Mary's Peak

 

Mark and I climbed Mary’s Peak on Saturday.  We have done this hike every year; we no longer need a map. We mark the trail by plants—the logs where the Coral Root orchid lives, the seep for the Monkey Flower, the long slog after the bench that once looked out over the valley, but the view is now blocked by doug fir. We have learned how to hike together. Mark is a slow wanderer, attention pulled off the trail by whatever he is thinking about at the time. Right now, he likes to look at pampas (the fluff that disperses seeds in the wind). I am a quick and steady climber, matching breath to pace. When we need to Make Time, I take the lead and Mark stretches out his long leg to keep up. When we need to move slowly, Mark goes first and stops whenever he wishes. We often discuss speed before we begin.

Because this hike was late in the bloom season, I suggested not taking notes on every flower that we passed. But it had been a stressful week, so we decided to move more slowly, stopping several times to observe the world. As we climbed, we moved backward in time, in the season. At the beginning, thimbleberry was ripe. Then it was just a forming fruit, and, by the peak, still a blossom. The peak itself was quiet. The rock garden was past bloom so we were left with the wide view from the Pacific to the Cascades. We sat down for lunch amid a huge population of grasshoppers which were cheerfully munching on all of the lupine plants and being munched by the local robins. Several were mating on grass stalks; others were hanging out alone at the tips of other plants. An invitation, we wondered? Some were reddish, others were green. Lots of speculation while we ate bagels and blueberries.

On the way down, we considered rotting stumps. First we passed a tree that had fallen across the path and been cut away. There were fungi settled on the center older rings of the tree, but not on the outer younger word or the bark. A few feet further down, another tree’s younger wood had rotted away, leaving a stand of older wood in the center, like a volcano plug that has eroded.  Clearly beetles and ants had been at work here. A little further—a stump with the center rotten away and the bark shell standing.  Three Douglas Fir, all within a quarter mile of one another, all decomposing in a different way. We made notes. There’s clearly a Master’s Thesis in our observations—maybe even a lifetime of fulfilling work discovering why trees decompose in such different ways on the same mountain trail.

We have hiked some trails three, five, ten times a year, every year for 20 years. There is comfort in knowing a trail so well, of being rooted in your place so deeply that you know the specific plants along the way. That Phantom Orchid, not any other. We have also developed a sense of deep wonder of the complexities of our natural world because being so familiar with a place means that we have to look more closely to see something new, to break our minds out of the daily patterns.  We pack snacks, water, a notebook, and our curiosity, every time we step onto a trail.