Colonel Bob
September 2nd, 2005. Pictures
Of the few hikes I’ve taken so far, this one has been my favorite. Partially, it is just a great place to go, but much of my enjoyment stemmed from the luck of getting the perfect conditions. When Porter and Tess and I first got there, the conditions were not great. It rained lightly, and fog and mist ruled out much picture taking. I decided to go for it anyway, and we headed up the trail for the peak, seven miles away. After about a mile, a third dog joined our pack. He was a boxer mix, black and brindle, with white sox, unaltered, underweight, and young. We were a mile from the trail head, and I hadn't seen anyone, so I didn't know if he lived by the lake or if he had gotten away from some campers up the trail. I ignored him, hoping he would go home. After a couple of miles, I wondered if he just does this all the time, hiking with people he finds and then returning home at the end of the day. I thought about just taking him with us for the whole fourteen miles and, if we didn't find his owner camping in the woods, checking the neighborhood around the trailhead to see if anyone recognized him. When I saw that he had diarrhea, I didn't think I should subject him to a fourteen mile hike, whether he was willing or not, because he would be dehydrated no matter how much water he drank. So, three miles away from the trailhead, we had to turn around and go back, scratching that hike for the day. When we got back to the truck, I wanted to put the boxer in the back of the truck, secured with leashes, so I could take him to the Ranger's Station to see if any campers were missing a dog. I put Tessie's leash on him, and he got spooked and ran off, dragging the leash. I couldn't chase after him right away, because I had to secure my dogs in the truck, and when I got out to the road, he was nowhere in sight. I had horrible visions of him stuck somewhere with the leash caught on an obstacle. At the first door I knocked on, the woman said, "Oh, that's Kane. He lives a few doors east. He's always running loose in the neighborhood.” When I knocked on his owner's door, he seemed irritated that someone had attached a leash to his dog. I explained that I was trying to help get the dog to his rightful owner, and the man relaxed and said thanks. I got Tessie's leash back. I wanted to tell him to take Kane to the vet to be neutered, and to be treated for giardia or whatever was ailing him, but the man wouldn‘t have listened. I doubt that he cared, since he was already letting his dog run loose without any tags, drinking out of streams and ponds. I was glad I didn't end up with a third dog, though.
Since Kane scrubbed our original hiking plan, we went on a shorter hike in Fletcher Canyon, six miles east. It was dense, old-growth forest, foggy, drizzly and drippy. The mountains on either side of the canyon went steeply up into the clouds, their tops invisible. We could hear Fletcher Creek rushing along below us as we walked. I couldn't take pictures because, in the middle of the afternoon, it seemed like twilight with the thick clouds and dense forest, but if I tried to use the flash, all I got was fog. What looked like clear air to me became impenetrable mist when the flash hit it. I could only take a few shots in clearings with enough light so a flash wasn't necessary. Tessie fell off the log when we crossed Fletcher Creek, but she didn't mind. Porter jumped in after her and they both splashed around. We stayed overnight in a place like the Bates Motel (with a recent remodel). Tessie and Porter jumped up into the bed and slept on either side of me as I watched the news and the weather report.
It was good that Kane bungled our trip that day because the next day was perfect weather, cool but clear, with plenty of light for photography and views hundreds of miles across the Olympic mountains. The huckleberries were ripe and delicious, freshly washed by the previous day's rain. At lower elevations, the red huckleberries were plentiful, but higher up, there were blue and black huckleberries. The black ones tasted okay, and I could certainly have lived off them for weeks if we were stranded in the woods, but the blue ones and red ones were better than candy. I brought a bag of Fritos, and up above Moonshine Flats, above Fletcher Canyon, I shared the Fritos with the dogs, who liked them much better than I liked the huckleberries, judging by the way they begged for more.
The summit of Colonel Bob Peak was 4,510 feet according to the book, and my GPS said it was 4,473, not too far off. It was a spectacular view, but I only stayed long enough to snap one quick picture because I didn't like having my dogs anywhere near the edge of the cliff on the north side. Even though we stayed back ten feet from the edge, I didn't feel comfortable, as I imagined Porter trying to scamper away from a bee or something, so we went right back down to the safety of the trees. For the minute we were up there, it was nice to see the lake in the distance, three miles as the crow flies and seven miles of trail. A lone raven played in the updrafts. He would make a low rattling noise and then tumble down about twenty feet, over and over, apparently just entertaining himself. We got back to the truck in under eight hours. 4.5 hours up and 3.25 down, with plenty of breaks for water, lunch, pictures, and huckleberries. On the drive home, the dogs were very tired. Porter slept with his head in my lap, and Tessie slept with her head on Porter's chest.
I felt like I was home, when I walked into the forest near Lake Quinault, the same way I felt at Kendall Katwalk and Myrtle Lake and Castle Mountain. It wasn't until I had been walking for hours in the woods that I began to realize why I felt that sense of belonging. Of course, there was the absence of people that I greatly enjoyed, almost as much as I enjoyed the company of dogs and trees. I realized that the act of going for a hike incorporated many of the interests I had acquired recently and long ago. All that I've learned about native plants, in the course of taking the Native Plant Stewardship training, makes the woods a rich and detailed place. It's not just a mass of vegetation, but a complex, interwoven system of specific plants performing particular tasks in the whole organism of the forest. Now I know many if not most of those plants I see, and I know their traits and habits. Another facet of old skills being put to new uses comes into play because hiking fourteen miles with almost a mile of elevation gain is like running a marathon. There's not as much physical exertion, but it has that rhythm to it. I get the same feeling of "I'm never going to make it" at the same time I'm certain that I can as long as I don't listen to that voice. Like a marathon, a long hike breaks me down, and what was effortless at the beginning becomes amazingly heavy at the end. The long hike is also a commitment to going a certain distance, whereas during training for a marathon I can always skip making another lap around the lake if I get bored. Near the top of Colonel Bob, I knew I had to make it to the highest point, and of course, once at the top, I had no choice but to hike back to the truck. I couldn't just call a taxi. The third habit that I use on a long hike is my photographer's eye. Although I'm not constantly taking pictures, I am constantly looking out for a picture that needs to be taken. That is, when I'm not busy watching my footing on the trail. I see things, like the way the forest was dancing at one point, the evenly spaced trunks moving in unison as I stepped along the trail, each tree dipping in time to my stride, the spacing and rotation reminiscent of an ancient dance that was passed from generation to generation through demonstration rather than explanation, and I know these things I see, these beautiful things, would come out as nothing in a photograph, a mistake. Then I see other situations that have the proper relationship of icons so that the viewer would recognize a familiar motif with a new set of particulars and be drawn into the image, and I stop and take the time to unstrap and dismount the backpack and dig out the camera while the dogs take a break. Then there are images that I know will be confused and unmanageable for someone who wasn't there, but I take the picture to remind myself of the experienced beauty, which I can recreate in my head from the shorthand of the photograph, sampling that blue, sensing the moisture in the air, tasting the huckleberry. And of course there are ten thousand pictures of dogs, which, to most people, would just be ten thousand pictures of the same dogs, but to me become a record of the ten thousand dogs my dogs have been as the world filtered through their noses. Lastly, hiking is the best form of writing. I do not write while I am sitting at a keyboard. I only write while I am walking or running or hammering new plywood sheathing onto the old fir skip sheathing. I write everything then, when I am away, then I forget, and then I sit in front of the blank screen and slowly remember what I wrote out there along the trail, Tessie in front, Porter right on my heels, so close that his backpack bangs into the backs of my legs and jars me out of my thoughts. All of my useless talents are put to use during the course of a long walk through the woods. It is the way Tess moves along the trail carpeted with hemlock cones, the wolf-like flow of her body shining out of the boxiness of her accidental genetics. In addition to employing all my sensibilities, hiking along a trail has the bonus attraction of fitting into my often lamentable philosophical framework of never being a tool toward an end, but just being an organic part of a moment.