Flying high in the Issaquah Alps

By Bill Pearse on February 21, 2026 • ( 0 )

On Saturday I got up early for a long hike on Tiger Mountain, the Issaquah Alps. There was a wind advisory starting at 10:00, light snow in the lowlands, and in the driveway in the dark it felt wild in our quiet neighborhood, a sound like someone beating two sticks together in the distance almost musical, probably just wind chimes. Plus the scent of clove on the air from the mole scram repellent I’d put down the day before.

I’d drive to the trailhead and sit in the car in the dark with the engine running and the car stereo playing, finishing my coffee, eating leftover pizza or Pop-Tarts. Driving across the plateau at that time of day it was just the neon glow from the local business signs and the traffic lights but no one out yet. I got all greens on my way to the interstate. The mountains are so close it’s just one exit off the freeway; by the time you get to cruising speed it’s time to get off. I loved sitting in the dark in my car with Alice Coltrane playing, knowing how wild and peculiar it was about to get, walking across that abandoned homeless encampment at the base of the mountain by the freeway, crossing a little stream, twisting up the pathway into the dark of the forest. I would be out all morning in it. Even better with a storm blowing in.

After you turned the car off the headlights stayed on for a few minutes, lighting the scene by the trailhead: some temporary iron fencing between the shoulder and the freeway, broken and curling in places, giving it a refugee camp vibe. A modest wooden cross tied together with twine staked in the ground, a makeshift grave or shrine. Tall trees swaying in the wind. There were others out early too, and the headlamps caught them squinting as they passed with their poles and coffees, reminding me of a scene from the film Halloween where the mental hospital patients have all escaped in their white gowns and are running across the road amuck. That was us too, breaking out of the psych ward: escapees.

Today I planned the longest route I’d ever done, the one I’d planned to do last weekend but got distracted by the AA meeting and did that instead. I’d taken a wrong turn and wanted to go back and find the place I’d gone adrift so I could correct it. I was always going back, trying to fix things.

The tops of the hills were often dusted with fresh snow or shrouded in fog and the peaks were so close to our house I could make out some of the detail toward the very top, the radio towers and thin patches of trees, and imagine myself up there, picking about.

It was like those band photos of Joy Division when they were so young and just getting started, winter of ‘79, how stark everything looked with them in their trench coats smoking, all black and white, looking out over the landscape. There was nothing light or fickle about them, it was all life and death. That brought an urgency to their music I identified with as a young man away from home for the first time, out on my own. The winters in the northwest of Pennsylvania were dark and cold too. The band were northwesterners (Salford, Manchester) just like I was in PA, and now again in Washington state.

There was an owl making a funny sound as I climbed the trail. Not a hoot but more like a beacon beeping in the dark. It went on such a measured cadence it was like a pendulum on an old clock swinging, needing grease.

The trail names I’d never been on before all sounded exotic though it was more or less the same. Each section had its unique qualities with slight variations.

There was a place I’d misread the signs and gone left when I should have gone right. The trail was like a knot and I was never good with knots. Two runners passed with their headlamps and I averted my eyes to preserve my night vision, just heard the one greeting me and the other asking his partner in a more timid voice, have you ever read much Taoism? Voice number two just barked No, tell me about it. West coast living.

Going up the trails, zig zagging the braided turns, was like going back in the past, all the times I’d been here before and the associations, all blurred together. I loved the look of it all, especially the sword ferns which made it feel prehistoric, the mushrooms jutting out of the sides of the moss-covered trees, stuck there like Chinese throwing stars. A set of two could look like a pair of puffy lips. The birdsong and waterfall sounds, the breeze through the trees was all so good: but I got my phone out and put on an old bootleg recording of the post punk band The Fall playing live, 1983. It sounded like hell, and perfect.

Ruth’s Cove, first sign of snow. Scattered like confectioners sugar on the ferns and muddy trail. The Fall videocassette an old girlfriend gave me one Christmas but we never watched it together. In truth they were loathsome, the music not so great but to me it was perfect, like it activated some loathsome part of myself too that wanted to be something more. It wanted to be just like Mark E. Smith from The Fall. They were not great talent-wise but that’s what gave me hope with my writing: if you cared enough about the art and prioritized that, you could still succeed on some level. Maybe not in a commercial sense but one that was more important.

When I broke through the forest there was more snow dusted over everything and with the light what it was, muted and gray, it felt like I was in a black and white photo myself, just like one of those old Joy Division posters I had in college. A view of the ridgeline at the top, the radio tower and forest roads with their iron gates, all of it giving a queer industrial vibe.

Not surprisingly as I got closer to the summit the wind got increasingly strong and loud, so loud it drowned out The Fall (drowned out The Fall!) and the patches of sky between the trees got bigger and more expansive like it does near the ocean. A storm was coming in but not expected for a couple hours so I thought it would be cool to watch it gathering in the distance from the summit. And the mountains looked so sharp and clear, though moody and dark with the deep violet hues, the gray and black, it was just like a scene out of a painting we had in our bedroom of somewhere in Alaska, the colors were the same.

I hadn’t brought my micro spikes or gaiters though, and could have used them. Funny what assumptions you make in life, these little choices that lead to big outcomes.

But of course I’d been on this trail before I realized, I’d just come from the opposite direction. Those memories were so buried they were in the way-back when I no doubt would have been getting high. I always did when I hiked, because that made it so much better. And seeing the mountain for the first time, trudging through some storm all alone and stoned in what felt like the middle of nowhere I would have feared for my life. It all would have looked different then. Now here I was on the other side of it several years older, a bit wiser, still a fool. Like my old Cajun friend said, those way-back memories were all stored in a different filing system, hard to access.

On the other side of the mountain the wind died down and the snow was falling gently and for hours it seemed I meandered through the forest amid mud, fern and snow. Some of the tree mushrooms were so big and puffy they looked like crooked teeth coming out of the jaws of some deep water creature. Or like roasted campfire marshmallows, with that alternating white caramel coloring.

My memories of these scenes being here were hazy but somehow my therapist had gotten a call through to me then and left a voice message, accusing me in a passive aggressive way of missing an appointment she thought we had. Which is funny because the actual appointments we agreed upon she was often missing herself, refusing to use electronic calendars and instead her diary. After missing a few of my appointments I got frustrated and called things off with her via text. She tried to engage me, did that make you feel angry? But I didn’t respond. Which felt sad as we’d known each other for years; she was like a mom to me in some ways being about the same age and caring for me in a loving way. She was just bad with calendars. Helped me get sober though, I often thanked her for that.

Sometimes the trees squeaked in the wind or shrieked like banshees. You could see how the indigenous people would develop strong imaginations.

Farther down the mountain the snow thinned out and turned to a soft sleet. It was like the color got turned back on again, no more black and white. You could see the faint red from the fallen cedar fronds in the soil, tannin colored. All the shades of green, lots of lemon-lime.

What pizza was left in my car would still be cold. My coffee tasted the way I remembered cigars. Back home and out of my wet clothes, I would take the hottest bath of my life. And with the pitter patter of the rain, the afternoon gray and the muffled sounds of the Olympics downstairs, the washing machine churning, it was the perfect soundtrack for a nap. The rain was the sound of static or a rhythmic wood fire crackling and the trees squeaked in the wind. For as good as it was out there there was no better place than here.