lupine and daisy: Bear Poop and Bajadas

Under ripe bananas suck. I know this, but peeling this particular banana's cardboard husk back I knew immediately it was going to really suck. I still ate it. I'm, among other things, a masochist. And can somebody tell me why under ripe bananas taste like pennies?

I arrived in Leavenworth early Friday morning, I mean really early. But that is another story. And, having no food other than a jar of Nutella, some peanut butter and a loaf of Dave's Killer Bread, I felt like I wanted something more. Thus I found myself at Safeway with the swing-shift stockers stocking their unfresh bananas. At least the sunrise was pleasant between the lifting clouds.

You get to Leavenworth a couple ways. The most scenic is to take Highway 2 from Everett east over Stevens Pass. The highway descends from the pass skirting the Chiwaukum Mountains and the northern flanks of the Stuart Range. Eventually it joins the Wenatchee river and the two snake through the post-apocalyptic firescape of Tumwater Canyon. In 1994, two fires burned more than 17,000 acres and threatened the town itself. Nearly twenty years later much of the area still looks like a nuclear bomb had been detonated. Husks of Ponderosa pine and Silver Fir stand rigid like days-old stubble way high up the sides of the mountains, eerily. And the hills are covered in granite, or, more specifically, Paleozoic quartz diorite (yes, I cheated and looked it up to sound more fancy. In fact, the rest of this paragraph is pretty much cribbed from several readily available online resources, so there). You are constantly reminded here, maybe more acutely than other ranges I've spent time in, that you are standing on a gigantic rock. The Cascades are a young range and young ranges are always more spectacular visually.. But the North Cascades in particular, the area that has as its southern boundary I-90, is even more resplendent because of Holocene glaciation, indeed there are more glaciers here than anywhere else in North America (Alaska excepted). There are garage-sized black granite blocks hiding, literally, meters off the road. Three thousand feet above are haunting towers overlooking vast talus slopes and here and there, the quickly retreating remains of glaciers. It is an absurdly beautiful place.

And, then there's the running. There are several great trails that I've spent time on, but the landscape is so clear from the fires still that you can simply grab your shoes and just go with little fear of getting lost unless of course, concepts like rivers running downhill (and thus east in this canyon) or the fact that the sun tracts roughly east-west seem alien to you. One morning I got up early and ran directly from my campground (Eightmile Campground) up a wash a couple thousand feet (I reckon). Another morning I ran down Icicle Creek Road and explored all the little climber access trails which can be steep and technical.

As an unhappy-but-forever-working-on-leaving Seattleite, the weather in Leavenworth could not be more different, and more welcome. It is dry, sunny, and warm for the months of the year that you'd expect it to be - roughly April through October. The forests on the eastern slopes of the Cascades have a piney smell that I can't get enough of too.

So why bear poop and Bajadas? Well, I cannot seem to go into the woods lately without intuiting the presence of Ursa or encountering it outright. There was the "huckleberry incident" last summer when we surprised each other and he/she climbed up a tree fifteen feet away from me and we made eye contact.
This trip was no different. I woke up one night tweeked out on Advil PM after a day of seriously thinking about getting a tattoo of Ursa Major, looked up and directly overhead, perfectly enclosed in a break in the trees, with the Lyrid Meteor shower arcing through it, was Ursa Major. I can't tell you how powerful this was. And it simply spun on that spot in the sky throughout the night, never moving out of my line of sight. And then there was the morning while scrambling around that I heard what I thought was the familiar grunt (I remember from last summer) but I wasn't sure. I felt something though. A few moments later I came across fresh piles of bear poop. Steaming.

I mention Bajadas because they provided adequate protection for my feet as I ran as fast as I could back to the car. Not really. Maybe.

The more I go into the wild, and off trail particularly, the more I am reminded how connected everything is. I was not brought up this way. I was not raised to view the natural world with awe and intimacy, like a lover. So it has taken some time. But, as the forays start to add up, and my legs get a little stronger, and the tendons and ligaments that once complained again take up the work they were made to do, and my brain starts to not recoil from inconvenience and change and discomfort, the more I become feral. The more I live. And, it's not quite happiness in the hour of vision, in the zero moment when the ego falls away, it's connection and love and vigor.

The Wild is a funny and unforgiving teacher.

Bear poop, real fresh.