July 2024

You know your day is an interesting one when you have to count the number of bullets in your gun and decide how quickly you can reload.....not once, but twice during the day. I suppose the problem was that we had not seen a human on the trail for weeks, but this day would be different. On this warm July day, the trail started at a popular trail head where many folks come out for a 3 mile round trip hike to see some pretty spectacular views before heading back to their vehicles. We were doing far more than that and really just wanted access to the Timberline Trail on Mt. Hood from this location. I knew it would be a problem. Every time the Wolf goes a period of time without experiencing humans on the trail, she has a hard time adjusted to seeing them again. I feel her pain and have a similar adjustment crisis myself! We were in trouble when we arrived at the parking lot and found 2 huge vans that had clearly carried large groups of humans up the mountain. I groaned outwardly while strapping on my gear and lacing up my boots. I hoped that we would not encounter this group on the trail.

That hope was dashed about one mile up the trail. We heard their voices long before seeing them. Josie was wanting to bolt just from hearing so many humans talking and laughing through the trees and up the ridge. We caught up to them in no time. There had to be 18-20 of them. They were all in good shape and between 20-40 years of age. I figured we would have to just slow our pace and keep a safe distance behind them until we could find a way to pass. Unfortunately we were on a skinny ridge with steep cliff drop offs on either side of us. Everything was sand, rock and boulders with a raging river in the bottom of the ravine to our right, Mt. Hood straight ahead with his cracking glaciers and a sandy and rocky ravine to our left. The humans stopped dead center of this spine and all pulled out their cell phones. They were taking photos, videos, group selfies and laughing some more. I was finding it hard to access any patience inside my body. Josie had already tried to dive off each cliff side twice in an attempt to flee the human contact. I sat her next to me and told her we had to just wait. There was no way we could pass this group on the skinny spine. After 5 minutes I started to quickly say naughty things about the humans to the Wolf and she looked up at me in total agreement. After 10 minutes my hands were on my hips shooting my best eye daggers at them. After 20 minutes I was vocalizing more loudly and had lost all patience I had been able to muster.

Finally the apparent leader of the group saw me and waved us to come toward them asking if I wanted to pass. By now, I had grown spicy and yelled back that I would have done so 3o minutes ago if I could have and was wondering if they were planning on hiking on this day or just standing around. A few more faces in the group started to peer around the boulders to see what kind of crazy person was behind them. The leader then informed me that they had hiked as far as they were going to hike and were not going any further. Well let's just say some strong expletives came out of my mouth. Who in their right mind drives that terrible forest service road for dozens of miles in rented vans to hike ONE mile in??? These humans were young and in shape and had no excuse to not go further. It was a travesty of humanity. I dubbed them the "Great Standing Group of 2024" since they clearly could not be called hikers. I then back climbed off the ridge behind them, flanked them for two tenths of a mile and then climbed back up without trail to get ahead of them back up on the spine. This was not easy to do on the steep sandy ravine and ridge-line as every step forward in sand would have you sliding two backwards. But we pushed with everything we had, gripping at any alpine tree branches, roots or boulders to pull ourselves up. Anger was a fantastic motivator. When we broke out ahead of the group I could hear their shouts of surprise and awe at how we did such a thing. It was real hard not to wave at them with my middle finger as we continued up the ridge walk. But I refrained myself. I took a deep breath as we got out of sight of the standing group and pulled out my camera for the first time.

This is where this trail dead ends and you have to loop back to get to the Timberline trail for the real hike to start. Of course the reality sank in that I would have to go back past the standing group to do this. So in desperation I started to search the ravine to our left, knowing that if we dropped down that cliff of sand and scree that we could just cross country our way to the trail and be on our way avoiding the humans completely. I pointed down the cliff and explained the plan to the Wolf. She had grave concerns about this idea and was not on board. I tried to convince her that this was a good plan. "Hey, that is Nova's job on the trail to be the voice of safety. When it is just you and I we have to go all out and not worry about such things. Pull up your big girl panties Josie. Let's do this! " She clearly was not convinced. "Okay, Josie, let me put it to you this way. At the very idea of going back by the standing humans I have already calculated that my revolver does not hold enough shots to get them all without reloading probably twice. It takes time to reload a revolver as it does not have a clip. There are some big guys in that group that likely won't give me reload time. So just the fact that I have already had to envision this entire thought in my head and have counted my bullets should tell you that we absolutely cannot go back toward them and our safest bet is to cliff dive." She was in total agreement after I explained this to her. "Good girl Josie."

So off the cliff we went. It started out fast as a slide down the sand. We had about a thousand feet to drop very quickly. The problem was that as the sand was sliding us down, the rocks and boulders started to slide as well. Before we knew it we had a pretty good avalanche sliding with us. At one point when we were side by side attached by our six feet of line, I watched a three foot diameter boulder let loose just above us and start sliding right at us. I stepped back one step as Josie stepped forward one. I grabbed the line between us as we were sliding and held it up high enough that the faster moving boulder would go under it and not take us down with it. That boulder bounced and crashed off other boulders and was quite the scene. I giggled to the Wolf that this probably made so much noise that the standing group was likely running to their vans in fear for their lives. As we completed our sliding cliff dive, we both landed on our feet, sticking our landing perfectly. I might have raised my hands over my head in triumph like the best Olympian after flipping over the vault.....only wearing a twenty pound rucksack on my back and tied to a Wolf while doing that vault. Before long, our climb up the trail took us to beautiful flowers blooming on the mountain as snow was receding.

The day before this hike, a new forest fire had started near the town of Mosier and close to Hood River. This was just to our north. We could see Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier and Mt. St. Helens to our north, but the smoke was starting to obliterate that view. It was fascinating to watch the plumes rise so quickly and then blow eastward with the Gorge winds. Even Josie couldn't help but want to watch this.

From the moment we hit the Timberline trail, we did not run into other humans. It was glorious. This is one of my favorite sections of this trail because it is above treeline with incredibly vast views and feels a bit like being on the moon when you get into nothing but sand, rocks and boulders. Every part of this trail makes you breathe deeply and makes everything well within your soul. I asked Josie if she was glad the humans were now long gone. Her face told me everything I needed to know about her thoughts of the standing group.

As the miles passed beneath our boots, our minds cleared of the clutter life fills them with and great clarity entered us. I realized how much Josie the Wolf and I are still learning to be human, but we do far better at being beasts. I can so easily embrace the beast. I think that is why Josie and I just get each other so well. Neither of us like strangers. Small talk is worse than anything. Hearing human voices sometimes just puts us both over the edge. Humans are so blissfully unaware of their own sound pollution. Why do they need to make so much noise we wonder? Why must they incessantly want to hear their own voices? We just want to be mountain gypsies and be utterly alone. I want to fill my soul with the sounds of the wind, the birds, the creeks, the creaking and groaning of glaciers and even thunder crashing overhead. These are my salves. I am a slave to them. I know that my heart is covered in scars from all the terrible things that life throws our way. I am working to cover those scars with all the sunsets my eyes have beheld, all the flower filled meadows, tree choked ravines, rushing rivers and mountain tops that we experience. I am convinced that I can heal all the pain with the profoundly beautiful world God has given us. I know that I can have the painfully difficult along with the profoundly beautiful...both on and off the trail. The challenges in life and on the trail perhaps makes us truly appreciate the beauty and serenity all the more. After being stuck behind the infuriating standing group, this peaceful serenity on the trail was even more divine. Just look at the beauty of a trail snaking along the flank of a mountain moving from one rock cairn marker to another.

Of course Josie the Arctic Wolf just wanted to stop and lie in or roll in all the snow and ice we encountered. A few times I started to make and throw ice balls at her which she thought was the best thing ever. We moved closer to the peak with each step we took. We were moving southbound on the eastern flank of the mountain and could see Mt. Jefferson now in the distance. But it was hard to take our eyes off Hood. His peak is so rugged and wonderful.

Eventually we came to a place where we wanted to really climb. We bouldered for awhile until we hit solid ice fields heading straight up. I was having trouble kicking steps into the ice and was reminded of how I broke toes doing that several years ago. Josie really needed crampons for her paws as it was almost impossible for her to tackle the steepness on ice. Eventually she gave up and just wanted to lie down. When I asked her how much farther she was game for climbing, she gave me a strong message when she closed her eyes for a nap on the very side of the ice we were climbing.

When she started to slide down the mountain in her sleep, I told her we would call the climb and move over to another peak on the flank of the mountain to watch the sun set behind Mt. Hood's tip. I knew it would be a fabulous view. What I did not realize was how terribly windy it would become while we were on that peak! I set up our little camp and we got comfortable. From this vantage point, we could see the Timberline trail far below us, Mt. Adams, Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Jefferson and of course Mt. Hood. We could even see over into the deserts of eastern Oregon. We could see wildfire smoke coming up in multiple locations. The skies were blue and the ice and snow reflected the sun into our faces. Josie adored the views as much as I did.

The wind had been pulling at us for some time, but the closer the sun dropped toward the mountain's peak, the faster it came. It started to sound like a freight train and we could watch it coming by all the sand it would pick up and lift high into the air like tornadoes and walls of dust storms. It would even pick up any loose snow it could find and lift that up into a cloud-like formation instantly formed from the very ground. But then some of these gusts would hit us and we had to hold onto everything we had. I had taken my boots off and covered them with boulders for fear they would blow off the peak. I strapped everything to me and held on for dear life to anything not tied down. I was trying to read, but it was almost impossible as the wind repeatedly wanted to rip the book out of my hands. When the big gusts came we had to hold our breath as it would steal the oxygen out of our own mouths and noses. We had to close our eyes from the onslaught of sand and rock pelting us. Josie kept looking at me to see if we were okay as I would shriek and laugh in the gusts. But that was when the gusts were about 50 miles an hour. As the sun dropped, they became worse. However the beauty was making up for the painfully difficult.

Before long the gusts had easily moved up to probably 70 miles an hour. There has only been one time on the trail when I have experienced wind like that and it had taken both Nova and I off our feet multiple times until I learned to drop and crawl through it. That was how I had cracked ribs on my right side. My heart rate increased remembering this and I stayed low to the ground holding onto everything I owned in that moment. If this had occurred several years ago, I think I would have been terrified. But in this moment I was stunned by the power of nature. I was mesmerized by what was occurring all around us. I was laughing like a crazy person with each powerful gust. At one point I turned to look at Josie and the wind had blown her hair so flat that it reminded me of the flat person in the movie BeetleJuice who could move through cracks in the wall. I swear Josie turned to smile at me in this moment and I howled with how hilarious she looked. I could only imagine my own hair tangling in wild knots above my head. I really should have worn my hair in a pony tail I thought. But pretty quickly Josie learned the lesson I had in gusts like this. While she was standing next to my prostrate body, the wind blew her right off her feet and she hit her right side like a sack of potatoes when the line between us went tight and snapped her back to the ground. I hung onto that line for dear life through a very long gust. As that gust stopped, she stood up only to be hit with another wall of wind that snapped her off her feet a second time. I could not get any pictures in the moment as my camera would have surely blown off the mountain, but as the wind died down I got these ones as she finally turned and ran for me to protect her during a lighter gust of wind.

"What a big baby Wolf you are" I crooned to her as I held her in my arms and kissed her face. "I thought Wolves were suppose to blow houses down, not the other way around" I said to her. I wanted to stay up there for hours, but realized that my entire body was shivering from the temperature drop. The winds coming off the ice and snow were particularly cold. I had on two coats on top of my base layer, but had no pants with me, which was decision I was regretting. I was losing feeling in my fingers and knew we had to drop down in elevation. We were currently at almost 8,000 feet and I knew we would be so much warmer if we dropped even to 7,000 feet of elevation. Once again, I was entertained by my fingers. I realized that they were starting to turn red, but then they went a sickly pale yellow that had no capillary refill time. They were losing circulation fast. I laughed and kept trying to get the Wolf to look at my hands as I was repeatedly pressing on the skin to make them look like a corpse's hands. Sadly, she did not think it was funny. She just wanted to get moving off that peak!

We hiked hard and fast between the gusts. But we could only make it one or two tenths of a mile and we would hear that freight train of wind howling toward us. As soon as it was about to hit us, we would both drop to the ground to cover. Sometimes I laid flat on my face and other times I would crouch over my ankles and wrap my arms around my legs. Josie quickly learned to lie down as well so as not to get picked up by the winds. When we did this. we tucked our heads and closed our eyes both hearing and feeling the pelting sands and small rock over our bodies. When the gusts stopped, we jumped up and tried to move again. It was a slow hike out I can tell you that. But you cannot say it was uneventful. Needless to say, we still were not encountering any humans and enjoyed our freedom in yelling with the wind gusts in privacy. We literally had the entire side of the mountain while the sun was setting to ourselves. Magic time for sure. As the sky turned shades of pink and orange and gold, we saw storm clouds flying in from the north mixing with the wild fire smoke. It was spectacular and we could hardly pull our eyes from the beauty of the moment. This moment and the memories burned into my brain were surely covering some scars on my heart I thought to myself.

I falsely assumed our night hike back to our truck would be uneventful after this. I was not planning on turning on a flashlight as we hurried down the trail. I was looking forward to some iced lemonade that I knew was waiting in a thermos in my truck. I also couldn't wait to clean up. My hair was so tangled and full of sand that I questioned if it would ever recover. My skin was plastered in sand. My boots were filled with it. My eyes were gritty and every time I tried to take a drink from my bladder bag, my teeth were crunching sand. When I realized that my ear canals were even full of sand all the way to my very brain, I craved the extra gallons of water in my truck so I could just strip down and take a full spit bath before driving home!

As we neared my truck....probably a half mile away, I came to a hard stop in the dark trying to place a strange and terrifying sound. With a sinking heart, I realized it was a car alarm. I am very use to coming off the trail in the dark to mine being the only truck left in a parking lot. My worst nightmare seemed to be coming true. Either someone was breaking into my truck to steal my extra gear or steal my beloved trail truck, who is like my handsome shirtless boyfriend. "Hell no!" I said to Josie and told her we were going to run hard and fast. I could not turn on my light now for sure even though it was really not safe to run a trail in the black of night. But I figured if someone was trying to steal my truck, there would probably be more than one of them. I could not let them see or hear me coming at them. I needed the element of surprise to take these would be robbers. I figured if a barely five foot tall trigger happy woman strapped to a Wolf came running at them in the dark, that would surely give me the upper hand to take them. This is when I once again, for the second time today, found myself calculating how many shots I had in my gun before needing to reload. Let's just say my heart and adrenaline were racing as I raced off that trail ready for the fight of my life.

What I saw instead, stunned me. I came running into a completely full campground of humans with tents set up all around me. There were probably 8-10 vehicles at the trail head and all kinds of campers milling about. Apparently one of them had set off their own truck alarm and couldn't get it to stop. It was still blaring even after our half mile run in the dark. These were hikers wanting to start the Timberline Trail for a long weekend hike early the next morning. I wanted to murder them all and I could feel the same emotion coming from the beast at my side. I was breathing hard and itching for a fight. I stomped to my truck and stripped down for my bath.....silently daring any of them to say just one word to me. "Humans!!" Josie and I both muttered in unison as we left the trailhead and started our long drive home. In order to make up for the trauma of humanity on this hike, on the way home, sometime close to midnight, we did something only allowed maybe once per year. This was my first time in 2024. We pulled into a drive through and ordered a small hot fudge sundae with extra hot fudge. It was divine and I started to like humans a little bit more after that. But only a little.