Meditations above the Plains of Abraham

Sunday. 2:30 PM.

Halfway up the ridge I stop and rest. The climb up from the rocky barren valley below, although short, was especially arduous.

Here, at the base of the volcanic cone, the dust and rock is still loose. No plants have yet taken to begin turning it into soil. My feet have a trouble finding a footing. One loose step would send me sliding down in the scree on the slope. I should be using my trekking poles, which are fastened to my day pack, but for some reason I felt like going without them so far.

I am barely at 5000 feet above sea level, but it feels purely alpine, like a boulder-field far above tree line. Or it feels like being in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The  sun is brilliant in the sky. A smattering of clouds in the distance seem to be right at eye level. Nevertheless I can see the massive hulking snow-streaked crest of Mt. Adams to the east, and the pointy cone of Mt. Hood further in the distance to the south.

There's an old Klickitat legend about these peaks, a jealous love triangle, fighting over the beautiful woman they both desired---the mountain on whose devastated flank I now sit. Helen---a coincidence of history dropped that name into all that old Indian legend. The Indians called this peak Loowit, which is the name of the trail I am on.

The dust around me reminds me other dust I have experienced. I can feel it in my lungs, breathing it as the wind and my feet kick it up into the air.

For ten minutes I sit looking out over the valley, called the Plains of Abraham. In the distance across the valley I can see the wooden sign at the junction of the trails. On the way up from the parking lot, all four miles, I had barely seen a soul. When I got to the junction, several other groups arrived almost simultaneously. A pair of young women asked me which way I had come, and what the prettiest trail was. I told them to go back the way I had just come, which I they did. I was not in the mood for company on the trail today.

Not another person in sight from where I sat. Then finally I see a couple figures approaching, tiny in the distance, unidentifiable, picking their way across the boulders on the valley floor. I decide it is time to keep moving up through the scree and dust, before they get any closer.