The Earth is a still, and granite the froth boiled out of its depths. That granite is buoyant. It skitters before the wind, almost, riding the mantle’s currents, bumping up against other flakes of granite and suturing itself together into continents.
The rock of Mount Eddy is heavier stuff. A cubic mile of peridotite, flesh of the mantle welded to the continent when a chain of islands rode up onto the North American Plate to become the Klamath Mountains, Mount Eddy seems top heavy up here above the crustal rocks, an ocean-going anvil on a bamboo raft. I wonder, as I lie shivering in my sleeping bag, what manner of nudge would suffice to flip this whole county upside down.
It has been some time since I have seen this many stars.
That peridotite was cloaked in ice not long ago, a mere 12,000 years or so. The ice flowed down the Deadfall Creek drainage, plucking rocks from the face of the mountain and moving them downhill. Where the glacier ended, rocks accumulated in moraines. It is a topography familiar to Californians: the Deadfall glacier melted back in stages, leaving behind a chain of lakes separated by morainal dams. They are called “paternoster lakes”: a rosary chain of holes carved out by Pleistocene ice, strung together on a meltwater braid. When it laid down the lateral moraine pressing into my back, the Deadfall glacier was downright petite: half a mile long, a quarter across. Perhaps two hundred feet deep.
A snowfield at the head of this little valley shines in starlight. It is June and unmelted snow remains, and shines in starlight. Two weeks ago the pass was blocked by a head-high drift. It had melted back clean to the verge when we drove past it. There is no moon and the sky is black, and yet the stars burn bright enough to bathe the mountainsides in light. Starlight limns the snow under the firs, behind the ridges where the big star cannot yet reach to melt it by day.
There is light enough to walk, and so when I must get up — as well-hydrated hikers often do — I walk in darkness. It is cold and the bag beckons, but I walk when I am done to the edge of our lateral moraine, look down toward the lake. It is bottomless. There is no wind to rake its surface, and stars blaze up from it.
At three the moon rises over the summit ridge. It drives a wind before it and we shiver in our bags.
Day comes and coffee, and we rouse ourselves slowly to the summit. I have known Matthew for 25 years and he has known me just as long, and we divide the tasks of our hikes near-instinctively, without discussion: I complain going uphill, and he complains going down. There is little of that routine here aside from my calling halts to catch my breath. Less than 24 hours at altitude and this trail climbs 2,000 feet in a mile and a half. We take turns carrying the 20-pound daypack. I observe that I don’t feel up to making the summit, and then we make the summit.
We make the summit. It starts to rain and we descend.
We second-guess the sky. We lose. It rains on and off for the rest of the day, a bit of drizzle at a time, and then an hour before sunset the high overcast descends, fills the valley with mist. Darkness gathers and we watch the mist. Red rock walls across the lake, spare groves of sparse trees on them in the dim cold fog, and we in equipoise between the beckoning down and sublime, uncaring murk.
Thank you, Chris.
I hope you re-open your blog, eventually. It’s been a good place to rest for me.
Sravana
What happened to cause you to close? (As usual, I’m a little slow on the uptake.)
Were the frogs still there?