I got to the Marblemount ranger station an hour before it opened, at 6, one other guy in a van with long hair, bearded, already there. They had a Please Take A Number stand and an LED display showing number 18. For some reason I was 36. The sign at the entrance to town said Welcome to Marblemount, Entrance to the American Alps. Another sign said Ultra MAGA country. Yet another, TRUMP WAS RIGHT. There were still wisps of low-lying fog about. The fog started in Oso, that sad town where they had the mud slide years back and many died. It was a Saturday morning and most people were home sleeping when the mud came through. They never should have built homes right there. The fog was so wispy and ghostlike it looked fake, like the cobwebs you can buy at Halloween or like a fog machine or dry ice. Each time I came to the North Cascades it was a journey into the past, reaching back to the time I worked out here for a couple weeks doing salmon research with some scientists. One was named Correigh Greene and we became friends. Correigh was part Native American and Irish, more the former. That didn’t add up well for him with alcohol. He turned bright red, literally glowed when he drank. But Correigh knew a lot about the rich history of the local tribes, the Sauk and Suiattle, and we explored the Upper Skagit River systems standing in water all day with our wetsuits, carrying expensive, heavy, government-funded equipment for measuring stream pebbles and water flow rates. Can’t imagine the current administration would fund something like that.

That summer I lived in the town of Darrington for a bit, one of the few towns you pass through heading to the North Cascades. It’s one of those places you hope would be cute but it’s not. One of the first store fronts you see just says Tobacco and Fuel. It’s that kind of place. A church here and there, the obligatory cannabis shop. Then the massive logging operations with a lumber yard right next door.

There is Whitehorse mountain too, a mountain I tried to climb that summer but had no business being up there. It’s got a glacier and I was alone and under equipped. But I was new to mountaineering and thought I could do a lot more than I could. That’s the funny tension with outdoor sports like this. You never know unless you try, and there were few things I did I regretted, if any at all.

I watched all the others in the parking lot coming to take a ticket after me and wondered if any were headed where I was. The Sahale Arm and Boston Basin area were one of the most popular in the area. Brad had waxed on about climbing there in the 90s, climbing some of the harder peaks like Shuksan or Mt. Formidable, places I’d likely never go. I owned Fred Beckey’s Climbing Guides, sparsely illustrated, loosely defined guides (“take the obvious ridge”) but that’s as close as I got to many of these more challenging climbs. Still the mountains called to me, through the morning fog, getting clearer as the sun inched its way higher.

The way it works with the backcountry permitting system is they reserve a few spots for walk-up hikers last minute. The rest are booked months in advance. So it was a crap shoot if I’d get a permit and that made planning difficult. I didn’t really know where I’d be going or for how long. But I brought enough supplies to last me three nights. I didn’t want to leave our cat Timmy that long anyway. And part of me liked the idea of coming home to a bath and a night out by myself for a good burger. I was always a bit ahead of myself, on to the next thing before the first one had even started.

I sat in the car eating cold leftover pasta and writing on my phone. The guy in the van next to me was taking long, thick tokes on something and I tried not to stare. It sounded like someone was moving in the back of the van too. The van was a Ram 2500 and it looked like you could live out of it. He probably did. He had a laptop set up and was flipping between that and his phone, looked pretty dialed in. You get no cell reception though in this whole area, that’s the other thing. I had my backcountry sat phone for SOS only.

It’s hard to believe I used to get high while doing this kind of thing. I passed the diner near Arlington and recalled getting high before going in there around 5 in the morning that first time I came out for a multi-day loop and got so spooked by bear scat I almost aborted the first night. There was a party of hunters on horses, a family, with rifles I’d passed on the trail who said something about the golden bear at the camp where I was staying. The bear turned cinnamon colored or golden from sunning themselves I later learned. And for that they could easily be confused as Grizzlies.

When the station finally opened there were maybe thirty people standing around waiting for their number to be called. The longhair in the van next to me was 35, right before me. I guess he’d gotten there even earlier than 6. It’s good to have goals.

When my number was called the ranger asked where I was headed and said I’m sorry but all of Cascade Pass is booked. There was nothing in that area. I asked for a recommendation and he said Monogram Lake, and pointed to it on a map. It was only like five miles in. I asked some more questions and realized he had a stammer and then I stammered a bit myself and he looked at me funny like maybe I was mocking him but I wasn’t, I’m just an empath I wanted to say.

Not knowing really anything about the route or the lake or how to get there and not getting any kind of cell reception to download a map or read trail reports I had a moment of feeling pretty sorry for myself but then quickly snapped out of it and tried to enjoy what I could: not having to work, having all this time to myself in the outdoors, going somewhere new.

At the trailhead I reassessed my gear, scaling back some things (like the ice ax, glacier goggles, bivy sack). There was a little container I used to carry weed in that now I used for my vitamin gummies and fish oil tablets. Oddly the gummies and fish oil had congealed into a glob and the fish oil looked strange like it was pulsing. So I bit into it and it shot fish oil all down my hand and wrist. And immediately I realized how fatal a mistake that was because now I too would smell like fish oil. In bear country. I smelled my hand and not surprisingly it smelled just like fish oil. I wiped it on the moss of a nearby tree but that smell wasn’t going anywhere! For some reason out of all of our cars I’d taken the one with zero hand sanitizer in it. I would just have to deal.

The trail went straight up, almost comic book fashion. But there was nothing comic about it, it sucked. No views, just up and up. I tried to remember if the ranger had recommended it to me before or after I’d stammered.

Hours later I popped out of the forest at last, surrounded by alpine meadows and peaks, slanted valleys. The higher I got the better it looked. I giggled and shouted, it was just what I came for. Rounding a bend it opened again to jagged, snow-covered peaks and pure silence. Just the sound of some benevolent-looking bees sucking the salt off my sleeves.

I would not dare whip out my phone for a selfie or pano. This moment was for me and me only, just for a moment.

Not long after I came upon two hikers, a teenage boy and his dad. They’d tried for Sahale Arm like me but got redirected here and loved it. The dad said you could scramble up to that ridge and the whole place opens up, and I debated doing that at sunset or early in the morning. He also said they’d heard from another party about seeing a sow and her cub, “just throwing that out there,” he said.

When I got to camp and put up my tent I started to get dizzy, like almost pass-out dizzy to where I had to quickly sit down a couple times. And then I thought better of going for an afternoon dip in the lake and figured I should just rehydrate, eat and rest instead. I got naked and hung my wet clothes on a big rock in the sun, stumbled into my tent, glad to see the nasty-looking, stinging bee was trapped between the rain fly and tent dome vs. inside, with naked me.

I tended to my bites: one on the shoulder where my pack straps was was really swollen and two-headed. Knowing it was there now would make it hard to ignore the next time I threw on my pack. Then there was the deer fly bite on my knuckle that was cold and raised, ominous: and I could picture that little fucker staring at me, the one who did it back there where the forest first opened into the meadows.

I’d tried to stop for water at every water source but most were swarmed with bugs, horrific, Hitchcock-style, and not for lingering. At times the trail was so steep it dropped all pretenses of switchbacks and just went straight up. It was truly one of the most unlikable trails I’d ever taken, but the payoff made it all worthwhile.

I’d drunk a massive amount of water but still hadn’t peed since I couldn’t remember when. I liked the fact my calves were caked in mud. It made me feel savage, more real. I did not like the way parts of my body felt though, the harder-to-clean parts that kind of festered in my body heat and sweat.

The whole way going up I’d been reminded of the fish oil incident each time I paused to catch my breath which was often, like a hundred times or more, and each time I was surprised to learn the smell was coming from me, that fishy, fish oil smell. It was a smell I could not unsmell, kind of like the sea but without the views or the beach or any of the good parts. And with what I’d heard about bears and their keen sense of smell there would be no hiding that. In fact right as it happened somewhere, maybe a hundred miles off in the distance, a bear probably snapped its head up in my direction and sniffed, then ambled closer with its snout. And now there was just me and Neil Young on my phone for the night and that smell, a different kind of fish. Add my name to the guest log for the night friends, I’ve arrived.

Posted from Monogram Lake, North Cascades 14:45 July-something and dedicated to my lovely wife Dawn, reading from Besigheim, Germany.

I got a signal!

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, humor, pacific northwest, prose