Midlife Meditation

Friday morning, 6:30 a.m., we were both awake, and I set our goal: to be fed, packed, and on the trail by 8:00. We almost made it. I knew we had many miles to go before we slept. I figured that it would take us about four hours to cover the 7.7 miles to the trailhead, then another hour to drive to Driggs and have a quick lunch. It would then take us, according to Google maps, seven and a half hours to drive through the Sawtooth Mountains to Emmett, Idaho, where I had booked us a room in a bed and breakfast called the Frozen Dog Digs. This was the fourth time we had broken camp as backpackers, and we worked efficiently, filtering water, deflating air mattresses, compressing sleeping bags, retrieving bear bags, eating a quick breakfast, and finally loading the packs, which were inexplicably bulkier than they had been two days before. By the time we hoisted them onto our backs and set off, with one final glance at Buck Mountain’s reflection in the lake, it was 8:30. The Te...

Lakes, creeks, rocks, wildflowers, butterflies, marmots—and, of course, mountains. The Alaska Basin Loop trail was, I announced, “a smorgasbord of Tetonic delights.” It was also longer, and harder, than I had expected.   The trail was deceptive, climbing steadily, but never steeply, for the first two miles. The haze had finally cleared, so the views were astonishing. In fact, I took more than a hundred pictures over the course of this four hour hike. We crossed shallow streams, rested on enormous boulders, and climbed ever upward. Always before us was the craggy splendor of Buck Mountain. “Wouldn’t it be cool to walk along the bottom of that mountain?” asked Amy. I still wasn’t sure how close we’d get, but I agreed. And then, after more than an hour of constant climbing, I caught a glimpse of where the trail was taking us: to the very place where the basin ended and the mountain began. We were going to find out just how cool it would be.   We stopped to rest and ...

The day dawned orange. That may not seem extraordinary to you. Around the world, sunrises and sunsets are often tinged with red and orange. The difference here, almost 10,000 feet above sea level, is that the orange lingered. We were up by 6:30, having discovered that our brilliant plan of saving space and weight by forgoing pillows in favor of rolled-up rain coats had left much to be desired. The following night, we would find that our brilliant substitute plan, using Ziploc bags filled with underwear and wrapped in our down vests, would yield similar results: anything not actually a pillow will eventually feel more like a rock. Retrieving the bear can, having breakfast, breaking camp, and repacking bumped our departure time from this location to 8:30. The sun was well up in the sky by now, and everything was still orange. We knew what was causing this: the huge fire in the Sawtooths that had led us to change our hiking destination. What we hadn’t bargained for is that th...

Despite being unacclimated to the altitude, not yet broken in with our packs, and including the steepest climb, the first day was the easiest. We crossed over into Wyoming and the Jedediah Smith Wilderness as soon as we left the trailhead parking area. The first 2.7 miles of the hike, through woods and meadow, were delightful. Every twist in the trail revealed new treats for the eyes. I discovered fat huckleberries, a trail snack I always cherish, as well as translucent red berries I thought might be a different variety of huckleberry, but which had a slight off taste that kept me from trying anymore. And yes, my mother did teach me never to eat something I found in the woods unless I knew what it was, but I'm still alive and well, so there. As we hiked up Teton Creek, we had this view behind us: It's a view many a landscape painter would be proud to portray, but it was nothing next to what lay before us: I had no idea at this time that I would be making intimate acqu...

It was August, 2007, and I was grieving.   I'd been engaged for almost a year, but it was becoming clear to me that relationship was coming to an end. Marriage plans had been indefinitely postponed, and finally the decision had been made to put the engagement on hold. There was a final vacation together, at Lake of the Woods, and then I drove my children back to Idaho Falls. Dropping them off with their mother, I pointed my car back west, with an eye to doing some solo camping at Pettit Lake, a beautiful alpine spot in the Sawtooth National Forest my family had visited many times in my childhood. There were some hitches in that plan: for the second time that summer, I'd gone camping without my tent; the road to the Sawtooths was blocked for several hours by a traffic accident; and once I finally made it to Pettit Lake, with the sun already setting, I found the campground both far more developed than it had been in my childhood, and all b...

If I wanted to be cynical, I'd say it was the washout that made the difference. I've been camping all my life. Summer vacations for my family always meant finding a campground and locating there for a week or two. As a Scout, the frequency went up to monthly campouts whenever weather permitted. In Oregon, weather permitting meant anything but snow--and as rare as snow is in the Willamette Valley, we camped a lot. At the end of every Scout campout, we rolled up our sleeping bags and tents, loaded them in whatever vehicles we'd come in, then policed the area. This meant criss-crossing our campsite, search-and-rescue style, eyes to the ground, picking up every bit of litter we saw, whether or not it came from one of us. This could be a nasty activity, especially in early 1970s Idaho, where the national forest campgrounds we favored were often carpeted with cigarette butts. I'd gather handfuls of the loathsome things, as well as pull tabs from beer cans and occasional...

Here's the most spectacular thing I saw in the Olympic National Park last week:    "What?" you say, "One of those ubiquitous logs that have been cut away from blocking the trail, and the sawdust left by the chainsaw? You call that spectacular?" Look more closely (and I apologize for the blurriness of this, but it's on full zoom, and the light's not very good under the canopy): The blob in the middle of this picture is a carpenter ant with a tiny load of sawdust in its mandibles. Here's what makes this spectacular: The intricate pattern in the log was made by these ants. That means the heap of sawdust, which is at least two feet deep, was made by these ants, too. The color of the log's face shows that it's not a recent cut; it was probably made at least a year or two ago. We stopped to take a closer look because the design was so interesting that we thought it might be of human origin, and we wondered what it meant. Then we r...

Brace yourselves for another descent into the world of Star Trek, specifically, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. (And if you're wondering what this has to do with Our Olympian Adventure and the huge photograph above, please be patient. I promise it'll all come together nicely in the end.) Among all the hit-and-miss chapters in the franchise, V stands out for a lot of reasons: the special effects (especially the rear-projection viewscreens) are laughably inept; the dialogue is overtly jokey; the plot is yet another retread of an original series episode, and not even one of the better ones; first- (and only-) time director William Shatner gives himself entirely too many actions scenes that come off at times like self-parodies--and you begin to get the picture. For all that, there is a philosophical center to this campy B-movie that has left a deeper mark on me than many an Oscar winner. The story is simple: Spock's long-lost half-brother Sybok, a Vulcan heretic who ha...

I grew up a short drive from God's country, and I never knew it. I've had more moves in my 52 years than I can count. Last night at ComedySportz, I was doing a quick calculation in my head about how many addresses I've had because I need a new trivia item for the pre-show slides (due to AT&T's lack of coverage in the Olympic wilderness, my New York Times daily crossword streak ended Monday at 987), and I came up with 30. That's just addresses, by the way: it doesn't include how many times I moved everything I had from one location to another while keeping the same post office box. By the time I entered college, I'd lived in seven houses and, very briefly, one apartment, located in five different states. Family vacations took me to and through some of the most spectacular scenery in the United States and Canada. We drove through the White Mountains of New Hampshire, up the coast of Nova Scotia, through the Badlands of the Dakotas, the Grand Tetons of ...

  Their names are Joe and Joy Baisch, and together they own and operate the Elk Meadows Bed and Breakfast in Brinnon, Washington. Like many B&B hosts I have met over the years, both Joy and Joe are gregarious and eager to please, offering advice, sharing wisdom, doing all they can to make their guests' stay as comfortable and rewarding as they can.   Amy and I stayed at Elk Meadows at the beginning and end of our latest outdoor adventure, a three-night backpacking trip into the Olympic National Park. Elk Meadows is located on Dosewallips Road, which follows the Dosewallips River up into the Olympic National Forest, ending abruptly five and a half miles from the head of the Dosewallips Trail due to a ten-year-old washout. The graveled hillside in the picture above used to be the road.   The night before our adventure, we spread our trail map on the dining room table at Elk Meadows. Joe looked it over, speculating with us about what we might accom...