One of the things that makes it obvious that you have crossed from Denmark into Germany is the comparative paucity of flags on the German side. Danes do have a gentle--and tolerably justifiable--smugness for representing the pinnacle of peaceful and civilized society, and they express this with their red and white nordic crosses. Germany's history is a little more dubious, and it takes a toll on the nationalism.

When I arrived in Hamburg, after being told by no fewer than three conductors that I'm a delinquent for having only an electronic copy of my ticket, I was excited to find out that I wouldn't have a seat on the hour-and-a-half transfer to Hannover, and would have to stand with the other "unreserved" in the cattle car of a cabin. (Forgive me for my anxiety in the matter, but Jews don't have the best track record when it comes to entering the Fatherland by overcrowded train.)

Hannover, like almost all German cities I've been to, is half beautiful and half 1970s dingy à la Kraftwerk and sandals over socks. It's a medium-sized city but noticeably provincial. It is the capital of more or less a backwater region, and Bremen, which is the nicest city around, is cut out of Niedersachsen by a cookie cutter like Berlin from Brandenburg. So it's kind of the biggest fish in a small, cultureless pond. But maybe I'm not giving it enough credit: there are some beautiful buildings from the 17th century, and the city center is clean and new. Charm, if Hannover has some, can be found in the many gorgeous parks that make the city feel weave pretty fluidly from urban center to nature reserve. I live on the outskirts of town, if anyone cares. A block towards the centers and there are nice restaurants and shops. A block in the other direction and it's pretty industrial.

I can say with certainty that it is impossible to feel like a tourist here, since nobody would visit Hannover just for fun and because nobody would ever come far enough from the center to stumble upon my dwelling place. But I do feel supremely like an outsider (since I realized that I really can't speak German), and I hope that will change sooner rather than later.

Day 7: Found Tabs the farm cat, dead.

"Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin."

Dear both of our readers,

Now that you are enlightened but also likely exhausted by my penetratingly French quotation and by Leo "Smokey-the-bear" Schwartz's comprehensive description of the Politics of Wildfires (to be published in a three volume set by the Harvard University Press), I will actually take a break from my usual tone of complaint to celebrate, for a brief moment, the quiet pleasure of farm life.

After one post, I was a blogger, so I guess one day of work makes me a farmer.

Deep in the deciduous forests of Denmark, about a half-hour from Copenhagen by train, sits quiet Stengården, an organic farm that cultivates vegetables, egg-laying hens, cattle for slaughter, and friendly, socialist virtues. The farm is absolutely stunning, and the family that runs it has that standard Scandinavian awkward kindness which I've always tried to simulate but have only ever achieved the awkward part. We work five hours a day, five days a week in exchange for room and board.

Room: all of the unpaid workers or "WWOOFers" (you may know them by their historical name, "slaves"), share a gorgeous apartment with tons of light that pours in from huge skylights. Beautiful common room, scandinavian design, etc. If this apartment were in Manhattan, Anderson Cooper would scrimp and save to cough up the down payment. And it has a fucking washing machine!

But really the board is what has made this so cool. Stengården has the largest organic supermarket in Denmark (and the owners joke the most expensive, too), and we are free to waltz in at will and take anything, save alcohol of course. Every time I get groceries I feel kind of like a criminal. For breakfast we can have yogurt, muesli, eggs, avocado, etc. Then we work for two hours until "coffee break," when we are given lekker breads, cheeses, juices, etc. Then we work for another couple of hours and it's lunchtime: meats, herring, vegetables, potatoes, you get it. By this time it is 1 P.M. and we have the rest of the day off to grab whatever we can from the shop with whatever of our hands hasn't been thistled and nettled away from weeding.

It's not all a walk in the park, though. Some of the "trendy" flavors are a little unorthodox by American standards:

Call me old-fashioned, but the thought of chomping on my own offspring doesn't appeal to me; I'm not a goddamned beta fish. But I guess "when in Rome..."

More later--have to go for a leisurely stroll.

xoxo, gossip girl

I'm on Fire

Whoops.

Round 1 Results: We fail. It's been a busy month though--I've starting doing Monday through Thursday camping hitches for work (although I have no excuses for the weekends, which are largely spent lounging around, except for one eventful weekend spent in Portland that I'll hopefully work up the motivation to write about soon), and Jake has been busy bumming around New York or whatever. But we'll do better, especially because Jake has actually starting traveling/working at a farm in Denmark picking tulips or something. Let's pretend the past month of non-productivity didn't happen though and start fresh.

In response to the last post from a little less than a month ago, one of my favorite Jake being a terrible tourist moments was when five of us went up to the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont (which averages roughly .6 people per square mile) for fall break. We went to the town’s grocery store/gun store/outfitter/jail to check it out, where he immediately yelled, in front of the very nice, albeit slightly "provincial" storekeeper, "Ooooo, we can buy so many souvenirs here!!!" Moral of the story, Jake is an uncouth, unfiltered New Yorker with an irreverent sense of humor, and for anyone who read the previous post thinking "Jesus, how could a kid go to one of the most beautiful places on Earth and have that reaction," it's at least 50% meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek. The other 50% can be accounted for the fact that he's spent most of his life in Scarsdale and the Upper West Side.

Moving on to my experience in a place where Jake would almost certainly offend everyone, here's a topic that I think is worth writing about for my second real post: forest fires. Forest fires dominate the culture here, and are as much of a way of life as complaining about tourists are in New York (actually, Central Oregonians complain about Californians as much if not more than New Yorkers complain about tourists.)

Forest fires, for whatever reason, aren't really a thing out in the East Coast, and although I've heard about them in the news every year--mostly in the context of all of Colorado seemingly burning down every year--I've never really had a context for understanding what they actually are, in any sense. To start off, I really have no idea why forest fires happen so frequently out here and not on the East Coast, or even the Midwest--I think it has something to do with the type of trees (mostly conifers) and brush, and mostly to do with the lack of rain in most of the region. Most of  Oregon, contrary to popular belief, is incredibly dry, with only the area west of the Cascades being really wet. Central Oregon, where I am, is classified as a high desert, and although there are frequent thunderstorms, they're usually dry, with very little rain, but tons of lightning, which set trees on fire, and spread like wildfire (hah, sorry) through the insanely dry forests.

This week we were out camping for work from Monday through Thursday, and thunderstorms rolled in on Tuesday and Wednesday night. We could see them forming over the Three Sisters around 2 or three, slowly creeping across the sky and building until they blanketed the sky by 6 or so. These thunder cells, mostly dry, come with these insane lighting strikes unlike anything I've ever seen that just fill the sky. We have a forest service walkie talkie that we use to call in and out of service every day, set to the Central Oregon dispatch channel that the local fire lookouts use to call smoke reports. On nights like the ones we had this week, there will be dozens of smoke reports, constantly calling in. Apparently on Tuesday alone there were around 700 strikes that caused over 40 fires.

During the summer, most of the forest service is fire-related, which is a massive operation between lookouts, hot shot crews that build fire lines to contain the blazes, helicopters that suck up water from lakes and dump it on the fires, pump operators, dispatches, and dozens of other roles. You need what's called a red card to fight fires, but there's been a couple fires this summer that have been so bad that we've been close to getting recruited to help out. Most of the other trail crew members, who are actually employed by the Forest, forsake their trail crew duties to go help out when the fires get really bad (they're also paid much more for fire duty, because it's largely overtime).

It's crazy to see the forest go into action when a fire actually gets out of control, like two weeks ago, when two forest fires joined to become what's called a complex (this one was the Bridge 99 Complex, they all have names, like Hurricanes, after where they started)--the local middle school turned into a fire center, where hotshot crews were called in from Idaho, Montana, California, and Washington, along with all over Oregon, to put all hands on deck. Even then, the fire just kept spreading, due to unfavorable winds and heat, and at some point you just have to let it burn.

A forest fire makes a mushroom cloud in the sky. The first time I saw one was the first week I was here. We were driving back from work one day and saw this huge cloud in the sky, that looked like an atomic bomb had hit Bend. We found out later it was the Two Bulls Fire, torching about 7,000 acres, including the outskirts of Bend (a city of 100,000).

We were out camping when the Bridge 99 Complex started, and saw a similar cloud in the horizon as we began to hear about chatter about it on the radio. Our co-worker/supervisor came out to work with us for a day--our site was about an hour drive from Bend, and then a 5 mile hike in, so he didn't meet up with us until about 11. By the time he showed up, he was already called in to go work on the fire, so he helped us put in a couple log checks, ate lunch, and then headed back out. For a fire like the Bridge 99 Complex (which was especially threatening because it was encroaching on the Metolious River, which is a popular recreation and residential spot), all hands go on deck. He worked as a pump operator, and would mostly sit around all day as trucks came up to re-supply. 

By nighttime, we could see the flames creeping up on the ridges surrounding us. Our real supervisor guaranteed us that because we were working in area that had already been burned out about 10 years before, there was no way they fire would spread to us (plus we were camped out on a wilderness lake, which he half-jokingly claimed we could always swim out to the middle of if it got really bad, although we were pretty skeptical), but going to bed with a pillar of red rising on the horizon is just a little unsettling. 

At some point in the summer, campfires are banned in wilderness areas, although that hasn't happened yet. That was our first camping trip for work, and that night was the last one of the hitch, so we decided to have a little campfire to celebrate (as a disclaimer, campfires are required to be 100 feet from a trail and 100 feet from any water, and we were questionably 100 feet from both the trail and the lake, although I'm almost positive we were fine). Our fire had been burning for about an hour--and these fires burn big because the wood around here is so dry--when we heard a whirring in the sky. Fire helicopters had been passing over all day, but this was much louder than anything we'd heard. Before we could react, one flew right over our campsite, which is a pretty surreal sight, as we were out in a completely desolate wilderness area where there's nothing even slightly related to civilization for miles and miles. Then it circled back, and began to fly back to us. We started freaking out, only a little, pretty positive that it was going to dump 1,000 gallons of water on our little campfire, or something like that. 

Confirming our worst suspicions, it flew right back to our campsite, and hovered right over us, probably 100 feet above, for about 15 seconds. At that point were were fully freaking out, and we could see the people in the helicopter, although they didn't say anything to us. Finally, it began to move, and went to hover over the lake we were next to, with its hose dangling down. We were pretty positive it was going to suck up water, but it just flew away. We ran to get our radio to try and hear any activity about what it was up to, but we were too late. I also unfortunately didn't have my phone on me so I couldn't take any pictures, so you'll have to use your imagination. Just try to picture being surrounded by thousands of acres of wilderness for a couple days and then having a helicopter, most likely coming to check out your possibly illegal fire, hovering hovering 100 feet above you. 

So what do forest fires look like. That, unfortunately or fortunately, I can't tell you or show you, because I haven't seen one up close. I can show you what a forest fire does, though. Because we're the lackeys of the trail crew, and because burned out areas need the most trail work, we've been working almost exclusively in burned out areas this year--two in particular, the Pole Creek Fire of 2012, which burned about 25,000 acres, and the B&B Fire of 2003, which burned over 90,000 acres. On one hand, working in burned areas is the worst, because the soil is shit, and everything is fucking burned, so there's absolutely no shade. At around 2 pm, with the sun beating down, no clouds, and 95 degree heat, wearing long pants and long sleeves and gloves and wool socks and a hard hat and digging trenches and crosscutting trees, let me tell you, is not fun. On the other hand, working in burned out areas has its perks. First off, because everything is burned, it opens up the surrounding areas, giving the most beautiful views of the landscape. Second off, working in these two different fires, it's pretty cool seeing how a forest recovers from a fire. In the Pole Creek area from two years ago, everything is just completely nuked--it looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There's no green whatsoever, the soil has been turned to sand by the blaze, and the trees are still black poles sticking in the sky. In the B&B area from ten years ago, though, the trees have turned white, looking up close like petrified wood, and from far away like a forest blanketed by snow. The ground is covered in green from the first pioneers, largely snowbrush (which blankets the area) and manzanita. 

Finally, burned out areas are unlike anything I've ever seen--eerily, surreally, hauntingly beautiful. For all those who have read this far (or if you're just skipping down), I'll reward you with lots of pictures. This is the Pole Creek region, on the Park Meadow trail, which is about six miles of burn before you come out to these gorgeous alpine meadows at the base of North Sister and Broken Top which I unfortunately didn't have the chance to take any pictures of. I've got lots of pictures of the burn though:

As you can see, absolutely no green, and the soil is sand. We actually would mountain bike to work every day, which was pretty difficult because a) I have virtually no mountain biking experience b) the soil is sand and incredibly hard to steer through c) it's all single track, as you can see from that last picture, so very little room to maneuver and d) it's all uphill and downhill, which the pictures don't really show. Pretty fun though. You can also see the incredible views that the burn opens up. Not necessarily worth it on 95 degree days. The trail looks like that for virtually the entire six miles or so until Park Meadow.

Here's the area we've been working in a lot recently, all hit by the B&B Fire from ten years ago. A pretty stark difference. We've been camping out at this little wilderness lake called Booth Lake, which is in some of the pictures. 

This is Three Fingered Jack, apparently named when a group of pioneers came through, and said to their three fingered friend named Jack (an ex-train robber who had lost his fingers presumedly during such escapades), "Hey, that looks like you!" 

My campsite for three weeks, not bad. For the most part, we were the only ones, although one night I was woken up to people showing up at 11:30 to set up camp, although I thought they were going to sacrifice us all in some weird Satanic ritual--seriously, who sets up camp at 11:30 at night. 

A different lake called Square Lake about two miles from Booth. Two miles away from Square Lake is Round Lake. Both Square Lake and Round Lake are round. Not the most imaginative names. 

So that's forest fires for you. Last thing I want to very briefly talk about is the politics of forest fires, which I've saved for last because I figure most people won't care, even though I think it's really fascinating. One hears forest fires and thinks, those are bad, pretty naturally. They burn down homes, they destroy forests, they occasionally kill people. Not good. A good amount of people I've talked to in the forest fire have pretty differing views. First, a pretty common belief is that there's a reason forest fires have been so bad in the past thirty years or so, and that's because we've been stopping them. In ecosystems like this one, forest fires are part of the life cycle. Fires start naturally from the lightning strikes in the summer, and if healthy, will burn away all the brush and smaller trees. The larger and more established trees can pretty easily survive these fires, and the fires, if anything, revitalize the area, ensuring that overpopulation of vegetation doesn't happen. In the past fifty years or so, and possibly before that, we've been actively fighting forest fires, which means that forests are becoming overpopulated by brush and smaller trees that normally would be burned by the natural fires. When a fire happens, there's much more fuel , and the fires are bigger and bigger, causing these massive ones like the B&B and Pole Creek Fires that burn even the old growth trees, which otherwise would be able to survive the blazes. 

The reason we still fight the fires, of course, is political pressure--we build our homes and communities near where fires happen, and if the fires get too close to homes, they have to be stopped. If it wasn't for that, the forest service would most likely let them burn, because it's actually better for the life cycle of the forest. Recently, controlled and prescribed burns have become more common--the forest service will actually look at historic photos of what the forests used to look like (aka the amount of trees, roughly, per acre) and set a blaze in an area to try and get rid of the brush and smaller trees, to both reduce fuel and restore the forest to how it's supposed to look--literally using fire to fight fire. The work behind a prescribed fire is immense--the conditions have to be perfect (wind, temperature, weather, etc.), and even then, they can get out of control. 

The forest service is also advocating for more logging in a lot of circumstances, to reduce to amount of trees in a given area, and reduce the likelihood of a super-blaze. This is creating controversy with conservation types, especially with the spotted owl lobby. Just goes to show there's no black and white in these situations, and the forest service can never please everyone, which is why they're so controversial in this area. 

Anyway, that's about it. I promise the next post will be written in less than a month. Burn baby burn. 

By the way, the title is a reference to the Shakey Graves cover of the Bruce Springsteen classic--he's an awesome folk artist out of Austin (who played a bit role in the TV show Friday Night Lights as the greasy Swede, for any fans), who will be playing at the Sisters Folk Festival (the third biggest event in Sisters after the Rodeo and Quilt Fest) in a month. Would highly recommend checking him out. 

"Ooh look at me I'm Leo and I have pretty scenery all around me." Okay, buddy, we get it. You graduated college and left the East Coast and now you're seeing a real mountain for the first time. Well, two can play at that game:

I could tell you all--all two of our readers--about the natural beauty of the American West. But the job of a travel writer, which, having already written one post, I can now safely consider myself, is to give you a kind of impressionistic view of a place, as Leo has done for Oregon. And of course being the negative, generally shitty person that I am, I would be lying to you if I said that entering this pristinely tranquil natural sanctuary made me at one with the universe. And I may be shitty, but I'm not a liar.

So I'll give you, both of our readers, a run-down of how my family experienced Yellowstone National Park, in the annoying, condescending, New York way that we actually encountered it. This cartoon is a visual representation of how my family generally experiences the rest of the world:

You've probably heard of Yellowstone's spectacular wildlife, or maybe that it is home to two-thirds of the world's geysers. What they don’t tell you about Yellowstone is that every hotel, restaurant, and store is owned and operated by Xanterra, a corporation that probably wants to cut down the rainforest and almost certainly has more political power than you do.

A waitress at one of Xanterra's wonderful establishments (staying afloat purely by the monopoly that they have imposed on the park) told us that we really ought to try their delicious after dinner mints, almost passing them off as a house speciality. She then pulled out the most standard, average mints one could possibly imagine, fully equipped with "Thank You" printed on the front in a kitschy cursive font, which thankfully Blogger spares its readership of. I actually laughed in this poor waitress's face, fully solidifying the state of Wyoming completely valid disdain for grouchy, self-obsessed and deeply entitled New Yorkers.

The local folk here are quintessentially-provincial types, which has its charms as well as its frustrations. I do not recommend attempting sarcasm. The truth is that the people here are simple in every sense of the word, one tour guide noting that Wyoming has the "smallest per capita population in the country." And here I was assuming that proportion would be one to one.

But as I much as I can mock these residents, in reality my family is as woefully unprepared for their lifestyle as they are for ours. We couldn't make it as wranglers. My mother, for example, upon seeing this guy in the middle of the road, recited our family mantra "Shit shit shit, shit shit, shit shit."

Just a classic clash of cultures. Glad I'm coming home tomorrow. I wonder how I'll fare working on a farm.

Cold feet in the wild

I have two counterparts here, both with the same job as me, which officially is “backcountry trail interns for the Deschutes National Forest” (and I swore I’d never do another internship again—at least this one is paid-ish). All three of us are sponsored by a group called the Student Conservation Association, and two of us are also double dipping as Americorps-ers (the third already spent a year in the Utah Conservation Corps, and wants to save her eligibility to do the Hawaii Conservation Corps.)

Except for an OSHA-mandated week of orientation in the dreaded indoors covering subjects such as defensive driving (which was probably a fair one, because I’m pretty green to driving a massive pick-up, and our rig is paid for by the tax payers), sexual harassment, CPR, first aid, general safety concerns, and my favorite, how to fight off a (black) bear or cougar, we’ve been true to our job title, out working on backcountry trails (I’ll go into what that actually entails in later posts).

And while we’ve worked on some pretty incredible trails, and I’ve seen some of the most beautiful wilderness of my life working on those trails, you’re still working, and when you’re working on trails, you move at a glacial speed. Each of the three of us came here to explore (and to backpack, which we’ll be doing as part of our job later in the summer, but hadn’t had the chance to do yet), and this weekend was our first real opportunity to get out into the Forest.

Before going on, I should go on a brief tangent to explain what a national forest is and what wilderness is, because before coming here I had no idea what either of those were.

I really only remember going to one national forest before this, which was in North Carolina. I told everyone coming here that I was working at a national park, which it turns out is a completely different thing (to certain people who care, you really can lump them into the same category and not lose sleep over).  The main difference is that a national park is operated under the Department of the Interior and a national forest is operated under the Department of Agriculture. While a national park is mostly an area that people can visit and nature can run its course, a national forest is still viewed as a resource (hence it being under the Department of Agriculture), meaning that while conservation is still a priority, land management also focuses on harvesting, logging, grazing, etc. There aren’t too many in the East, but the West is littered with them, Oregon especially.  I’m in the Deschutes National Forest (obviously the best one, and the namesake of one of the best breweries in the country), which is bordered by the Willamette National Forest, the Fremont National Forest, the Ochoco National Forest, the Umpqua National Forest, the Mount Hood National Forest, and the Winema National Forest, and there’s still at least six or seven other ones in the state. They’re huge too—the Deschutes alone is over 1.5 million acres.

The best part of the forests is the wilderness, which is an actual legal term, and where we do most of our work. The Wilderness Act of 1964 (it’s the fiftieth anniversary this year) set aside the distinction for federally managed land, usually within national parks or forest, that were to be preserved entirely in their natural condition. There are endless rules and regulations, but essentially it means that within these areas, man is just a visitor, and must make as much of an effort as possible to not disturb the land—for us, this means that we cannot bring any sort of machines in to do work on the trails (including even simple machines like wheelbarrows), and need to use old-fashioned tools like crosscut saws. Needless to say, they’re pretty incredible. The Deschutes has five huge wilderness areas. We spend most of our time in three of them—the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, the Mount Washington Wilderness, and the Three Sisters Wilderness. For those keeping track at home, those are all centered around Cascade mountains in my area—Mount Jefferson (the second highest peak in Oregon at around 10,500 feet), Mount Washington, and the three Sisters Mountains, each of which are over 10,000 feet.

Although everything being at enormous elevation means incredible beauty, it also means that a solid amount of land is covered in snow for about 90% of the year. Really anything above 6,000 or 6,500 feet, we’ve come to realize, will have snow until the middle of July or even August, and then only until the end of September will the area be fully navigable. Since most of the good backpacking loops cover a lot of ground and tend to go into areas with higher elevation, the options are pretty limited until later in the summer.

We were planning on doing a 22 mile loop around a mountain called Broken Top from Saturday through Sunday, but someone we know who ‘s actually familiar with this area told us there would be way too much snow to do the hike this early in the season.  We went to see some live music in Sisters on Friday night, and our friend from a nearby town came and stayed with us. He told us about his favorite hike in the area, which goes right through the Three Sisters Wilderness. We figured this would be appropriate first trip, since we’re living in the eponymous Sisters, Oregon. The hike follows the Pacific Crest Trail (the West Coast equivalent of the Appalachian Trail) down twelve miles from the Lava Lake Trailhead (the entire area is volcanic and littered with once flowing lava fields that deposited massive mounds of volcanic rock) to Obsidian Falls and a natural spring, passing the Collier Cone (7,500 feet) and going right to the west of the North and Middle Sisters. We would hike out about six miles to a different trailhead along the same highway the next day, and get a hitch back to the car.

The three of us woke up a little worse for wear on Saturday morning, but luckily had everything packed up—way too much food, cooking gear, tents, sleeping bags and mats, clothing, moleskin, etc. We managed to get on the road by around 9:30—not the worst start, but with only about ten miles planned for the first day, pretty reasonable. The trailhead was right on the McKenzie Pass, which is this beautiful scenic highway that connects the east and west sides of the Cascades. It’s closed to automobiles for a good portion of the year and actually just opened up a couple weeks ago, so it was our first time on it. A couple miles into the highway, the view opened up on to a massive lava field with views of the mountains, slightly obscured by clouds, in the background. (This is my first of many pictures in the post).

We got to the trailhead and got our gear together, hitting the trail around 10:00, 10:15. We started hiking through this dense, wet forest, with all the trees covered in Spanish moss (I assume it’s not called Spanish moss out here, but that’s what it looks like).We were already pretty high up though and started to hit snow immediately, first in innocent patches to the sides of the trail, and then on the trail itself—huge packed mounds, sometimes five or six feet high, that we had to climb over, often with a steep downslope next to us. Still, we expected it, and the trail was perfectly manageable, with incredible views hiking toward North Sister (picture number two, with Sean looking pretty thrilled.) We got to our first landmark, this gorgeous mountain lake called South Matthieu (picture number three), that was just a little bit too cold to jump into. 

It was smooth sailing up to that point, but then we started to hit some serious snow.  I’ve obviously hiked in the snow before, but having spent just about my entire life in the Northeast, I’ve never done summer snow hiking. It’s pretty strange wearing a t-shirt and tramping through fields of snow that look like it should be the middle of February, but there’s always a first for everything. It’s also not my favorite, because a) no matter how waterproof your boots are, they’re not actually waterproof unless they’re made from pure rubber, so your feet are inevitably going to get cold and wet b) snow is fucking blinding to walk through with a summer sun above you, and c) not only are you walking much slower, but you’re constantly, constantly losing the trail, and having to find the trail in areas with less snow, only to lose it again when the snow picks up again. All of these, and especially point c, considered, while you can pretty easily do three miles an hour normally, in snow you’re lucky to do two. It’s slow moving.

For a while, the snow wasn’t so constant that it blanketed everywhere, and we could generally follow where we thought the trail would be, and find traces of it when there were dry patches. It’s still super frustrating to celebrate finding the trail, and 100 feet later lose it again to snow, having to basically guess at where it’s going to go based on your map and the contour of the land. Here’s a picture pretty much summing up the experience, right at the base of the Yapoah Crater—Sean put his walking sticks right where the trail disappears into the snow. We ended up walking on the crater, which doesn’t look too steep, but covered by snow, was pretty difficult to circumnavigate, as you kept slipping down the face. We made it probably a mile past the crater, but we kept going higher and higher in elevation, until we were in an area that was just completely blanketed. We trudged through this huge clearing, probably half a mile, that went into a forest, but realized that since the trail (or at least the idea of the trail) kept going higher and higher, there would only be more and more snow, and we’d never be able to find it again. We’d have to do the other six miles or so by guessing where we thought it would roughly follow.

It was about 3:30 at this point, and we’d covered maybe six miles or so. Sean, who’s much more, I guess you would say adventurous, wanted to keep going, following the landmarks on the map, happy to camp on top of the snow if need be. I advocated going back to this dry spot we had seen back near the crater, setting up camp, and having a nice big fire and lots of food. Already having soaking wet feet, with the prospect of several more miles of hiking through snow, took away any of my desire to finish what we had started, and luckily Donna agreed. We trooped back and set up camp in a miraculously “dry” area with fields of snow all around us, miles and miles away from the next human (who else would be stupid enough to come into these conditions, although that’s the beauty of wilderness).

When you’re hiking, you don’t really feel the cold too much, but when you stop, it starts to bite away at you. And it was cold. It really did start to feel like February in July, and by some miracle we managed to get a fire started despite only having snow-soaked wood at our disposal. Once we got it started, we kept it raging for the next four hours. It stays light out here until about 9:30, but as the hours crept on, so did the fog, and by about eight or so, we were completely enveloped in a cloud, with a visibility of maybe twenty feet around us. This post is already too long for me to talk about what it’s like to be in a place like that, especially after spending the past four years in NYC, but all I can say is that it’s just pure tranquility. Below is a picture of the camp site when we got there, and the same view a few hours later. There’s also a picture of what our set up looked like.

The great part about setting up camp with fours hours of daylight ahead of you is that you can take your time with everything—we got four hours worth of wood, for one, and made a verifiable camping feast, with spam and rice (my dish, admittedly not the fanciest), and the creation of my two, backcountry chefs—mac and cheese with beans, spinach, mushrooms, peppers, and onions. We went to bed once it got dark out, in the middle of a cloud, with the wind howling around our tents.

I woke up around 2 am, having drunk too much water to sleep through the night, and went outside. Somehow, the clouds had all cleared, and up above was the clearest, brightest night sky I’ve ever seen—and I’ve seen some pretty spectacular night skies—with a fully defined Milky Way. In my sleepy stupor I tried to take a picture, but of course when I woke up in the morning and checked, it was just a picture of blackness. Probably for the best. Still, the clouds had stayed cleared up in the morning, and we got a full panorama of where we had camped. Here’s the final shot of the same vantage point as the other two, showing North Sister in all its glory.

In the morning, after breakfast and packing up, we got another late start, getting on the “trail” at 10 again. Our plan, rather than backtracking, was to go down about a mile to where we had made it the day before, where there was a junction between the Pacific Crest Trail and another trail that went due west for about six miles, eventually linking up to the McKenzie Highway. We figured the other trail, although it gradually went down in elevation, would still be covered in snow, and since it twisted and turned, there was really no hope of following it. We decided just to head due west at the junction.

We went a couple miles, trekking mostly through snow, before we hit a little volcanic formation called the Four in One Cone (essentially four little peaks). We decided that rather than go around it, we would climb it for the view. We started up, but since it was made of this soft, loose volcanic stone, with every step you took, you would slide down about a foot, especially because it had a pretty steep incline. Finally, we made it to the top, and the view was worth it (a few pictures of the three views from the top, with a picture of the cone itself first—a lot steeper and taller than it looks).

We could see the highway, our destination, way ahead of us, snaking through the horizon. In front of us was a massive field of mounds of lava rock, and to the right of the lava field was a forest. We opted initially to try and make our way the five miles to the highway through the lava field, since it was relatively open, but it’s a lot harder once you’re in it than looking at it from above. The huge mounds are made of this loose, porous rock that you’re constantly climbing up and down, slipping and falling and dodging pretty large spiders that call the rocks home. We pretty quickly made a bee line for the forest, and eventually just followed the boundary of the field and the trees, which roughly went west. The only problem was there was a stream that at points turned into a pretty fast flowing river straddling the field and forest. We got tired of constantly crossing the stream back and forth to follow whatever clear paths we could find, and decided just to go into the forest and bushwhack our way the three miles or so to the highway. Luckily we were low enough in elevation that there were only patches of snow, but there were plenty of other obstacles, mainly in the form of thick, thick brush that always pushed you in the direction you didn’t want to go.

Three very long miles later, we hit the highway, about four miles away from where our car was. It’s a windy road with a downslope on both sides, so not the safest path to walk on, and luckily pretty early on a woman (who told us she was about to leave to hike the John Muir Trail) picked us up and gave us a ride to our car. Pretty soon, we were on our way back to Sisters.

To anyone who actually made it this far, I guess I should probably sum this all up. There’s not really a point to everything except to demonstrate how incredible the National Forest and the Wilderness is. In the first thirty minutes of our trip, we saw two groups of people, but were completely on our own (and man does it feel like you’re on your own) for the rest of the time, until we hit the highway. You’re just our there with the mountains and the trees and the snow, and it really feels like a different world, especially because when we came out, it was sunny and bright and about 70 degrees. As I said earlier, this isn’t the post where I talk about what it means to be in nature and the wild and all that—this is just an account of what it’s like, with an excuse to show some pretty pictures. To all you people still stuck in the city, try to get out for a weekend. It feels pretty good.