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Monday, May 30, 2005

Reflections on Lost Creek Ridge

An exceptional thing about living in Seattle is the vast menu of wilderness hikes available within a few hours' drive, in three national parks and many more wilderness areas, national forests and unregulated areas. The hiking club The Mountaineers publishes a near-standard reference to the best-known hikes, the "100 Hikes in . . ." series of guidebooks. Each of the four "100 Hikes" books covers a major region of Western Washington and there is a "50 Hikes" book for Mt. Rainier National Park as well. Each book offers a few bonus entries, so that's close to 500 hikes in Western Washington just in the five books everybody buys.

A backpacking dilettante of some four years' standing, I make no more than eight overnight trips a year, all on weekends and almost all for one night. I have yet to repeat a trip and it occurred to me this weekend--in a passable approximation of an epiphany--that I may never do so. It didn't hurt my receptivity to epiphanic thinking that I somehow managed to select what was, so far as I have been able to tell, one of the very most grueling climbs in the entire guidebook series, to Lost Creek Ridge in the Glacier Peak Wilderness. After finally reaching the ridge and pitching my tent, I gazed straight out from my very temporary front porch to jagged basalt cliffs across the way, followed them down to the still-frozen little lake 500 feet below my campsite, circled back up the snow-buried near flank of the bowl to its lip six feet in front of me--and knew I would never see any of this ever again.

As I say, I was receptive to the idea, having just completed something of a death-climb, 3800 feet in five linear miles (carrying, it had just turned out, about ten pounds of photo equipment but not the spare battery I really needed). My precipitating thought must have been that there was no way in hell I was ever going to be making that kind of climb again with a working camera or no camera. And it hit me that I had never yet returned anywhere I had hiked before and was unlikely to choose to go back someplace I've already been when there were hundreds of other unseen destinations to choose from. Would I make this hike again now that I knew what it was like up on the ridge? Probably not before making a great many other hikes. So probably not.

Two other thoughts flow from this. I could hike this same trail many times. Why shouldn't I value the prospect of seeing this same spot, these same views-- in all seasons, in all weather--as highly as the hope of taking new and different hikes? I think Samuel Johnson commented that natural course of the human heart is not from satisfaction to satisfaction but from hope to hope.

More fundamentally, we rarely do anything, go anywhere, see or speak to anyone while conscious that it is for the last time.

So, a few snapshots of this place I will never see again (the digicam battery was fine):





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