Eugenious

Mom ate matchsticks when she was pregnant with me. I’ve had a serious urge to chew piece after piece of Xylichew spearmint gum; it’s so fresh-tasting it’s like picking mint leaves from the backyard up on the farm where I grew up. Brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine spearmint toothpaste is also a treat these days. And I want to smell asphalt. I’ve actually detoured onto Ferry Street so I can walk past the utility construction and smell the fresh asphalt. Before I scare any of the grandparents with thoughts of a brain-damaged baby, I don’t actually kneel down and inhale the fumes — I just appreciate them on my way through.

Yesterday, my employer chipped up some toppled trees and branches from his patch of Oregon forest. He likes the pattern of the lowest understory, the 5-12 inch non-woody plants, so he clears out some woody debris each year to make room for those small plants. I wanted to eat the resulting heady mixture of wood chips, hemlock and fir needles, lichen, and other forest detritus. I picked up a handful and slid it into my sandwich container so it could come home with me.

And even before my surreptitious wood chip-sniffing, I experienced another spring pleasure — a Swainson’s thrush (I think) calling in the treetops. Thrush songs stop me in my tracks; they’re so beautiful and clear and flutelike.

Finally, there’s a family of western screech owls living in a birch tree between our “broken house” (that which is being renovated) and our serviceable rental which is delightfully close to Prince Puckler’s Ice Cream (Sylvan and I were home and even awake when Barack got a cone there last Saturday, yet we still missed him. My politician-dar must have been down.). The owls, of which there are at least three — and possibly four — peek out of the holes in a tree between Harris and Potter on West 21st Avenue. The tree is, for you locals, the westernmost birch of the three mature ones on the south side of the street. The owls are remarkably well-camouflaged on the gray, aging birch. I bet the folks in that neighborhood don’t have any mouse problems.

This morning, I walked down the path to my office in the woods, admiring the new carpet of green wood sorrel and duckfoot that’s emerged in the last month. Then, with the morning sun behind me, the sorrel at my feet glinted. I crouched down to peer more closely. Wood sorrel’s leaves are shaped like perfect hearts bent down the middle, just like the heart that a four-year-old cuts from construction paper, its fold line still intact. The leaves attach at the hearts’ points in clusters of three. For a few square feet this morning, last night’s dew had collected at the end of each fold line, tucked right in the cranny between the curves of each heart. Each wood sorrel plant held three perfect spheres of moisture, holding the morning’s light for a few moments.

As Sylvan and I biked to the library this morning, I considered my appreciation and awe of this amazing time-travel thing we do when we fly in airplanes. Yesterday, at precisely the time I was biking to the library this morning in Eugene, 9:45 a.m., I had climbed 1500 feet toward the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I’d started at a campsite on Horseshoe Mesa, and, in another 1000 feet, I’d reach the rim.

Two and a half weeks ago, I was given the opportunity to take a Leave No Trace Master Educator Course in the Grand Canyon. Although already an LNT Master (not to be confused with my position as the Master of Science), I’d like to instruct these courses, which are typically five days long, plus a couple of contract days before and after for planning and wrapping up — an ideal length for a Mom. In order to instruct these courses, NOLS instructors typically take one in order to see how it’s run. A position opened up on this course a couple of weeks ago, and I got a chance to see the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon surprised me with its narrow width. I’d envisioned a web of canyons, but the Grand Canyon is, of course, simply the Colorado River’s valley with some impressively eroded side channels running up to the rims. It’s only 12 miles across from the North to the South Rim. That doesn’t make it any less impressive when you come upon it and peer in, but it does make it a little more manageable. I felt like I could have easily made it down to the river and back in two days. I like how walking gives me that feeling of power, that I’d be able to walk down to the mythical Colorado River in just a day.

If you’ve hiked in the Grand Canyon, you’re familiar with trails in improbable locations, like hanging from the side of cliffs. The Park actually has a Trails Historian who, among other things, makes sure that trail maintenance is performed with materials and in a manner similar to those used during the trail’s construction — or at least during its maintenance in the past 200 years. Some Grand Canyon trails may have their origins thousands of years ago, when hunter-gathering cultures lived in the area that’s now Grand Canyon National Park.

We did some minor spelunking in the Cave of the Domes, in the Redwall limestone layer underneath Horseshoe Mesa. I took this photo looking toward the bright sunlight from within the cave’s lobby. Just minutes before, Air Force One had flown over; I don’t know any other aircraft with such an entourage.

The Grand Canyon’s human history extends back 10,000 years, and there’s plenty of evidence of the humans who have lived and worked there for the past 500 years. This cave dwelling is down in Cottonwood Canyon, on the west side of Horseshoe Mesa.

Horseshoe Mesa was a copper-mining hotbed in the late 1800s, at least until the realization was reached that getting ore, even remarkably high-grade ore, out of the Grand Canyon and then to any sort of population center was not cost-effective. Following are photographs of the remnants of that copper industry.

Stone cabin on Horseshoe Mesa, with Horseshoe Mesa Butte behind. The miner Pete Berry’s cabin?

Copper ore. Maybe azurite (blue) and malachite (green). What am I, a geologist?

Wheelbarrow left to stay until it rusts away, near Page Spring.

And, if you were wondering, yes, I could quite possibly have the best husband around, one who not only understands what makes his wife tick (getting away to hike) but works hard to keep her ticking merrily away. This was my last view of the boys when they dropped me off at the airport last week.

Diamond Peak has beckoned since I arrived in Oregon. An unlikely-looking volcano, resembling a slumbering beast with its improbably long ridgeline stretching for over a mile from north to south, you can see Diamond Peak, whenever it’s not obscured by clouds, along Highway 58 from Oakridge past Willamette Pass, cloaked in snow two-thirds of the year. In my quest to climb some Cascades this summer, our friend, Larry, and I picked up some biodiesel and espresso at America’s best filling station and hit the road yesterday. Larry, with his generosity, big grin, penchant for adventure, and supply of stories is darn near a perfect traveling companion. Although he wasn’t present for any of them, Larry tells some detailed, frightening grizzly stories. Ask him about them.

We hiked in on trails 3699 and 3632 from a gravel Forest Service road on the mountain’s south side. A crew, which I believe included our friend Chandra, had worked on trail 3632 the previous day, digging drainage ditches and generally making sure the trail didn’t fall off the side of Diamond Rockpile. In a remarkably quick three miles, we reached Marie Lake, where 75 Scrambles in Oregon says to turn uphill through the trees. We did, as Chris and I had done two years ago in May 2005, but Larry and I later found out that this is not the best climbers’ route, at least not when the ground is snow-free.

Following a ridge uphill, with Diamond Peak hovering to our left, we ran into a trail that wasn’t supposed to be there. Hmm. After looking at the map, we realized that we had headed northeast instead of northwest, which is why Diamond Peak stayed to our left instead of looming ahead of us, so we took the trail northwest, the direction we wanted to head. Soon, we found a tree with a diamond-shaped metal trail marker, so we figured we’d ended up on the Pacific Crest Trail. Since we weren’t on a climbers’ trail and we knew where the PCT headed, we struck off through the trees toward the ridges to the west. In another fifteen minutes, we stumbled upon the darn PCT again as it doubled back on itself around the end of a ridge. We continued west, climbing over small ridges composed of relatively stable toaster oven-sized blocks of gray, angular igneous rocks (andesite?) and passing through shallow drainages full of basalt cinders, rust-red and full of vesicles.

We finally hit the ridge that 75 Scrambles recommends, with more of the same rock-hopping and scree-climbing. At one point, a small, light-colored bird of prey landed on top of a pine across the drainage. When it flew, we could see its square tail; because of its tail, narrow wings, and light color, I’m going to guess it was a juvenile kestrel, even though all the kestrels I’ve ever noticed have been vibrantly colored, easy to identify, and located at an elevation of around 500 feet.

When we left the mountain hemlocks and lodgepole pines behind to climb up a slope of blocks and cinders, a large patch of snow to our left, the wind suddenly blew butterflies against our faces. We stopped to look, and hundreds — no, thousands — of orange butterflies flitted, perched in the lee of rocks, and blew across the ridge, sometimes colliding with us. With a little research, I’ve decided that they were tortoiseshell butterflies, which have population explosions some years. Apparently, it’s not uncommon for the butterflies to make it two vertical miles above the ocean, either. I’ve never before encountered so many butterflies that I could HEAR their wings, even with the wind whistling enough that I feared my hat would fly down 2000 feet to the meadows below.

Larry and I climbed to the false summit, elevation 8421 feet, and lunched in the lee of a constructed rock wall. This is where Chris and I turned around two years ago. The corniced snow along the ridge, coupled with the steep windward slope that we considered walking across, proved too much for my then-pregnant sensibilities. With crampons and an ice axe, it could have been done — but maybe not by us, at least not with a 25-week-old fetus in there. But Larry and I continued on.

The first few hundred feet off the false summit narrowly skirt some bedrock pillars, so I know Chris and I decided wisely. Then the trail climbs easily another 300 feet to the actual summit, where we found a red coffee can trying to protect a broken glass jar stuffed with a full notebook, business cards, and Clif bar wrappers acting as an extended summit register. We enjoyed the panoramic view, including the Three Sisters to the north and Mount Thielsen and Mount Bailey to the south. To the northwest, clouds blanketed the sky at about 8000 feet, just below us. After snapping some photos (see below), we left the summit at 4 p.m.

We hurried down, concerned that our partners would be concerned about us. We passed two parties going up – one couple with a dog and one solo man — near the false summit; it was 4:15. With a skier’s perspective, versus a climber’s perspective, it was easier to see where all trails converged and headed down, and we followed the obvious climbers’ trail, marked with cairns and orange and pink plastic flagging tape — well, now it’s just marked with cairns. It’s a Wilderness Area, folks. Pink flagging tapes dismayed us. My hubby would have been proud (he calls flagging in wilderness “litter” and deals with it accordingly). And, let’s be fair, the trail was VERY obvious. Now here’s why we hadn’t seen it: The trail dumped us on the Pacific Crest Trail, north (yes, toward Canada) of where we’d decided to go cross-country again on the way up. So we hiked out on the PCT to its junction toward Marie Lake, then walked to the car, occasionally berated by stellar jays. We stopped along the gravel road to snap a photo of our mountain where we’d snapped one on the way in — but our mountain was gone! Clouds obscured the summit all the way down to Diamond Rockpile, elevation 5110 feet. We bought some salty chips in Oakridge and headed home, where all of our loved ones were already asleep.

For your amusement: