Smoky Mountains

Mountain meadow wildflowers of early August have mostly turned to seed.  And something new and unwelcome has come to Wyoming.  

I had a plan for this trip—escape the pandemic and go to Wyoming where incidence was low, restrictions almost nil, and where clear air and wilderness awaited a pent-up hiker.  After six weeks of solo adventuring, I would come back to Pasadena when the pandemic would be mostly ended.  While gone, I would send inspiring blog posts, then return, and we would all have fun again.  And so it was for five weeks.   

Starting from a rabbit hole, in which a long rocky history of this place was explained to me by geologists, I emerged to the surface experience of seeing, feeling, and contemplating the Wind River Mountains. I am almost on my way home after millions of years.  I had thought it would be a beautiful, well planned, moment. But that’s all gone now.    

I can photoshop out some of the smoke,
but the left picture is real

My plan started well, but the result that followed was simply wretched—a  descending chain of events not planned for.  It isn’t easy to think of something comforting to say.  They call the eastern Tennessee mountain range “Smoky,” for the haze that usually envelopes it, but the Wind River Mountains, known for clear, dry, high elevation air, have changed.  It’s not our smoke (I speak to you Californians) that covers these mountains, it’s yours.  It must be hell there, judging from the amount of smoke the wind has brought all the way to Wyoming.  

Surprise sunrise on August 21

A normal sunrise in Pinedale, Wyoming

Before sunrise, a thick eerie orange cloud foreboded a sun that rose dark orange.  The day and the sun were so dark that at mid-morning I looked directly at the sun without fear of eye injury.  As it happened the pandemic in Pasadena was increasing.  

  

A Lake about half a mile away is clearly seen below me, but the lake below it is hazy with smoke.  

I hiked anyway—defiance maybe, optimism perhaps.  I even carried the heavy pack and camped at Glimpse Lake, where views would be mostly close, and disappointment reduced.  I am called a pessimist sometimes, one who backs out easily.  I would prove them wrong.   

To be the only human at a beautiful setting

my tent set up on a million-dollar lot

to own a lovely lake

a chipmunk came to visit

a woodpecker thumped a tree  

a thousand water striders

slid across the lake

on a film of surface tension

their shadows

on the shallow bottom   

dimples of their feet

in water surface

like Einstein rings

of gravitational lensing 

a leaf of grass explains  

Basement rocks come tumbling down

back to where they started

lifted high only for a time

they crack and break

and may eventually be buried 

Michael Angerman is making a map of nightly locations, as he has done for many of my trips.  Please see  Michael's Map    

Pines and People and Perpetual Longing

A tree divided, still can stand

two selves fight each other

for light and domination

but neither live without the base

from which they parted

Even a young lodgepole pine

can divide against itself

young pines

growing fast and strong

a few remember

but most forget

the ones who brought them here

Trees reach an age when parents die

they go on independently

along their middle-age path

aspen leaves must love the morning

translucent

backlit in their finest view

other times they try the same

but sunlight makes them lovely

Only a few among the myriad aspen leaves see past the present to prophesy October while still in August, to see their coming beauty at end of summer and the fate of all their kind.  Only a few can see ahead.  The others carry on with matters of this present life.

Flowers in focus draw attention

while the out-of-focus get ignored

they are just as lovely

but the camera doesn’t care

The Ancient of days, the Rock, precedes them all, looks over the trees, having known
the millions gone.

The trail continues

but to where?

neither tree nor visitor knows

only the rocks know

the two-billion-year-old rocks

hikers know

they think they know

for they have GPS

and maps and photos. 

Oh yes, the hikers did their research

they pass me going up as I descend

knowing their destination

heavy packs pull them back

up they go to where I’ve been

One lags behind his group

and stops to talk

excuse to his friends for not keeping up

I gladly accept his ruse

were I were in a group like him

I’d use photography for excuse

On he goes

pack too heavy

his feet in shape for city streets

his friends will wait

and I will wish

So many died in this pandemic

this infestation of mountain pine beetles

it kills the old

and the young go on

you can hardly see the ground

for fallen bodies

How we love the far look

beyond the current tragedy

better times surely lie ahead

we survive to get there

hope it is that drives us

onward, ever onward

Michael Angerman is making a map of nightly locations, as he has done for many of my trips.  Please see  Michael's Map 

Intermission

With just a sliver of moon rising in the east, 
I headed west, away from the Wind River Mountains, 
to a less visited and therefore exciting range—the Wyoming Mountains.  

Driving across the broad valley of upper tributaries to the Green River, I ascended the Piedmont up to the Wyoming Range.  Approaching distant woods, I looked forward to some forest therapy.   Here at about 6,000 feet, the lowland was tufted with grasses, herbs with deep roots, sage, miniature woody shrubs mingled with a few late wildflowers.  I say “lowland” because most of this part of Wyoming is above 7,000 feet.  

Hiking alone as I do, far into wilderness, has often brought concern from friends who fear for my safety.  Taking a fall, for example, could leave me injured and unable to return.  I have fallen twice on this trip, once in a swampy thicket, overhung by morning fog; I tripped over branches that snared unsuspecting feet in the dense brush.  And once, while descending a steep grade, I stepped on a patch of small rocks that looked stable but rolled out from under my boot like marbles.  Neither fall caused injury, but they caused me to think more about my feet and less about the beauty for which I came.  Such thoughts have slowed my progress.  If I were in a group, a fall could be just as serious, but seemingly less so because friends would be there, for all the good they could do.   

Aspen trees at high elevation are not the forest of tall, dignified, straight-trunked, white-barked citizens who produce brilliant yellows and oranges in October, as they are at lower elevations.  No, they are stunted, crooked, and dwarfed by hash conditions.  Yet they are not without beauty.  As though pruned and shaped for a purpose into fascinating individual shapes, each tree with personality, divergent from their low, conforming, yet sisterly forest.  They have the strength of old women, quivering light green leaves, blocking out the sun in dappled patterns of shade.  

Very little sound fills the air—an occasional bird chirp or thump of woodpecker, a slight gust of eerie wind, or scurry of squirrel.  As I sat on a rock contemplating the pleasure of silence, something hit me from behind on my left shoulder, I jumped up in shock, and immediately a squirrel bounced to a rock, then stopped on the trail by which I was sitting and stared to me.  He seemed dismayed to see a living stone from which he had taken a leap after using me as a springboard.  In Pasadena I have seen many squirrels, but never has one mistaken me for a stone on which to land for another jump to some quickly planned destination.  I know how these rock hops work from the many creeks I have crossed.  You think, not just about the rock you will jump to, but also the next three or four rock-hops.  This squirrel and I have much in common, and in the few seconds that our eyes met, we seemed to understand.  

They say August is the best month to be here because the bugs are less and the rivers easier to cross.  Open, treeless meadows on rolling land characterize this little-visited range.  I shared it with no one today.  Not that I mind meeting a kindred spirit, but today, as a performing artist, I only performed for a few birds and rodents.  I perform admiration, sometimes with exceptional excitement and compulsion.  The goal of such creative work is ever approachable yet unobtained.

Like the Wind River Mountains, this range displays large stones out of place, as though dropped from the sky by an invisible giant hand.  I bent my head back to look up at the wall of rock, imagining ice towering over me.  It was so incredibly massive the top was lost in the clouds of imagination.  Its sheer size made it seem closer than it was.  It was incredibly beautiful in the sunlight.  Its magnificence, its power. 

Mount McDougall

snow lingers in its shaded nooks

resting layers of rock  

 

Such a privilege seeing friends who have gone missing from my life since March.  They appear as ghosts—images on a screen, almost like dreams, like dancers projected onto a gauze curtain at Disneyland—a false reality.  And with me, not so much as the shadow of a lover.  I hope you are more fortunate.  I miss the companionship that made our species successful, the pleasure we used to thrive on, and by which we came to dominate the world.  A pleasure now sacrificed to fear of a virus and for our lives or other lives.  I came to Wyoming where that fear is much reduced, because the numbers say it should be and because of politics.  I came to the real, the felt, the companionship of trees, the Wyoming Range.  

Michael Angerman is making a map of nightly locations, as he has done for many of my trips.  Please see  Michael's Map