We stopped first at Lava Beds to explore the lava tubes and chimneys.  It was my third trip to Lava Beds as an adult, but I had been several times as a Boy Scout too.  Every time I go, the same caves seem different.  There are so many that they all, in retrospect, seem to combine into one long labyrinth.

On the way to Bend, we spend a few days in the mountains of Southern Oregon (see writing at the end).  The state seems on fire.  Smoke all around us.  Our intended route is closed because of them.  The sun is orange even in early afternoon.  From our campsite in the shadow of Bachelor Butte we see a retardant tanker make pass after pass at a fire on the western side of the Casdade crest.  We hike through the thin Lodgepole Pine forests, and the dog delights in the abundance of lakes and creeks.

Again, my memory is thin.  My family camped here many times when I was a child, but it all seems very different.

We make a big push for Canada, stopping at Spokane for the night.  At the border crossing we are courteously given the Third Degree.  Fair enough, I suppose.  We try very hard to remind ourselves that we are in another country, that we are not just in another US state.  We try to start thinking in kilometers and about ending all interogatory questions with “Ay?”.

We worked our way north through southern Canada.  I was surprised at how lush and green it was.  I was expecting something like Alaska, where the short growing season means that vegetation, especially trees, is more sparse.  Instead, it was like Oregon on steriods.

Canadian rivers are more damned (oops) than the US.  The dams step one after another up their drainages, the slackwater of one practically at the foot of the next.  Canada is also more ruthless and shameless in their logging.  It’s bad in eastern British Columbia, but nothing like what we saw on Vancouver Island, later in the trip.  There’s no pretense on Vancouver Island about staggering the clearcuts, they just started at the bottoms of the valleys and shore them like sheep up to the crests.  The island is one great tree farm, with the oldest second growth along the roads and new clearcuts at the crests.

The Canadian parks are wonderful, however.  We made our way to the Canadian Glacier Provincial Park.  Here were mountains that could only be carved with huge glaciers.  There are nothing like them in the US outside of Alaska.  The pure relief of the topography is staggering (if you are lucky enough to be there on a clear day) and they are capped by the remnants of glaciers (pronounced gla-see-airs).  Of course these “remnants” are bigger than any glaciers in the US.

“Encroiable!” I shouted, in honor of the Qubecois.  The dog looked up, alarmed.  Amy looked over and made that “what a dork” face.  “Mag-nif-eeek!” I shouted in response.

One day I hiked up a trail 4.5 kilometers with a elevation gain of 1500 meters.  I got to the edge of the glacier and sat down amazed at what my body will still do when I ask it to.  A squall moved in and I went from shorts and a tshirt to full waterproofs, fleece, a stocking cap and gloves in a matter of minutes.  I was snowed on by icy pellets.  Ten minutes laters it had blown by and the sun was on my again.

I would have liked to stay a week, but we had more country to see.  We pushed west on the Trans-Canadian highway for the coast.  The middle part of BC is suprisingly dry.  I guess the coastal ranges shadow out the rain.

And sagebrush!  Small, yes, and a bit thin, but sagebrush nonetheless.  We stopped and I went over to smell some just to be sure.  If you had told me there was sagebrush in Canada, I would have said Bah!  I looked north, wondering just how for north it grew.  We must be at about the 55th parallel.  Maybe I’ll find out next year.

We skirted the sprawl of Vancouver City, and took a ferry across to the Sunshine Coast.  Another rain catching range on Vancouver Island creates a relative rainshadow there.  Relative because I’m sure they still get drizzly drench for the majority of the year.  But true to its name, there seemed a constant sunny opening above it in the mostly cloudy skies.

We hiked and sea kayaked and the dog had good days and bad days.  Spiteful at being left for a few hours in the truck camper one afternoon, it went psycho and tore down the curtains and screens on the camper door.  Grrrrrr.  Doggie take-down time.  Woulda had her sleep in the dog house that night, if such a thing existed at our campground.  On good days the dog delighted in the lush forests and sandy beaches.

We saw our first tidal rapid.  Tidal rapids occur when you have a big collection of inlets and fjords that are fed from the sea through a constricted channel.  When the tide rises or falls, all the water to fill or drain the inland water basins rushes through the tight opening.  It's just like a huge river that breathes in and out.  The rapid we saw (Sechelt Tidal Rapid) looks like a medium sized rapid on the Colorado River in Grand Canyon.  I estimated its flow to be about 100,000 cfs – a huge amount of water -- much bigger than the Grand Canyon has flowed in over half a century.  Of course in rapids there are standing waves, and this rapid was no exception.  So you get a tidal wave.  How this term might have been twisted to refer to a tsunami, I don’t know.  There was a group of whitewater kayakers who had brought their rodeo boats from some far river and carred them several miles down the trail to surf one of the waves.  It was perfect for kayak surfing, and they took turns going for a ride as the wave swelled larger and larger with the rising tide.

We hopped a few more ferries over to Vancouver Island for more hiking and sea kayaking.  It looks like the winters are wet, then drizzly, then foggy, then drizzly rain through the fog.  Wonderful and green in the summer, but ohahgoooahoo it must be damp and chilly in the winter.  Even worse than the Oregon of my boyhood.  There is most assuradly no sagebrush on Vancouver Island.

I’ve got some pictures, but probably won’t have a chance to get them posted before my Grand Canyon trip.
 

If No One is There to Hear It.

On a mountain on the western edge of the Great Basin in Oregon is a forgotten corner of the West.  Well of course the loggers remember it.  Their jake brakes rattle and echo off the lodgepoles and ponderosas starting at 4 AM.  And the ranchers too, know of this place.  The clearcuts make for cool summer patstures.  The cows stare stupidly from the middle of the road.  The tires catch and spatter fresh pies.  Just over the border in California, selective logging is practiced:  at least half the trees are left to continue growing in a much-thinned forest. In Oregon, the old school must still prevail, and clearcuts are the rule.   To the rest of us this mountain is a blank spot on the map.

We camp in a meadow with a creek meandering through.  The cows are absent here, for one reason or another, and it is a paradise.  High summer soars smoky and warm.  Crotch high grasses grow in the hummocky soil.  Wild onions and white lace and thick-speared meadow grasses.  It is verdant and lush.  Every step is delight, is elation, is nirvana.  The dog bounds and laughs and knows life is short, that such afternoons are few and should be celebrated.  The water is cool and clear.  The light is golden and shimmering.  The bugs are mostly gone for the season. If you cannot find a reason to smile here then you are dark and damned.

There is an old wilderness above us, one of the originals.  The next day we walk up a mountainside under old-growth.  There are meadows of pennyroyal, and the dog’s investigations send the scent sharp and sweet on a warming breeze.  Other meadows throng with wild sunflower and lupine and pink.
White flox and crowded congregations of peach columbines in the understory.  Springs gush from the steep slope and feed wet fields of skunk cabbage and moss and watercress.  I refill my water bottle from the sources and they taste chilled and harmonious. Cliffs top the mountain, not volcanic, but metamophosed sedimentary layers plastered with phophorecent yellow lichen.  The trees smell of vanilla and butterscotch and Christmas pitch on your hands.  Logs look torn by bears and the sky smoky from distant fires.  High above the treeline on the rocky ridges I find sagebrush, my old friend, under flagged and stunted shrubs.  We lunch and nap and descend.

There is a fire lookout at the edge of the wilderness, unused now, and weathering away.  We circle under the rock outcropping on which it sits and find our nervous way up creaking and crumbling wooden steps to the base of the tower.  Clouds are moving in from the west.  I study the network of conductors that would feed the current from a lightening strike: rods down all four corners and a crossing X under the tower building and one tail dipping into the big diesel tank halfway up the tower.  My mind tells me it is all grounded but I can still smell the diesel and all I can think of is trying to sleep on a stormy night up in the tower with 200 gallons of diesel wired to Thor’s own dynamo plunger.

The trap door to the top of the tower is locked.  I descend the steps to the flat supporting rock.  The dog is hot and panting.  I hear a pop in woods below, like a sledgehammer on plywood.  The dog stops.  What the heck?  It’s not gunfire.  Then a tearing sound, like a bear rending an outhouse.  I step and look and see nothing down the on the steep slop below.  Silence, zen-like.  No wind.  Obscured sun.  Humidity rising.  Storm coming.  Hair stands up on the back of my neck.

Then the landscape shifts and I am disoriented for a moment.  One tree separates from the rest and there is a great groaning and shredding.  I do quick reckonings of distance and height and time and do not run.  The tree is falling upslope toward me.  A big old snag sitting dead 20 or 30 years through snow and wind and wet molding rain.  A final termite bite following many uncounted nibbles.  Like a thousand lies subvert justice and truth after a long perseverance.  Something gives and the forest sighs and lets go one of its own.  The tree seems lifted and thrown.  In a great whoosh and crash its weathered spine is snapped into three great lengths.  The dog barks threateningly at the catastrophe below.  Brittle limbs are ejected and rain about the pine litter.  The impact echos off trunks and needles and rocks.  A lower section starts a slow wheel down mountain, steamrolling its own adolescent offspring.  Before it gets up a spin it is stopped dead by large and stout cousin.  The living tree hums from the energy of the dead tree’s final gasp.

Then silence again.  Then the first thunder.  A rumbled warning to get thee down from high places.  Everything in its proper procession.  Five minutes earlier we had crossed in the shadow of the now fallen tree.  Our passing.  Its passing.  A storm comes to pass.  It moves on quick brown fox legs.  More thunder, louder and closer, but no ground strikes.  The dog needs coaxing down the rotten steps.  Before we are far from the base of the rocks a light rain is falling.  The sharp rattling in the sky sounds like the final breaking of the ancient trunk, and the echos like hollow rotten logs, one on another.

We follow our own gravity down through the recovering clearcuts.  I do not bother with protection from the rain, and the dog is oblivious to everything which cannot be chased or smelled.  The rain feels cool and cleansing on my salty limbs, and it somehow quiets the sky in its white hissing.  Dusk approaches us through the thin forest, staining the clouds and quieting the light too.