{"id":3168,"date":"2015-02-04T05:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-02-04T13:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/?p=3168"},"modified":"2018-11-11T21:57:23","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T05:57:23","slug":"place-still-wild-north-cascades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/climb\/place-still-wild-north-cascades","title":{"rendered":"A Place That Is Still Very Wild – The North Cascades"},"content":{"rendered":"

“We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as a source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing and painting, in mountaineering and in just being there.”\u00a0–\u00a0Olaus Murie<\/em><\/p>\n

This started a long way from the North Cascades<\/a>. The sun slanted through big, south-facing windows inside the caf\u00e9 of REI’s administrative campus. It was July, warm. We had just settled into cushy, overstuffed chairs across from each other in a quiet corner, and Matt was going back in his mind, retracing his history in wilderness to its beginning.<\/p>\n

For me, this story had started a month earlier, on a hike to the summit of Mount Persis. Through the stillness and quiet of the tangible fog, hanging out at the back of the group photographing as they climbed through trees and up over snow, I caught a snippet of conversation meant for someone else. Matt was talking about a trip into wilderness that had changed his life. After summiting and celebrating, on the way down I caught up to him long enough to ask about it. The trip, he confided, had been to Whatcom Pass in the far reaches of North Cascades National Park, now over a decade and a half ago. It still held a place within him, as wild as the pass itself. I needed to hear more about his experience, his thoughts on wild places.<\/p>\n

Although he grew up in the Midwest, Matt was no stranger to wilderness, having backpacked throughout the Appalachians of West Virginia, and in Kentucky, learned to climb on the sandstone cliffs of Red River Gorge. Even back then he wanted to get out, explore. \u201cI can remember pretty clear,\u201d Matt explained as I sipped my coffee, drawn into his story as it began to unfold. \u201cI was sitting in a huge auditorium at the University of Cincinnati, in the back, flipping through a Backpacker<\/em> story called \u2018The Back Of Beyond,\u2019 about the North Cascades.\u201d Matt had never heard of them, the North Cascades. He didn’t know where they were, or anything about them, but as he read the article something clicked in his head, and it became somewhere he was going to go.<\/p>\n

Months later, my living room dark after the last lamp on its timer clicked off, the sound of wet streets beyond the window panes, I try to remember my own first experience in the North Cascades. Certainly not as evocative, definitely more embarrassing. I had heard about Mount Baker so, seventeen years ago, as my first summer in Washington waned, I made the trip up to Artist’s Point to explore and photograph. The thing was, I realized months later, I never made it to Artist’s Point. I had stopped short of it, at Picture Lake. Mesmerized by the view across to a spectacular peak, the heather turning shades of crimson and gold, I walked around and fired off some frames of what I assumed was Baker before turning around and heading for home. When I discovered what I had actually photographed was the renowned west face of Mount Shuksan, I felt sheepish. But something, too, clicked about that place in my head, and I knew I had to return. And just like Matt has, I would, again and again and again.<\/p>\n

Returning to his story, Matt told me how he had, from the back of that auditorium in Cincinnati, hatched a scheme to head out west. He ended up visiting the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier. \u201cAll the good stuff,\u201d as he put it. He and his wife-to-be had spent five weeks, and all of their money, without making it to Washington. That would have to wait. Following that trip, he read an Outside<\/em> piece about the least-visited national parks. North Cascades was one of them. The article, Matt recalled, mentioned how \u201ca visitor would be more likely to see a bear than another human.\u201d Something about that, too, resonated with him. \u201cSo the trip the next year became all about coming to Washington.” The two spent a week walking around Mount Rainier along the Wonderland Trail, then a week walking across the Olympics. Then, finally, Matt would see the mountains that had graced the pages shimmering with late-nineties-Velvia color in that issue of Backpacker<\/em>. Driving up the Mount Baker highway, they stopped at the ranger station in the hamlet of Glacier and told the ranger, \u201cWe’ve got eight days, tons of food, massively heavy packs, and we’re willing to suffer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The ranger had the quintessential trip.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe ended up going over Whatcom Pass, coming back down, going up Copper Ridge. It was\u2026.\u201d and here he paused for the first time that morning, while he gathered the words to convey the sheer epicness of the memory\u2014\u201cIt was amazing. It really was. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was amazing. It changed my life.\u201d There it was. That sentiment spoken on the hike through the fog to the summit of Persis, now echoed to me, my coffee long gone. \u201cI can remember the second night,\u201d he shared, \u201cwe were at Tapto Lakes sitting there looking at Whatcom and the sun setting and seeing ice calve off the glacier hanging there and instantly I knew\u2026 it was a really pivotal moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knew, he explained, how everything came together in that \u201cmoment of synchronicity.\u201d How clarity was gained. It was \u201cthe point in your life where you’re like okay, I’m done with grad school because I’m tired of accumulating debt and I don’t want to be in the rat race to try and have a job as a professor somewhere at some point in time, and I really am in love with being outside and being in the wilds, and it’s really important to me. It all made sense.\u201d I relate in my own small way, in my own efforts to balance my career and my family and my passions, for photographing wild places and writing music, building and creating things. Matt was speaking to me that morning in the caf\u00e9, in more ways than he was aware.<\/p>\n

I’ve also been to Whatcom Pass and Tapto Lakes. I, too, have stood alone overlooking the Little Beaver Valley while the gibbous moon rose over Wiley Ridge and the colors of the Challenger Glacier faded from vermilion to violet to pink, then darkness. And I, too, think of sunsets, the \u201celemental half-light\u201d, as Laura and Guy Waterman wrote in Wilderness Ethics<\/em>. Indeed, as Matt felt that pivotal evening, the pageantry of sunrises and sunsets in wild places has been well celebrated by nature writers over the centuries. \u201cThe loneliness,\u201d the Watermans write of it. I feel Matt would understand, regard even, the words of Thomas Mann: Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ever since that moment overlooking the wild, wild Little Beaver and the scene of cascading creeks and glaciers and the setting sun, Matt and his wife Barb have done their best to go to the North Cascades at least once a year. Trips up the Big Beaver, bushwhacking into Luna Cirque. Up the east side out of Hart’s Pass, into the Fisher Creek basin. Up in and around Cascade Pass and the big mountains found there, down even towards Dome Peak. They have two boys now, Nick (seven) and Alex (four). They’re thinking of taking them up Thunder Creek, or maybe Cutthroat Pass. \u201cStarting them young,\u201d as Matt put it. Proper.<\/p>\n

Our conversation slowly shifted from unequivocal trip reports and memories to more esoteric, romantic ideas. Of humanity, and wildness. He started by offering the notion of how, in describing the North Cascades, \u201cit didn’t take long to feel really far away from absolutely everything.\u201d And of how then, \u201cin some instances, it’s like walking\u2014not walking away from civilization, but walking backwards in geologic time.\u201d Being in places that are still very wild. Places that, as he says, \u201cremind us that we are not that advanced\u2026not really that far away from the complete wilds that are still around us.\u201d Connecting with that is a good thing\u2014\u201ca soul-worthy endeavor in a big way,\u201d as Matt put it.<\/p>\n

I was blown away.<\/p>\n

So I asked him about wilderness, what it meant, how it translated in his mind. Our thoughts were echoes of each other, about reconnecting to the wild within, rediscovering a distilled sense devoid of all the clutter and chaos and all of the mechanisms we build up for this modern life we live. As he explained, he spoke more softly and more slowly. \u201cWilderness is a place to understand yourself as a human devoid of all those things. It’s also a place\u201d\u2014he paused longer this time, grasping at the thought\u2014\u201ca place that’s devoid of us.\u201d The catch is, we humans indeed must want it, must as a species consciously choose wild places over developed ones, must recognize not everything of value has worth. \u201cPart of the beauty of having places that exist on their own terms is still wildly important. It reminds us that we’re not masters of the universe, it reminds me who I am aside from any of those other things, whether that be just sitting somewhere looking out into amazing nothingness, having the time to do that,\u201d and here he lowered his voice even further, almost to a whisper, \u201cthe silence to do that.\u201d Again, a pause. \u201cTo remember that the keen sense of human observation is really sharp there, and we lose a lot of that when we’re not in the wilderness. Just a day worth of that is fuel for years of living outside of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a predicament: that we cherish solitude in wild places, but need fellow humans to support and protect them. \u201cOn one hand, I love the fact almost nobody knows about the North Cascades,\u201d Matt confessed. \u201cBut on the other hand, people need to know about it. They need to go there, and it needs to have an element of human connection, because wilderness and humans are intimately connected no matter how you want to slice it.\u201d He was right, of course. This was the quagmire of wild places, the issue that had seemingly no easy answers, even as our perception\u2014and the very definition\u2014of wilderness begins to evolve.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to think,\u201d he offered, what seemed on the surface to be a step toward a solution, as the morning quiet gave way to the bustle of the lunch hour, \u201cthat the North Cascades can exist on the merits of just being wild, spectacular, and amazing and unknown, and that is good enough reason for them to be there and that will never change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as a source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing and painting, in mountaineering and in just being there.”\u00a0–\u00a0Olaus Murie This started a long way from the North Cascades. The sun slanted through big, south-facing windows inside the caf\u00e9 of REI’s administrative campus. It was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[352,113,293,138,143],"internal-tag":[1674],"class_list":["post-3168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climb","tag-climb","tag-national-park","tag-rei-employee","tag-united-states","tag-washington","internal-tag-pre-redirect-climb"],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"https:\/\/rei.com\/blog\/climb\/place-still-wild-north-cascades","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"A Place That Is Still Very Wild – The North Cascades","url":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/climb\/place-still-wild-north-cascades","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/climb\/place-still-wild-north-cascades"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/02\/3993-schroeder-0002-FINAL.jpg?resize=150%2C150","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/www.rei.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2015\/02\/3993-schroeder-0002-FINAL.jpg?fit=2530%2C1716"},"articleSection":"Climb","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Angela Crampton"}],"creator":["Angela Crampton"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Uncommon Path \u2013 An REI Co-op Publication","logo":""},"keywords":["climb","national parks","rei employee","united states","washington"],"dateCreated":"2015-02-04T13:00:31Z","datePublished":"2015-02-04T13:00:31Z","dateModified":"2018-11-12T05:57:23Z"},"rendered":"