TR: American Alps Traverse - 16 days, 60k, and 120 miles
The American Alps Traverse
16 days, 60,000 vertical and 120 miles
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"By forces seemingly antagonistic and destructive Nature accomplishes her beneficent designs - now a flood of fire, now a flood of ice, now a flood of water; and again in the fullness of time an outburst of organic life...." —John Muir
-June 17th, 2013
Bibles and books of God covered the sun-washed dash of the minivan. “I live off the grid,” the middle-aged driver proudly asserted as he glanced over his shoulder and smiled back at his family.
I had been hitchhiking for hours and this was my second ride. Sixty miles still separated me from my car.
“This is as far as I can take you,” the driver said with an apologetic smile, quickly pulling over outside Marblemount, a speck of a town in northern Washington State.
“Thanks for picking me up,” I gushed, waving a friendly goodbye.
My gaze followed the minivan until it melted into the sleepy shadows. Looking down, I sat and let my thoughts roll over the past sixteen days.
Usually millions of neurons fire off in the process of remembering. I don’t visualize it so literally. To me, memory is more like a meadow and the act of remembering is like a spring rain, followed by sunshine. Instead of flowers springing up, the greens, blues, yellows and reds of individual memories blossom.
It was no flashy color that blossomed first. It was the wet and soggy grey mid-May afternoon. At my house, in Tacoma Washington, I sank into my office chair. Waiting in my inbox was an unread email. The title was subtle, but that subtlety hinted at epic. It read, “Are you busy in June?”
The message included my longtime mountain companion Kyle Miller, a bipedal splitboarder. The sender was Forest McBrian, a euro-crazy but brilliant guide, whose less than sane ideas have always inspired in me the response of, “Yeah that could work?” Not posed as a statement, but always as a question.
Forest was fishing for partners to complete a grand traverse of Washington’s North Cascades.
This is the point at which my memory flashes in another color, this time blue. It is the color in which the jovial sky envelopes our maternal sun, the color that a sprouted seed first sees when it breaks from the earth and the color of dreams becoming reality. My attempts to convince like-minded friends to join me on such an endeavour as Forest was suggesting, had fallen on deaf ears. It was within Northwest ski historian and pioneer Lowell Skoog’s written account of his decades-long mission to ski from Mount Baker to Mount Rainier, a ~300-mile high route, a traverse across the Cascade Mountain crest. Lowell dubbed a portion of that route, which is a third of the length, traveling from Highway 20 through Glacier Peak, the “American Alps Traverse.”
By 1991 Skoog and party had made an attempt to complete the American Alps Traverse, but an uncooperative spring shut them down. In 2000, two locals took up the torch. Both Matt Firth and Bob Nielsen succeeded in reaching as far as Lyman Lake, about two-thirds of the way, but no farther. Since that time no other known efforts have been made.
PART I – Highway 20 to Cascade River Road, Days 1 through 4
-June 2nd: Pyramid Glacier
Red is a passionate and dangerous color. It is the color of fear, it paints the sunrises and sunsets and it is beginnings and endings. Yet for Kyle Miller and me, red was the color of blood-filled mosquitoes being squashed, just like our fears. There was no Forest McBrian. He had joined the National Park Service patrol in Alaska at the last moment. The weather was questionable. One-hundred and twenty miles and sixty thousand vertical feet in one of the snowiest places on earth was hard to grasp. And we were already tired from our preparations and lack of sleep.
We arrived at the Pyramid Lake trailhead, high above Diablo Lake, smack dab in the middle of the North Cascades National Park in northern Washington State, dubious of what we were getting ourselves into.
Above us, the olive-colored evergreens plugged the sky. On the road, an occasional car would hustle by. On all sides, birds voiced warnings to their friends. They know we are not like the deer, not part of the forest. Instead, we are amalgams circling the rim of civilization.
Our adventure could be broken into three parts, separated by food caches. The first is the Isolation Traverse. It was the shortest leg of our trip, expected to last four days. While short, it provided plenty of time for me to remember how to curl up in the moment and feel the heat of life as it happens.
For me, that detachment from the hubbub of city life began at the trailhead, moments before I stepped out of the car. I joked to Kyle, “Are we really doing this?”
To which Kyle smartly retorted, “We can still go home.”
In a matter of speaking, we were at home. We both have spent more time sleeping in the mountains than in our own beds so ‘home’ is quite often made where we pitch our tents and lay out our sleeping bags.
Right then, everything we owned seemed to be on our backs. I couldn’t help but laugh at the thought of my monstrous load straddled on my shoulders. I often joke that I am in a relationship with my pack. We bicker, we get into arguments and we heckle each other. In this case, I jested that she had a crush on me. In all actuality, I felt a rising urge to tell her that she is obese and barely fits inside her own skin, but I thought better of it. I was still just feet from the car and would be spending weeks of quality time with her. Best to save her angst for another day.
When beginning, it is best to start like one jumps into a cold lake or in our case, a web of forest. Fully committed, we dove headfirst into the leafy waves and rose as fast as we could toward the alpine zone.
Somehow a vertical mile of climbing doesn’t ever go as fast as you would like, but when we burst from the greenery, our Universe expanded from our feet to the horizon. To the northeast were the massive shoulders of Jack Mountain. To the northwest were the impregnable walls of the Picket Range. In between and further encompassing us were the mass of peaks that make up the formidable North Cascades. Of the eleven hundred glaciers in the contiguous United States, nearly eight hundred of them are located in the northern reaches of Washington State. It is truly a sight one has to witness and experience, especially from a summit.
At a col, I looked down onto the first glacier of the trip, the Neve Glacier. Rain speckled my glasses. “So much for the great forecast,” I mumbled into the grey, murky fog before agreeing with Kyle that we should set up camp there.
After dinner, I scrambled to a high perch. The clouds had cleared and the stars shimmered. It was a perfect first night and exactly what I had come in search of. Before going to sleep, I wanted to watch the liquid blues dissolve into oily blacks. As they did, the stars began to twinkle like the faraway city lights. The night sky inspires humility in me. That perspective, without a doubt, should humble us all.
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