For the Love of an Orange Soda

At the top of the ridge, the wind from the north hits you hard. Windy Gap---it's evident how it earned its name. It's also evident that the barren valley I was just leaving, the Garden of the Volcanoes, had been on the sheltered and calm side of the ridge.

The trail down in the other side is in close switchbacks, visible like a ladder as you look down. But the trail is well-defined. There are no places where one must scramble down the scree, as I did on the way up.

At the bottom I find myself in a narrow gulley. The contours of the pyroclastic flow are deepened by the shallower runs of a water stream from the melting glaciers. The trail takes me over the gulley on to the swell of one of the remnants of the flow. From there one can see the terrain the north, the big spill of ash and rock left over from the explosion, and at the times the great snowy crown of Mount Rainier.

After thirty-three springs there is still little grass and sporadic blossoms. I project in my mind forward in the decades. At one point does it become a prairie again, or an evergreen forest? In some decade the barren flows will become a quick memory.

The trail descends into another shallow glacier gully. Here I must pick my way over little mesas of rock, leaping from one to another. At some point I lose the trail and begin descending the gully, which seems the route to follow. It reminds me of Death Valley---the barren washes that one can ascend from the valley floor. Only later do I learn that I missed the trail on the other side. But I don't care, as I know the gully will take me down to the main trail that leads back to the parking lot.

When I'm in sight of the main trail again, I turn and look up at the north face of the mountain, at the massive Breach, as it is called, that ruined the Fuji-like symmetry of the cone before the eruption. But now the mountain is more interesting. By itself it looks like a jagged ridge from the high Rockies, plucked out from among the peaks and established as a free-standing monument above the green hills of the Cascades.

As I head back towards the parking lot, along the easy incline of the old logging road, now given over to hikers, all I can think about is the Aranciata soda in the back seat of my car. I won't care if it's warm when I get there. It will taste so good. And then I will want to go get something to eat, at some little place along the road home, maybe a cheeseburger at a convenience store in the little town Cougar, where the road comes out of the forest into civilization again. I'll want to talk to people again. It will be pleasant to do so.