landscape. I have been momentarily lost in the canyon, confused by its many wrinkles. Instead of looking back the way I have come, I look forward, wanting to know what lies ahead.

What I do know is this: Loving Hells Canyon is like loving a difficult but fascinating man. Exasperating, perplexing, and strangely wonderful. It hides its secrets--its old trails, its line shacks, its precious water--and it takes patience and trail sense to find them all. I hope I never find everything.

I went backpacking. In my sandals.

2011-05-24T18:32:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I've forgotten many things on a backpack trip. Tent stakes, necessitating emergency rocks and sticks. Mosquito repellent in the Everglades. Tent poles, forcing an improvised bivy sack. The fact that the tent I was bringing had a missing pole. A book, on a solo 5 day wilderness ranger hitch. Even a sleeping bag on a rainy, cold kayak trip that I shudder to remember. But I've never forgotten boots.

In all fairness, I'm not completely clueless. I had thought I was going to drive in my truck, so I put on my Merrell, at least ten year old, sandals for the drive, and thought I would just put on boots when I got to the trailhead. However, all five of us fit in Tami's truck, so I merrily threw my pack in and thought nothing of it.

Until we pulled into the small parking lot. A horrible feeling began to well through my body. My boots! Where were my boots?

Back at the truck, an hour and a half away, of course!

This trip had been planned a long time. I was going with four wonderful women who, unbeknownst to me, were hiking in tent decorations, a huge box of wine, and gifts. It was a bachelorette backpack! I couldn't back out. And I didn't want to: it was sunny and beautiful, several thousand feet and many miles removed from the dreary, cold spring we are having "up top."

Okay! So I would hike in sandals! After all, people are doing the barefoot thing, I would be right in style.

Note to self: If you do decide to attempt this again, wear socks. On the way in, my toes slipped and slid and became mud-covered. I got a lovely rub mark too. And came uncomfortably close to many poison ivy plants with my little feet. We hiked 12 miles total, next to the river. Merrell, your sandals rock!

But believe it or not, it can be done! It was a fabulous hike.(On the way out I wore socks. Much better).

the trails are opening up!

2011-05-21T15:11:00.000-07:00

I have waited six long months for my favorite trail to be free of snow. I took a scouting hike on it yesterday

The water in Hurricane Creek is so clear it doesn't look real.

Somewhere up there is the mysterious Deadman Lake. I'm heading there in August.

Sacajawea, this is the year I climb you.

Another great trail view of the mountains ahead.

The trail disappears into this massive slide about three miles up. It's going to take awhile for this to melt.

I am beginning to be touched with a bit of summer mania. It is so short here-three months if we are lucky-and there is so much to be done. Climb Eagle Cap and Sac. Find Hawk and Deadman Lakes. Camp in Copper Creek. Then there's all the swimming, trail running, kayaking, a trip to Banff, the Oregon coast......!

This is one of those times that I really wish I was lucky enough to not have to work!

Oh. The Horror.

2011-05-18T20:58:00.000-07:00

The canyon has left me with a little gift.

Yes, the dreaded PI. I have escaped its clutches since my Florida swamp days, when Juls and I suffered through numerous bouts of it acquired during surveys of burn units and snagging. Back then we used to lather up with Technu, a viciously yellow fluid that was supposed to work. Sometimes it did. I recently read on the internet that Technu is very, very bad for your skin. We used to just about bathe in it. Oops.

I've also had poison oak, courtesy of a fire in California where we heedlessly grabbed dead-looking sticks. That warranted a trip to the hospital.

The worst of all was poisonwood, an entire tree so toxic that it kills its own leaves. All of us on the fire crew got it working in the Keys. Here it is:

Stay far, far away from this one.

That was so horrific that all of us sat miserably in the trailer provided for us by Everglades National Park, our arms pink from calamine lotion. Mike made up a song called "Calamine Jim" in honor of one of our workmates, based on the song "Big John." It started out, "Every morning at the trailer we'd see him arrive.." and the chorus was, of course, "Calamine Jim. Calamine Jim."

So the familiar itch brings back memories of those times. I've tried a few remedies so far. Baking soda toothpaste is the hands-down winner. But you can bet next time I will be carting the Technu.

don't turn your back on the canyon

2011-05-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

We staggered out of the canyon, having underestimated it yet again.

The main thing you can't forget about Hells Canyon is that you can't count on anything there. Can't count on there being water in the draws, can't count on the weather forecast being accurate, can't expect "just an eight mile backpack" to be easy.

What you can count on is this: a view so big that you can't describe it. You can't say how it makes you feel to look at the folds in the landscape falling steeply down to the Snake River, rugged and wild and lonesome. Low scraps of fog haunting the buttes. The thirsty feeling both from draining your water dry but also the desire to keep going, to keep walking as long as you can to see where you end up. The canyon's like that.

Cale is ready to go. Finding good water for the dogs was a problem.

Our campsite above Eureka Creek. This is about a mile and a half above the Snake River. The Megamid was for cooking and for the dogs. They appreciated it because it rained all night.

We went exploring down Eureka Creek, finding an old cabin and foundations, also pit houses.

There's wolves in the canyon.

It was eighty degrees as we climbed into the canyon and about forty and hailing on top.

The fog in the canyon

The dogs were pretty tired after sixteen miles and four thousand feet elevation loss and gain

Know what this is? Stay far away.

The dramatic clouds right before a huge thunderstorm.

First light in the canyon.

how to ride a mountain bike in a dress

2011-05-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

For decades, I had a dark, shameful secret. A few observant people guessed. A few, very few people were told, when I could be sure they would not judge. I lived in fear of people finding out, almost as if I had committed a crime once and was living a secret life.

My secret was, I never learned to ride a bike.

No point in going into the reasons. Just suffice to say that I eventually started believing that riding a bike just wasn't possible for me. It was something for other people. Once in awhile I could almost know what it would be like,almost like flying, I thought as Ed McGreevy gave me a ride on his handlebars on Mackinac Island years and years ago. But there was something wrong with me, I told myself. And I thought it was true.

When I moved here to this valley I began to question everything that I had previously thought was true. Maybe I could quit the road and live in one place forever. Maybe I could find love that lasted. Maybe I could publish a book. And maybe, just maybe I could ride a bike.

After all, I had taught myself to swim a few years ago, gutting it out in the pool hour after hour. I had decided to learn and I had, despite the embarrassment of being passed in the lap lanes by just about everyone as I floundered through the water.

In the end it took about a week to teach myself how to ride. I refused to give up. I rode under cover of darkness. I slunk along farm roads. I still remember the moment, a little over a year ago, when I started to pedal.

I also started to cry. Because here was something I had wanted for so long but I had thought was not possible for me. Finally I could let my secret go. I could be like everyone else. And finally I got it. I understood what it was all about. It was a whole new world, one most people learn at 8, but what's a few decades?

This winter I rode my bike to work just about every day. Only two of us made it through the sleet and ice and snow while everyone else drove. I've ridden in heels, dresses and everything in between.

I love it.

Writing like a fiend

2011-05-07T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've been writing like a fiend, trying to revise my memoir of my traveling ranger days. This can be distressing because it means butt firmly planted to desk chair, something relatively hard for me to do. I did take a small break and ventured onto the lake:

But mostly I've been writing. Just for fun I compiled a list of thoughts that have been going through my head all day today and yesterday.

1. Look at those cute swimsuits at Athleta! Shouldn't be surfing. Get back to work.
2. Yum, chocolate almonds. I've almost eaten the whole bag. Won't be able to fit in cute swimsuits.
3. Oh, the cute neighbor is going somewhere! Where's he going?
4. I wonder what my friends are posting on Facebook.
5. This book blows. I'm hopelessly stuck.
6. Is that the Yard Nazi mowing?
7. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.
8. I could really use a nap.
9. My house needs vacuuming in a big way.
10. Maybe I should try to cut my own bangs.
11. I really shouldn't have tried to cut my own bangs.
12. I feel kind of sick from all the almonds.
13. How will the ex feel about this chapter? Do I really care? No.
14. Maybe I should quit my job and be a seasonal in the Park Service again. It was really fun.
15. Hey, this book isn't all that bad. I'm a genius!

Here's enough news to keep me going: the anthology that my latest essay is in has come out. Check it out here: http://www.pvstories.net/.

Writing and wilderness don't always coexist very well. One is a sedentary pursuit, mostly spent in the head. The other takes me away from the house for hours but soothes my 40-hour-have-to-work soul. How to combine the two without cheating one? I haven't figured that out yet.

the call of the canyon

2011-05-04T18:35:00.000-07:00

I'm finished with winter. Like a lover I no longer need, I'm ready for winter to beat it. It persists, though, salt-shaker snow as recently as yesterday. The mountains are clouded over, unreachable. The wind bites through my coat. Like I said, I am finished.

Fortunately, I do not have to stay crushed in winter's icy grip. Here there is a choice: descend to the canyon and I did, to find where summer had gone. It's been around all along, down at the Snake River.

I don't know why the canyon has such a seductive hold on me. By any account, there are only a few weeks when it does not bake in the sun. It is a harsh place, full of rattlesnakes and ticks and waist-high poison ivy. The old sheep trails are being overtaken by non-native blackberry, making passage impossible.

But there's something about the place I like. It knows what toughness is all about. It can keep you on that edge--watching your step on the high rims, searching for hidden seeps in a dry ravine. I kind of miss that razor's edge I grew accustomed to in Alaska. Here it is again. It keeps me on my toes.

Barefoot Running

2011-04-30T10:23:00.000-07:00

My life can be divided into two parts: Before Knee Troubles and After. Before, I ran marathons. I never stopped to wonder if a hike was too steep. I never worried over an unexplained twinge.

It's all different now. I don't run as much, or as far, or as fast. I use trekking poles when I hike. I worry.

Ever since I developed plantar fasciitis awhile back, a horrible hurtyfoot that lingered for eight soul-destroying months, I've ben curious about so-called barefoot running. One of the theories surrounding PF is that we wear such cushioned shoes, our feet , arches and ankles get weak. Wearing minimalist shoes helps avoid heel strike and lets us run the way we were built to--barefoot. This strengthens the foot, takes less energy and by avoiding heel strike, which very few of us would do without cushioned shoes, may prevent injuries like PF or collapsed arches.

I decided to get on the bandwagon. I bought a pair of Merrell Pace Gloves. The first thing I noticed was how light they are.

I picked a route: Lakeshore Drive, three miles.

Feeling a little nervous about this endeavor.

I started to jog slowly. It felt--different. I didn't feel the heavy plop of shoes. I think I'm a heelstriker, and with these, you just can't. It was almost like running on my toes.

I could feel the ground under my feet, every little ripple of it. I don't know how running on rocks would work. On a smooth dirt road, it felt different, but not uncomfortable.

The outcome? I wasn't any faster. But it felt easier, less effort. Because I landed on the ball of my foot, I was propelled forward.

When I had PF, the PTs insisted that I needed orthotics to correct my "biomechanical problems." I tried the expensive, stiff soles for a couple of weeks and gave up. What if all I've been told is wrong? What if you are really meant to run as close to barefoot as possible? What if your feet know what is right all along?

After the run I went online and read some tips. First of all you are only supposed to start out with a quarter mile at a time. Oops. No wonder my calves feel like I've climbed Mount Everest.

I think I'll stick with it and see what happens.

Breaking Rules

2011-04-27T17:47:00.000-07:00

In my old, fiercely independent, road warrior life, I had a set of rules. Here are some of them:

1. Don't buy any furniture that you can't move by yourself. Better yet, don't buy furniture. Have a folding helitack-type chair that you use to sit on. Sleep on a thermarest, wrapped in a sleeping bag. Have one pot, one spoon, one fork.

2. Make sure everything fits in your Chevette for an easy escape.

3. Never give a man a) money, b) your heart. You're just moving on anyway.

4. Don't ever take a desk job.

5. Climb every mountain, ford every stream.

I also had rules I thought were true of myself, usually starting with "I'm not a." Not a bike rider. Swimmer. Person who owns a lawnmower. Marrying Type.

Yesterday my enormous new amoire was delivered. It weighs 225 pounds. I bought it because I somehow neglected to notice that my cabin has no closets (or a kitchen. Another story). I love my armoire. It was made with dead standing lodgepole and draw knives, which I have had the (dis) pleasure of using and know it's hard. I need an army to move this armoire.

Today I sat at my desk all day.

I own a lawnmower.

I don't climb every mountain anymore, though I try my hardest. I for sure don't ford every stream, not the ones raging with snowmelt, the ones that could take me down.

I'm a bike rider. A swimmer. And, I'm getting married in 72 days.

I guess you just never know.

My new rules:

1. Stick around long enough to know a place and a person.

2. Only have the stuff you really need (and a cool armoire or two)

3. Never give a man money but do give your heart, if he deserves it.

4. If you take a desk job, have an escape plan so you don't grow old at work.

5. Climb the mountains you want to climb, not the ones others want you to. Same for streams. If you don't feel like it, don't. But keep going, don't sit around too long.

I'm trying to replace the "I'm not a" with "I am." I'm a writer. Trail runner. Baker of bread. Backpacker. I'm not a lot of things, but why focus on those?

Have you ever had rules that changed? Let me know. Click that comment button below. Yes, I know you need a Google account. I know it's a pain. Humor me.

Novel Envy

2011-04-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

The truth is, I was a lousy panther capture assistant. I fumbled with the crash pad. I cringed when Rowdy, the tracker, let his hounds loose. When the cat was treed and darted, I just wanted to let it go instead of help the vets pull teeth and take blood.

At first glance, panthers and writing seem to have very little in common, even for me, a person who can, and often does, stretch a metaphor beyond its breaking point. Just remember the panther. It will become important later.

I spent this last week at a writer's retreat on the Imnaha River. Every day I woke in my little cabin,

started a fire (Confession: I stole a coveted shingle to start my fire. The ones Janie and Pam use for the main house. Once. Sorry, Den Moms), visited the outhouse (there were three. I didn't use this one)

and ran up Freezeout Road.

The other four women were novelists, poets,and prose writers who have lists of publishing credits longer than mine. Way longer. Like, you can find their books on Amazon. And they've won prizes. They teach workshops. Every evening when we gathered to read, their paragraphs rich as dark chocolate, smooth and sweet and satisfying. In contrast I struggled with each word, unsure of each sentence.

I was seriously intimidated. These are women doing what I'd like to do, making that leap, and working hard at it. Every day Molly and Betty sank deeper into the sagging couches, intent on each line of their work. Janie baked sourdough bread and tended the fire (Oops. Right. That shingle) and read us stories so funny we couldn't stop laughing. Katey spun intricate and intense short stories that made me feel like I was in Afghanistan. In my cabin, I paced. I ate raisins. I read a book. I sighed, the framework of a TFN slowly taking shape.

(Small aside. T=That. N=Novel. F=you guess. Said in frustration over a novel that is not going well. I learned this phrase this week. Thanks Molly, I love it)

In South Florida, the panthers were barely hanging on. Their habitat fragmented in a sea of condos and golf courses, only thirty were thought to roam the swamp. Not enough. The Fish and Game brought in Texas cougars in a last ditch effort, removed some kittens for captive breeding. Interns rode on swamp buggies bristling with telemetry equipment, searching for the steady pulse of radio collars.

What does this have to do with writing anyway? Not much, except that one of the writers I admired had looked me up online. In one of my anthology biographies I had self-importantly listed all my various jobs, including panther capture assistant. Betty later told me this was intimidating; I suspect she anticipated some rope-slinging, hard-bodied, flinty-eyed creature.

So how does this all tie up in a bow? Maybe this way: we sometimes think of other people as so much more interesting, more exciting, more accomplished than we are. Maybe they are. In the case of these writers, they have reached pinnacles I have not. But have they touched a panther's tawny fur? Maybe not. We all have novels within us, stories waiting to be read.

Sea glass

2011-04-16T15:22:00.000-07:00

Marybeth and I lingered in the abandoned Ballard Place, sorting through the remains of a life. Perched on the ocean's edge, the house listed to one side. Rain lashed the empty places where window glass had been. The stairs were gone, the roof suspect. The forest was reclaiming the tracks where carts had been run to extract silver from adits. In the barn, an enormous generator would still turn over.

The house was full of practical things. Cans of food, bulging now from years of dampness and cold. Mouse-chewed wool clothes. But on the windowsill someone had placed a collection of beach glass. White, blue, amber--these jagged pieces were once utilitarian bottles, ordinary, not lovely. But years in the sea, pounded by waves, polished by sand, tumbling over and over in the current, had transformed them into translucent things of beauty.

Down by the skiff, Hans shifted his feet impatiently. "The tide waits for no woman!" he hollered, pushing the boat off the rapidly exposing beach. If we stayed too long, the flood tide would push into Klag Bay like a muscle and we would be stuck, unable to power through and back to our mothership.

But it was hard to leave the Ballard Place; I would visit it again and again over the next few years as a kayak ranger. Always I would sift through the sea glass. Sea glass meant renewal, reinvention. To someone who has reinvented her life time and again, I feel like a piece of sea glass. Once I was one thing, now I am another. I have washed up on one different beach after another.

I admit it: I took one small piece of sea glass from the windowsill of the Ballard Place. It was an impossible blue, the blue of a sunwashed sky, the blue of the eyes of someone I loved and lost. In all my moves I jettisoned many things but I never gave up that piece of glass. It was my link to the past.

A few months back, a woman from More Magazine called me. She wanted to profile me in an upcoming book about women who reinvented themselves. She knew I had left Alaska, and one of her questions was, "What do you do now to find adventure?"

I tripped over my words. It's true that my life isn't as wild as it once was, dodging coastal grizzlies on my training runs, spending days at sea in a kayak. I felt like I had to defend my new life, even though it paled in comparison to the one I used to have. A sliver of doubt needled its way into my skin. Have I made a huge mistake?

It's all about tradeoffs. As a firefighter in Florida, we were on the line twelve months of the year. You were always leaving someone behind, collateral damage. As a ranger, out in the field week after week, you couldn't know the community, volunteer, spend time with non-ranger friends. I gave up a lot for that way of life, and yes, sometimes I miss it.

It's also an adventure to stay, I am finding. Not the heart-pounding adrenaline rush kind, but as a person living that way, I was impossible to live with. This adventure is in letting people in through the walls you have built up, letting yourself believe you will not have to say goodbye. It's just as difficult sometimes, and just as rewarding. I am turning into someone else; the adventure is in the finding out.

my other lives

2011-04-13T19:05:00.000-07:00

It's been a slow week here outdoors-wise. It's typical spring here-snow, wind, rain, mud. A mixed bag for doing anything. (Although I did weasel my way onto an incredible trip--I get to backpack in the Seven Devils this summer, collecting fish for a methyl mercury study. Initial sampling has shown high levels of mercury in the high lakes and we want to sample more locations. I found out a ton about mercury--or HG as I can now loftily call it. Fascinating stuff!)

I get to go in this mountain range and get paid to fish! Yay!

Waiting for my ride to go to a meeting, I decided to google myself. I couldn't believe how many of me there are. That got me started thinking about all the people with my name living their lives out there, so very different than mine. That led me to thinking about how many different paths I could have chosen. Here's a sample of the women with my same name I found:

I could have been a vet in Arkansas.

I could have owned a flower shop in Wyoming.

I could work at a plastic surgery center in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

There were many others. Waitress at a diner. Watercolor artist. Bookstore owner. And even more interesting, lots of women with my name lived in the 1800s. A census listed a ten year old girl, "cannot read or write" in Pennsylvania in 1870 (we've come a long way, ladies). Someone with my name was a "captive of the Indians" in 1783 (no word of her fate).

Seriously I know that just because I share a name with someone doesn't mean much. But so many things in my life have hinged on chance. A summer job at a state park led to a volunteer job with the Park Service which led me in a completely different direction. There are crossroads everywhere you look.

Have you ever googled to see what people bear your name? What did you find out?

Staying Home

2011-04-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when I lived in (Conservative Ranching Town Six Hours From Here), I never stuck around. On the weekends I escaped to nicer venues: Crater Lake, Bend, here. I couldn't fathom staying put in a wind-driven, tumbleweed-infested place with no trails, no place to swim, no kindred souls. I used to spot Gary, the only other single person I knew, on our mutual street late on a Sunday.

"They never go anywhere," I shuddered, indicating the neighbors, who labored in their yards, worked on their houses, went to the grocery store. Didn't they know there was a big world out there? That their lives were flashing by at warp speed? Didn't they want to see everything there was?

I would never go back there to live, but now I kind of get it. They liked it there. It was their home. And I was a girl without a home, searching for one.

With that in mind, I decided to stay home this weekend. Jerry is on his ~~drink beer with the guys~~ Men's Ski Trip and I have a free, selfish two days. Yes, it looks like it might be sunny enough to attempt a backpack to the Snake River. Oh, the Wenaha might be nice! Hmm, Anthony Lakes? But in the end I decided to appreciate my back yard. And it has been great so far.

I ventured over the flume.

Pretty nice view from the State Park a half mile from my house.

Wallowa Lake, only a month or so until Operation Pink Kayak can begin. Not to mention Swimming with Wetsuit While Others Think I am Crazy.

I'm not missing a thing.

up in smoke

2011-04-05T14:06:00.000-07:00

Tonight, in my new life, I am burning a part of my old life. I am burning wedding pictures.

I look at them and I don't feel weepy or nostalgic. I don't feel like I could have done anything better, or that I did not try hard enough. What I do feel is sadness for the woman who looks back at me: for the long, hard road she will have to travel. This is what I want to tell her: It will be worth it. It will be hard, and lonely, and miserable, but in the end it will be worth it, to get to this place, this new life.

In the way some people have faith to sustain them, I have always had wilderness. Because of that, I will always be all right. Give me a winding trail into the mountains, a river without end, and I can go there to heal from nearly anything. In the calm indifference of the trees, I see that the cycle of life cartwheels on, regardless of tragedy, despite despair. There is something about wilderness that shows me that things change and renew. A stand-replacing fire, a hundred year event, brings hundreds of tentative new seedlings. Avalanches move mountains. Time marches on, with or without us. There is always mystery in the secret life of snow, hope in the wind.

I loved my wedding, a colorful gathering of many wilderness friends from around the country, representing places where I had worked: Florida, Sequoia National Park, Idaho, and others. They didn't know each other but quickly became friends themselves on a sandy beach at Redfish Lake. There was my history in their faces. They had all known me at different stages: dragging a drip torch through a sawgrass prairie, collecting sugar pine cones in the Sierras. It was my outdoor life, my whole life, right there, each stage of it.

I have a new life now, and am making new friends. I don't think about the other life that much, not the four years of it when things were hard. But the best part of that other life was the one day at the beginning, when hope still floated and we told stories. "Remember when?" we asked, dredging up those memories of hot springs, chasing fires, long hikes. We rolled with laughter, recalling the time Jack and I nearly got hit by lightning near Red Ridge, the time Breck returned to his pack to see a bear eating his peanut butter sandwich supply. We thought about searching for a hidden grove of royal palms and floating the Jeep Buggy way down south. There is a long and winding trail that leads me back to these people. Our bonds will never be severed, not by adversity, not by flame. I will remember them forever.

I don't need pictures for that.

Getting over myself

2011-04-02T12:36:00.000-07:00

I threaded through a rock field, trying to run. Up on the moraine, the glacier's leftovers, the trail dipped and lurched, following the curve of the mountain's back. Sometimes I was forced to an ungainly walk, stumbling over hidden boulders, crunching through old snow.

I used to be a faster runner. Back in the day, when I had an actual running log, I chronicled my failures and triumphs: a speedy half marathon. Intervals at the track. Two marathons. A 22 mile trail run with no training just because I felt like it. The Race to Robie Creek, a tough half marathon all uphill for the first several miles. Age group victories. A group of heavy medals hung in my house. I subscribed to Runner's World. I cared about gels.

I've fallen out of love with running, except on rare days like these when I find a rocky, high lonesome trail and let my expectations go. It's easy to berate my slow, lumbering body (at least it feels like it is slow and lumbering) and recall the way it used to be, easily sustaining a seven minute pace, nothing hurting, feeling limitless. I don't accept the aging excuse: I know I could go back to the track, run hill repeats, just run instead of cross train, and the runs would get easier and faster. But I don't really want to do that. I want my exercise to be fun.

I don't mean that I will always hold a meandering pace. I still like to push myself. But I loved running for so long. My identity became entwined in that one thing. A bad race, an injury: those were enough to send me off the deep end. I don't want to be that way.

When you stop being a person with an identity, it's a struggle to see where you fit. I can't really call myself a runner anymore. Instead, I'm a person who runs trails sometimes. I'm not really a firefighter anymore, or a kayak ranger, or a young woman. All of these things are hard to get over. All of these things conveyed something about me.

But then I think, who really cares how long it takes for me to run a mile, but me? I need to start leaving the watch at home and just running for as long as I feel like. I don't need to tick off the mile markers and think about how slowly I reach them. I need to find other trails that wind through the mountains. I need to fall in love with running again. Not as my identity. Not to prove anything. But just to recapture that feeling of first love, the way I felt at fourteen, running around the neighborhood with my sister and my friend Laura. Back then, it wasn't about times. Or distances. We never raced. We ran through sprinklers and talked about boys. We didn't have Ipods or Garmins or running logs. I want to get back to that.

I dropped off the moraine and picked my way back down to the car. I had no idea of how far I'd gone, or my pace. The lake whipped to a froth with whitecaps. A tentative sun peeked out from the clouds. I might not be a runner anymore. But most of the time, I'm okay with that.

leader of the pack

2011-03-31T08:11:00.000-07:00

J doesn't like to advertise that his dogs are in fact wolfdogs. There is so much fear and misinformation about these dogs, and right now in this county, the debate over wolves is escalating to a serious level. And these dogs are a nebulous mix of other breeds and since two were rescue dogs, the actual percentage is unknown. We don't know where they came from or what they knew before this. We know some of it was not good. Sometimes they look at me with sweet, sad eyes and I wish they could say.

One way in which they differ from other dogs is that they are definitely a pack. Where one goes, the others follow. You can't just take one for a hike. You have to take all of them. Which limits the backpacking opportunities. They also don't like to be very far from J. He is their pack leader and he can only go a certain distance only known to them before they get anxious and need to chase after him.

I have learned a lot from these dogs. Mostly I have learned optimism. They wake up happy, whether they have to spend the day in the yard or get to go out and play. I've learned acceptance: they adopted me into their pack without reservation. Cale, the big white one, comes and checks on me when I am out in the woods by myself. Though I will never know, I like to think he is making sure I am all right.

I've learned to live with a little--okay, a lot--of dog hair over everything, because the reward is floppy dog rugs to lie my head on, to wrap my arms around and feel a beating heart. I've learned to adapt: if I want to hike in the canyon but there are rattlesnakes, I can go somewhere else and be just as glad.

It's a package deal, J and the dogs. He likes to joke that since he couldn't find a girlfriend who would stick, he kept getting dogs. He says that if something happened to me, he'd probably get another dog. He can't even look at the wolfdog rescue pages; it breaks his heart because he wants to save them all.

In a perfect world, breeders wouldn't try to create these breeds. It takes the right person to care for them. When these dogs howl, it is a beautiful sound, tinged with wilderness. You know that a different song runs through their heads than your average dog. I love them dearly.

five year plan

2011-03-27T17:14:00.000-07:00

Crikey! I had a photo essay all written and my photos don't show up on the post when I publish it. So until I figure it out you get a photo-less post all about me, me, me!

I was sitting in my cube at the cube farm, my stomach a clenched fist. I had been visited by one of the screamers, who wanted to know why I wasn't doing things differently. The budget had hit an all time low, and we didn't even have money to buy toilet paper for our campgrounds. I was assailed by various co-workers, all of whom fervently believed that their project should be my number one priority. My head pounded. My stomach churned.

Then it hit me. It does not have to be this way. No, I can't just up and move, my usual solution in times of distress. Witness a recent conversation:

Me: "Soooo. We're going to live here the rest of our lives, aren't we?"
J (deer in headlights look): Uhhh...

So. I fell in love with a homesteader. But, I thought, why not just get out early? Is it really worth the extra $1000, $2000,$3000 a year to grimly stick it out in full-time employment until age 62? How much is your free time worth? Thus, the five year plan, which is:

1. Work grimly for five more years. This is when I can receive a tiny annuity, heavily penalized.
2. Skip out a free woman.

In the meantime I plan to sell the cabin in 2013 and put as much into retirement savings as possible. If I can pull this off, I will write full time, hike, ski, and live frugally. I'm very excited. Hold me to it, you guys. Make me leap.

camping in the rain

2011-03-23T16:48:00.000-07:00

This backpacking season is off to a slow start. There is only a small window between snow and ice in the canyon and virulent poison ivy, a multitude of ticks and oppressive heat. That window is March and April, two months of sun-drenched, rolling green hills and sandy river beaches. Soon that window will slam shut. So why am I not packing my backpack?

The word that dares not speak its name. But starts with an R.

I've spent many nights shivering under a tarp, many days plodding through sodden territory, days when water pockmarked the ocean as we kayaked, so much fog and rain that it felt like we were in a bowl of water. Rain is part of the experience, and as we used to say in Southeast Alaska, there is no such thing as bad weather, just inadequate gear. There, we did everything in the rain, because it basically hardly ever stopped.

Here's Annie in a survival suit and hard hat to ward off the rain, near Dry Pass.

A little bit of rain in the forecast doesn't deter me. I'm not that much of a wimp. It's the "rain, heavy at times" that I am no longer in love with. As a kayak ranger I camped grimly through gales, torrential rains and fog. I don't need to prove my toughness anymore.

Our rain-soaked camp on one of the Myriad Islands. Feet wet the first day=feet wet the whole time. We had a tarp just for our gear and tarps over our tents.

At the same time, I don't want to become so soft that any inclement weather makes me stay home. It's a fine line between misery and acceptance of the fact that it is NOT always sunny in Philadelphia. Or the mountains. Or the ocean.

Even an overcast day can be hauntingly beautiful.

It's about developing a level of tolerance, a line in the sand. Last year during the Amazing Snow Dump of August, we bailed early from the mountains. Other times I've stuck it out, enjoying the moody interchange of clouds and sun. It's about my new philosophy: do what I want, not what I think I should do. There are no wrong answers in the outdoors. The only wrong thing is not to get out there.

dolce far niente

2011-03-20T14:00:00.000-07:00

When I was training for my marathons, life was pretty simple. Everything revolved around the schedule. Horizontal rain, forty degrees, gale winds? Time for an eighteen miler! Nice, rare sunny day and Laura was out in her kayak? Too bad, this was the day slotted for a pace run. In the Alaska darkness I treadmilled around the track, intent on my speedwork.

Now that I am only training for life, things are a bit more disorganized. It's hard not to wake up and roll into a ball of anxiety: mustexercisetodaywhat?Hikerunskipilatesyoga? Oh crap haven't been to the gym in ages! I only ran once this week! It was MUCH easier when I was a mono-exerciser.The choice was: Run.

Because there are no benchmarks, such as the first time you run for two hours and survive, I find myself second guessing my choices. Is a walk enough? Maybe I should run another mile. This ski, is it raising my heart rate enough?

Which of course defeats the purpose and makes it a lot like work. One of the reasons I don't run marathons or race at all is to be free of training tyranny. To be able to do what I feel like. But the opposite side of that freedom is obsession. Without race times to measure myself against, how do I know if I am staying in shape? Must do more!

I need to get better at dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing. Well, not nothing. That's not me. But in listening to my body, which is an old hand at this. Maybe it wants to stroll. And that's okay, as long as I make up for it another day.

With that in mind, I headed out on the Chief Joseph Trail. I knew I couldn't cross the waterfall, so that would keep me from mindlessly pressing onward. It felt strange at first. There had been some slowshoers on it and it was nice and packed down. I should be running! I berated myself. But the trees were iced over with frosting, the trail a soft hush, the river a distant murmur. Dolce far niente. I took pictures.I tried to silence the voice in my head, the Coach that likes to drive me onward.

Dolce far niente. I trudged at a walker's pace. Far below the lake shimmered in the pale sun. Tracks skittered across fresh snow. In a second, the mountains changed their minds: a curtain of snow dropped past the sun, snow sugared my hair. Winter was back.

Dolce far niente. The waterfall was a silver braid, disappearing under a mound of snow and ice. I tentatively stepped out onto a rock. It was slick and dangerous. I stared longingly at the trail on the other side of the crossing. If I made it I could hike for hours up the flanks of the mountain, get a really good workout in.

My boots slipped on the rocks. I could probably do it, I thought, scamper across and be fine. But maybe this was enough. Every day did not have to be gulped down, measured by a certain amount of miles. This, I could savor.

Dolce far niente. I turned back. And it was sweet.