One of the bucket list hikes I had for 2022 was up on Mt. Adams. I had climbed up the North side in 2021 and found a magical place with shallow creeks of pure and fresh melt water flowing through meadows of flowers with a high iceberg filled lake. There were secret campsites tucked here and there among the meadows and small trees struggling to live at that high altitude. As soon as I saw it, I knew I would have to come back and spend the night. One of my favorite things on this north side is the largest glacier on that side, the aptly named Adams Glacier. It groans and cracks and booms from within and is fascinating to lay under and listen to! I will admit that one of my least favorite things on this particular trail is that it does not seem to matter when you do it, there are always terrible bugs. You are either bitten a thousand times by black flies or die the death of mosquitos. They are worse here than almost any other trail. But alas, the beauty of this one is worth it.
One week in August, we packed up our overnight gear and headed up the trail to connect to the Pacific Crest Trail. Of course, we ended up being on the PCT at a time when thruhikers were coming through in droves. In fact, this year I have set records for the number of thruhikers I have gotten to meet. I have made sure to stoke my pack with extra oranges as those are a delicacy for long distance hikers and their faces light up when offered one! The interesting thing to me is that with every conversation with thruhikers that I had, they were almost all from international locations…..Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, you name it. This was the year of international hikers and I loved asking them about their hike and impressions of America and how many pairs of boots they had gone through to get from Mexico to Washington! Their answers were always diverse and meaningful. For the record, almost everyone reported they were on their 5th or 6th pair of boots by the time I found them in Washington. Also, one man from Switzerland surprised me when he talked about how much easier mountaineering was there because you would hike along and every 10 miles or so there would be a small mountain town with places to eat. Here, on the PCT, you had to pack all your food for days and weeks at a time on your back. He said it truly is a very different style of hiking, which surprised me. I particularly made his night when I gave him my last orange. It was the one I was going to eat for breakfast the next day, but I figured he needed it more than I.
As this particular day was drawing to a close, I knew I had to do my final push up the mountain to where I wanted to camp for the night and left the PCT behind. It is a tough, steep climb that runs along a huge cliff. It is not the kind of place you ever want to run into anyone you have to pass. There is no room for passing even without two dogs with you! As we climbed higher, I kept a keen eye for any signs of other hikers. What I saw instead, was some dark clouds clearly dropping rain moving fast and straight for us. Great, I thought……we are about to have everything we own get soaked. The wind whipped us as we climbed as fast as we could, hoping to outrun the storm. But that storm moved incredibly fast and was on us in minutes, while we were still climbing up the scree fields, getting more dangerous as they became wet. I was still in a tank top from the hot day, but quickly started to shiver in the cold as I got soaked. We got up to the high-altitude meadows and tried to hunker down under a bush until the worst of the storm passed us. Luckily it was not long lasting and moved off almost as fast as it moved in.
After moving to our campsite of choice (lucky for us the most popular and best spot was wide open) we set up for the night. This photo was taken fairly close to our campsite and I just loved how the girls were looking at one another with such love. Ah, Sisters forever, I thought. I quickly put on all my extra clothes and climbed in my sleeping bag while still shivering. I had to warm up and that down bag was the only way! I put both the girls in their puffer jackets to help them warm up and realized that Josie had grown up so much that she was now like a snausage in hers! Within sight of our camp there were large snow fields right next to blooming summer flowers. It was a wonderful and unusual mix! I was reading a book until it was almost dark when a man suddenly popped over hoping to get the best campsite and was surely very surprised and disappointed to find us camped there. He apologized and after a brief conversation, moved off to find another spot to pitch his tent in the dark, so I could keep reading.
What I was reading that night in my bag was a very special book for me this last summer. This book started my quest of finding more intentional hikes….hikes with a meaning for me. Hikes that connect me to history. I had started reading this book while on a backpacking trip on Silverstar Mountain earlier in the summer. The book was called Tatoosh and was written by Martha Hardy. She was the first female lookout tower keep. She spent the summer of 1943 in a tower on Tatoosh peak overlooking Rainier and the surrounding area near Packwood, WA and wrote all about her experiences. As I lay in my sleeping bag that night on Silverstar when I first started the book, I was overlooking Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Hood. I lounged on my down bag that night and read about Martha’s descriptions of these exact same mountains as she would watch the sun set around them and it touched me very deeply. She talked about how the colors of the sky would change from pinks to purples to blues and how the fog would settle in among the valleys. All I had to do was lower my book down to see exactly what she was writing about from her tower in real time almost 80 years ago! Nothing had changed. But everything had changed at the same time. I instantly made the decision that I would only read her book while hiking or backpacking and that I had to go hike this Tatoosh peak to spend the night in the footprint of the tower she lived in before the end of the year. (Sadly, the tower was torn down and no longer exists, to my great dismay.) I finished the book that night on my Mt. Adams backpack, even more intent on planning a trip to Tatoosh.
However, I had not planned on a wildfire in the goal to climb Tatoosh. Packwood is a bit north of us and I did not know that they had had a wildfire breakout just near town until I was driving through. As I drove past Incident Command and all the firefighter tent cities, I knew there was trouble afloat.
But I was committed to backpacking Tatoosh peak that day….or perhaps should have been committed is the better way to say that. I followed my directions to the trailhead finding everything like a ghost town. As I followed those dirt forest service roads deeper and deeper into the wilderness, I suddenly found myself blocked by two fire trucks and several fire fighters standing in my way. I rolled my window down and asked them to move. They wanted to know what I was doing out there, and I boldly told them I was going to be backpacking on that peak above them. They looked at each other, sharing the "she is crazy" look, and back at me and asked if I knew about the fire…. whose smoke was all around us by the way! I was not to be stopped. I said it was fine, but did ask if they thought it could jump the ridge it was on over to Tatoosh peak overnight. They said they didn’t think so, but we could see the flames from where we were talking, so it was a possibility depending on wind. Well, I said if it did jump, they knew where I was and that we would be running the peak in the opposite direction. (I hoped they would send a helicopter as I have always wanted to be rescued in one). Off I went, shocked and elated that they didn’t stop me!! I have no idea how they were feeling. But I felt like a school kid who got away with stealing candy from the teacher!!
I quickly learned the hard way why Martha and her crew always rode mules up to that lookout though! That was some VERY steep and difficult trail. As I recall it was around a 5000ft gain to get there and a lot of miles. We were choking on smoke most of the way, but at least got to enjoy some of the biggest wild blueberries I have ever seen. In fact, Miss Hardy often recounted picking and eating berries up near her lookout and now I know why! They were truly incredible and put the famous berries of Mt. Adams to the test! After a difficult and mentally challenging never-ending climb, we made it to that smoke choked summit and found the foundational pier blocks for the tower! We never had any view at all due to all the smoke and I spent all night coughing and checking for flames with burning eyes as the smoke got worse and worse. But I slept in the footprint of the old Tatoosh Peak Lookout! I did bring home a rusty nail, a piece of broken glass and a rock from that footprint. It was funny that before I did this hike, I had asked to feel what Martha felt. In her book she spoke of the largest fire In Packwood at that time and how the smoke had choked her out and how isolating and scary that had felt in her tower. She wrote about feeling trapped on that peak. Boy were Martha and I feeling each other that night! So I got my wish….just not the way I expected it.
While on this hike, I was thrilled to meet an ancestor for Martha’s pet squirrel Impy, complete with the strange deep red fur she would describe brushing with her own hairbrush as he sat on her lap on the lookout steps!! The red furred guy I met wanted to get really close and I was sure he was a great, great, great grandson!! After a cold and sleepless night, we hiked out fast to get warm and ended up running into the same fire fighters from the day before on the road. I think they were shocked and relieved to see us leaving in one piece. I am sure that they spoke of the crazy woman at their camp that night! Perhaps we have become legend to that fire crew now.
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