I dressed and climbed the nearby knoll to see Mount Rainier in the first flush of the chilly dawn. This greatest of the Cascade volcanoes shows itself only fitfully. Though I’ve known hundreds of days when “the mountain’s out!” as Puget people say, my views have mostly been from lower elevations, where hundreds of feet of city dust or forest haze cloud its grand clarity. I had seldom seen it from such an altitude and nearness, and I found it stilling. Juncos, maybe jaded by the sight, crowded a clump of fir, cedar, and mountain hemlock with their waking busyness. Hummingbirds tore open the morning with their shrieking plummets above my blue tent, and a great horned owl called faintly a couple of times from the valley to the west. Violet-green swallows shone like chips of jade and amethyst in the same blaze that lit the mountains.
Shifting to another spot on the knoll, I could see Rainier, Adams, and St. Helens all at the same time. I seemed to be almost equidistant from the three, an illusion based on Tahoma’s disproportionate eminence. The sun seemed to hasten while the moon lingered, both on very nearly the same track. Glittering like a snail’s slime trail, an inch of the Cispus River shone far below. I’d awakened thirsty, and I began to wish its water were within easy reach.
After repacking, my Sherpa seemed a bit more compact. As I hoisted it off an ancient stump I realized that my shoulders were bruised, but I felt strong even as the sweat began to pour. Almost as soon as I started walking, my thirst came on sharp. I had enough water for another day or so, and I wasn’t sure how soon I would find more. But I was in sight of roads, in earshot of truck horns, and I wasn’t going to die. Not that it would be a bad place to go if they left me here, as in Ed Abbey’s last request, under “lots of rocks.”
Butterflies hilltopped the ridge as I followed it south into the warming morning: anglewings, tortoiseshells, painted ladies, fritillaries, coppers, sulphurs, skippers, all seeking mates. These colorful bits of living confetti helped keep my mind off the hard work. The grade was easy, but deep dust in the narrow motorcycle furrows, cut down two feet below grade, made the trail tough going. Hot needles pierced the fourth toe on my left foot as I took a downgrade through loose, sharp rocks.
This I had not expected after having a pair of boots custom-built. My feet, wide of instep, narrow of heel, and with an arch so high it could stand in for a croquet hoop, have never known a really good fit in their lives, besides air and Birkenstocks. Many hikes had been less than pleasurable because of a disagreement between my feet and their wear. So when the grant for this book became available, I went to see a bootmaker.
I had long planned to visit the Buffalo Shoe Company in Seattle, a venerable firm that had shod generations of loggers, but by the time I got to it they’d gone out of business. Asking around, I located a respected private bootmaker on the outskirts of Portland. Bill Crary, the son of the founder of the Danner Boot Company, grew up around fine bootmaking. He and an Armenian assistant craft footwear for all manner of workers, riders, dancers, and others who need something beyond the common-denominator shoe-store offerings.
The rich smells of leather and waxes permeated the small shop and my untanned nose. Boots stood everywhere, ranging from husky black “corks” (hobnail loggers’ boots) to a pair of shiny black riding boots for a woman with eight-foot-long legs and calves as big around as my wrist. Out from under a heap of leathers emerged a stocky, balding man in an oxblood-stained apron. That is, oxblood polish; they don’t actually make the leather on the premises, just the shoes.
Bill was brisk and professional but friendly. Quickly and carefully he determined what I wanted and what my feet required. He whistled at my arch. He took measurements for a last to be crafted from an ancient form made of tulip-tree wood. And from these he fashioned my boots: four pounds of Norwegian ox, kangaroo, bonded rubber, and sturdy foam. They were magnificent, if more like Frankenstein’s clogs than the sleek, hardly-even-there, New Age pseudo-booties so popular now. I broke them in on the flat, and they felt like clouds on my mutant hind paws. Heavy clouds, waterlogged perhaps, but I didn’t mind that—I like a substantial shoe. And that they were: but for their waffle-stomping soles, my tracks in the loose pumice would surely have excited fresh reports of Bigfoot among the next party of hikers or bikers.
Those wonderful boots cost $445, and I expected them to be good. So I was taken aback when my feet started hurting one day into the hike. The boots worked fine on the level and on good trail, but when I had to descend, especially in rocky places, or climb through the trenches left by bikers, one toe hurt like hell. It wasn’t the fault of the bootmaker—he’d done his best—but of my weird feet. I was a victim of Morton’s metatarsalgia, a common pressure affliction of hikers. Today I wore thinner socks, laced my boots less tightly, and moleskinned my toes. Still, that toe shrieked in the dirt-bike ditches.
After one particularly painful descent I stopped for a lunch of cheese, water, dried apricots, and Thea’s wheat crackers in a cool hemlock grove. I’d been inhaling water, and the containers were low. Just around the bend from the grove lay a meltwater pond in a little grassy cirque at the base of Sunrise Peak, the first water I had seen. I simply hadn’t thought the ridge would be quite so high and dry, devoid of springs or snowmelt. This cruddy little pool was full of gunk, volcanic ash, and algal clots, but the signs of wildlife told me there was no point in looking further. California and Milbert’s tortoiseshells sipped minerals from fetid mud scribbled over with hundreds of animal tracks. The liquid looked awful, but I reckoned it would filter all right. The days of carefree reliance on clean water in the wild now long past, every sensible hiker carries a water filter or other means of purifying water sources that might be contaminated with the cysts that cause giardiasis or other ills.
The water, shallow and silty, proved very difficult to gather and to filter, but I managed to secure a quart or so. Looking back at the pale green pond, I decided I would boil as well as filter the water.
The climb back up to the ridge below Sunrise Peak was abominable—steep, steep, steep, and all deep motorcycle ruts. Much of the trail was eroded as much as three and four feet below grade! The best alpinist would find it difficult to maintain balance while crawling up this slick trench, lubricated with choking dust like graphite. I took to my hands and knees, especially where the water bars and switchbacks had been ruined by knobby tires. My maps gave no hint of the difficulty here. Without the artificial erosion, it would have been merely the stiff climb that the map contours had led me to expect. As it was, the route proved next to impassable. As I struggled and swore, I scrawled a memo on my memory to the forest supervisor. Subject: bad management!
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Reaching the top of the worst pitch, I sat on the edge of the rut with my pack against a fir and thought about what I’d just been through. My stinking, soaking shirt bore a portrait of John Muir among pine boughs and cones. The landscape I hiked in was the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Neither John Muir nor Gifford Pinchot would have countenanced for a moment building a trail on shallow and fragile soils at great expense, and then inviting smelly, noisy, and dangerous machines to tear the hell out of it. Somehow, in trying to please everyone, the managers of this forest were totally blowing the concept of conservation, and the land itself was suffering.
Not that Muir and Pinchot shared a common sense of conservation. Pinchot founded both the U.S. Forest Service and the first forestry academy in the United States, at Yale, to supply foresters for the government. Having traveled to Germany to observe the science of silviculture in action, he aspired to build a whole new practice of scientific forest management for the country’s immense public forest holdings. When I attended Pinchot’s forestry school at Yale, he was still held in high regard. After all, his basic principle of using the resource while maintaining its value and future usefulness could hardly be questioned. For many his tenets are still the foundation of the conservation canon.
But earlier I had studied at the University of Wash
ington’s College of Forest Resources, where I had learned about John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club. Muir, a Scot who had come to California via Wisconsin, was transfixed by the “Range of Light,” as he called the Sierra Nevada. He believed, as Pinchot did, in the concept of intelligent resource use—but, he believed, for some places that meant no use at all. Just as Pinchot’s ideas put into practice led to the Forest Service, Muir’s writings and actions resulted in Yosemite National Park and the National Park Service.
The two men, sharing a common disgust over bad management in the western woods, tried to work together at first. But after a chance meeting in Seattle’s Olympic Hotel, when Muir attacked Pinchot for his duplicity on an important matter, they never spoke again. The issue was Hetch Hetchy, a spectacular valley in Yosemite National Park. Pinchot supported damming it for the use of San Francisco, a position that contradicted park philosophy and law; Muir thought it a travesty to thus betray the new park. As he put it, “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”
Pinchot responded, “Regarding the proposed use of Hetch Hetchy by the city of San Francisco, I am fully persuaded that the injury by substituting a lake for the present swampy floor of the valley is altogether unimportant compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir.” And there you have the essential bicameral nature of the American “conservation” movement, right and left brains locked in a perpetual battle between the so-called preservationists and utilizationists.
Pinchot won, Hetch Hetchy was dammed, and Muir retired from the public arena in favor of last travels in the southern hemisphere. Relations between the Forest Service and the Park Service and among their various supporters have been strained ever since.
John Muir never came back to the Dark Divide, but perhaps he gazed this way when he climbed Mount Rainier 102 years before my trek. His guide was Seattle school superintendent
E. S. Ingraham, a Rainier authority. The normally staid Ingraham had a remarkable experience on one of his ascents, perhaps brought on by oxygen deprivation after sleeping in an ice cave at the 14,411-foot summit. As described in Paul Dorpat’s foreword to Washington: A Portrait of the Evergreen State, he reported a grotesque crawling and glowing creature that he dubbed the “Old Man of the Crater.” The Old Man somehow transmitted knowledge of an “ancient race of humanoids that lived within the mountain,” which Ingraham named the “Sub-Rainians.”
Dorpat believes that “the Old Man of the Crater is surely a variation of our popular legend, the shy Sasquatch” and that “there is only one way to approach these demure and delicate chimeras, the Sub-Rainian and the Sasquatch—as poetic go-betweens. Through their eternal wanderings, Washington’s past meets its future.” He concludes that “if Washingtonians continue to treat the Big Foot kindly and preserve for it a private place in their enchantments, this Washington will step lightly into the future.” John Muir apparently failed to encounter the Old Man on any of his Rainier ascents. But he could have agreed with that premise: treat the world well, and it will treat you well later. If he were here now, he would see that we have not been so gentle, so far. We have not stepped lightly in this land.
My fellow forestry students in Seattle were split into Muirians in the wildlife and recreation programs and a Pinchot faction in the traditional log, pulp, and paper curricula. As one of the former, I leaned toward Muir’s values. We tried to blend the best of both men’s teachings but found that they often conflicted. In 1975, a hundred years after its founding by Pinchot, the Yale facility changed its name to the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. In so doing the faculty hoped to reconcile the old divisions in a common practice of conservation allowing for many uses of the land including protection, all based on solid science.
Progressive foresters have been working to balance fiber needs from the forests with recreation, water, wildlife, and mineral uses, as well as wilderness. Finding the proper formula is never easy. One thing certain is that even the use-minded Pinchot would be scandalized by many of the practices now followed in our timberlands. Struggling up the shattered grade, I had recalled Pinchot’s ideal of “the highest and best use for this and future generations,” and I knew that this wasn’t it.
I had no idea whether Sasquatch dwelt within the Gifford Pinchot, as its believers claimed, but I certainly saw abundant sign of humanoid apes that day. Leaving their colonies below, they stormed the steeps on their greasy beasts of burden. Once on the ridges, they tore back down again, having shredded the plants, the silence, and the thin soils along the way. This advanced behavior shows a degree of intellectual and aesthetic development somewhat lower than a monkey’s but approaching that of a larger portion of Homo sapiens than I like to admit.
Months later, at a restaurant in southwest Washington, I found myself seated for dinner next to Harry Cody, district ranger in charge of the territory I’d traveled. A fishing-trip guest of a dairying neighbor of mine, the ranger was affable, intelligent, and apparently as concerned about the health of the ecosystems in his care as I was. He expressed frustration at having to allow a larger cut of timber than the land could stand, thanks to Congress. I asked him about the impact of dirt bikes, especially on Juniper Ridge. He said that the damage I’d seen was from an annual motorcycle race on the trail. I was incredulous that the Forest Service would allow such an activity on erodible backcountry land. He said he had some concerns about it himself, so he’d pulled the race off that trail for the following year. I was relieved—until he told me that he’d shifted it to the next ridge west. Langille Ridge was so rugged bikers had seldom gone there: hence, it was pristine. He liked it, so that’s where he was putting the bikers to relieve the pressure on Juniper Ridge. As for the trail I’d hiked, he planned to rebuild it for motorcycles.
Readying myself to climb again, I wolfed water. It ran down the front of John Muir’s face on my T-shirt, mingling with the H2O I was sweating almost as fast as I drank it. At that moment I’d have given half my remaining water to have Gifford Pinchot show up, just so he could see the vast eroded clear-cuts in the distance, the roads punched gratuitously up steep and wild valleys below, the motorcycle ruts in the soft and shallow skin of the land. “Behold, Mr. Pinchot,” I would say with wry respect, “what your doctrine has become in practice in the national forest that bears your name.” Then I would ask if he’d care to discuss Hetch Hetchy.
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I set up camp near where the Sunrise Peak Trail took off. I dumped my boar of a pack at a good spot on Juniper Ridge much like the first night’s but wider. The tent went up on veg, not just ash. Then I walked unencumbered to view the next day’s pull, which looked down, up again but not so bad, then a long up-down to Dark Meadow, the first place I could trust to have water.
I decided to use the scuz-pond water for dinner and breakfast and save the last of the good Gray’s River water to drink on the trail. Filtering and boiling the holy water of the filthy pond, cooking curry lentil stew, and making coffee took an hour of pure leisure. In the late sun I was pleasantly warm, like a country bun. If only I had more to drink! Now I was really feeling the lack of water and could think of little else for long periods.
As I stretched out in my REI Volcano bag, a soft cloud somehow confected of recycled pop bottles, I became intensely conscious of my body. My throat felt like a dried weed. My shoulders, legs, and back were old rubber bands, threatening to cramp tight if I stretched the wrong way. My feet were aware of where they’d been and where they were going. These conditions got me to thinking about the state of my body in my mid-forties. I lay there and took inventory.
I had an osteochondroma on my knee like a golf ball on a tee; a torn muscle in my back from a long-ago toboggan ride on Mount St. Helens that liked to make a charley horse whenever a masseuse was not at hand; hay fever; and the first h
int of a hernia. I had wrestler’s knees, weight lifter’s knuckles, and discus thrower’s elbow. I enjoyed an abscessed tooth, temporarily packed; a sebaceous cyst on my head that I could feel against my air pillow; and a calcium lump on my mildly arthritic wrist. My bursitic shoulders were bruised, my Morton’s toes were squeezed, and I had jock itch for lack of bathing water. My sinuses, even as dry as they were, provided adequate proof of the indifferent universe. I was dehydrated and thirty pounds overweight, down from forty when I’m not dried out. Altogether I felt pretty good.
It occurred to me that Sasquatch, if corporeal, must be prone to many of the ailments that we suffer, with no medical care and with constant exposure to weather, danger, and rigors that we routinely avoid. Is this not a remarkable ape? Except that in these respects it is exactly like every other wild animal, and we are like no other. Supposing Bigfeet are much like humans at our dawning, except very much better at surviving in the wild? I don’t suppose they lie awake at night counting their hangnails.
As the moon rose, I watched the ghost moths at their brief evening’s work. Back in the tent I read a bit of Wendell Berry’s What Are People For? and a bit of Peter Byrne’s The Search for Bigfoot: Monster, Myth, or Man? It seemed to me that the two were not so very far apart in their intent. Berry is always looking for ways to better situate people in their surroundings. Byrne writes of an animal, in which he earnestly believes, that could not be better situated to its place. Perhaps the desired state lies somewhere between the two apes, one fitted but fading, the other seeking a fit before it’s too late. Lying up against my tent mate, the Sherpa, I thought of other large beasts elegantly suited to their lifeways: the bears.
I was concerned about black bears because of my food. I knew that you should hang your supplies out of reach and never stow them in your tent. But in the subalpine, where the tallest tree is a ten-foot switch, hanging food out of reach is next to impossible. Besides, I didn’t want rodents (or bears, for that matter) tearing up the Sherpa. I remembered a traveling pack of Boy Scouts still asleep while their gear and supplies lay shredded and distributed for thirty yards around their coastal campsite. Nearby a couple were trapped in their tent by a bear who sat patiently before the flap. I also recalled, from a trip to Katmai National Monument in Alaska, that the only brown-bear casualty they’d had in that bearful locale was the mauling of a man who had taken his bacon to bed. Considering these mixed signals, I brought my pack inside the tent and slept with bears on my mind.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 5
