Thither & Yon

This, then, is what the love of glaciers means:

Yesterday, you hiked Mt. St. Helens. You climbed up 4,500 feet over the course of four miles, more climbing than hiking, pulling your confused body over sharp boulders and loose scree. You then turned around and picked your way back down 4,500 feet of the same.

You woke up this morning with every muscle in your lower body wailing, suggesting maybe you should be a little kinder today.

You arrived at the Mount Rainier National Park wilderness office, because backcountry camping was your only plan for finding a place to sleep tonight, and asked if there were any sites left that did not require a strenuous or lengthy hike.

You listened as the ranger ran through a list of unappealing options – seven miles is too many, 2,000 feet elevation gain is too many, 2,000 feet elevation lost is way too many, three miles might be okay except half of it parallels the highway?

And then you listen as the ranger kindly offers to check for available group sites, since those could be given away to a non-group at such short notice.

You listen as she says, “the Glacier Basin site is open, oh, but that’s four miles in and nearly 2,000 up-”

And you hardly let her finish the sentence before you say, “WE’LL TAKE THAT ONE.”

And then you go back to the car, look at your loaded backpack and wonder, “what have I done??”

You distract yourself a little by pulling off to admire Christine Falls.

Then you come around a bend and see the mountain in her glory, capped with glaciers thick as frosting, and you think maybe climbing all the way up there on exhausted limbs isn’t the worst idea you ever had.

Let’s zoom in a little and really appreciate those glaciers, because damn.

Getting to see the mountain on a clear day is never a given. Employees who’ve worked here for years report they often go weeks without seeing the peak. After a lightly disappointing visibility situation at Crater Lake, having such a fine view of Mt. Rainier feels like a real treat.

Next you sit down for a really great lunch, because your body is not going to stand for granola bars if you expect to reach this alleged glacier that was not in its job description.

Then you start hiking, chanting to yourself that it’s going to be okay – you can eat four-mile hikes for breakfast – and yes, maybe the bod is a little tired but the slope on this incline will be less than half of what it was yesterday – and yes, yesterday’s incline was kind of a death-incline so that isn’t saying much, but 2,000 feet of elevation gain over four miles is nothing.

And you keep coming around corners and seeing more glaciers. They’re just, like, everywhere, and they’re SO beautiful.

The hike to Glacier Basin starts at the White River Campground trailhead and winds its way along the side of Burroughs Mountain, following the Inter Glacier Creek until it reaches the junction with the Burroughs Mountain Trail, at which point your trail splits off and starts climbing Mount Rainier proper.

The slope increases and you realize you’ve covered more than half of your miles and less than half of your elevation, and you start to sweat. You see stairs carved into the path in front of you. Your legs and your lower lip begin to wobble.

Then suddenly you’ve arrived at the campsite, and you’re not quite sure how that happened, because you’ve only come three miles (but definitely 2,000 feet up – no wonder the slope seemed too cruel). You set up camp…

• 

• 

… and then go hunting for the glacier you’ve been promised.

Well… there’s some snow?

With a feeling both sinking and relieved, you realize three miles brought you to your campsite, but the fourth mile would be necessary to reach the glacier. Because there has to be a glacier out there somewhere. The name of the campsite promised.

You get a tiny cell phone signal and ask Ye Wise Olde Internet for more information.

“Another mile and a half,” Ye Internet says, bored. “Oh, and another 1,800 feet up.”

You drink the beer you hauled up the side of this mountain and let your body win the argument against doing anything else rash tonight.

You wake up in the morning fully believing in the Sunken Cost Fallacy. You’ve already sunk three miles and 2,000 feet into this glacier-bagging attempt. Adding an extra three miles to the three you were already going to have to hike to get out of here is nothing. That extra 1,800 feet…. well. There’s a glacier up there.

You waylay a couple burly dudes carrying big ropes and ask them, just to be really sure.

“Yep. Another mile, or, like, two miles? Up that way, and around the corner. Or, at least, you can see it from there,” they confirm. You would have liked a little more confirmation, but you have glacier fever, so off you go.

You creep your way along, up a mile, then a little more. You get into an argument with a marmot about who has the right of way, then you come around a corner, and you finally see your glacier.

You pause here, in the glory of these neon wildflowers with a glacier haunting the background, to take a thousand photos and consider your life. You decide your life is very, very good, and that even though the glacier might just possibly be beyond your reach today, you’ve made some very good life decisions to lead you to this exact place at this exact moment with this exact person by your side.

But look: you’ve come this far, and this far has felt really far, so you at least deserve to clip the trailing edge of the glacier, the could-have-been-glacial border, if only this year and a dozen years after it had been much colder and much snowier, the proto-glacial snow fields that would have built the next layer of actual glacier in a universe with no global warming. So you pick up your extremely heavy feet and do something that you’d promised yourself at the base of Mount Saint Helens you would not do again for at least a year: you start clambering over boulders.

Success! You stand on the snowfield (but only on the veeeeeeery edge, because you can hear the meltwater rushing along, hidden beneath the snow, and if you don’t stick to established trails or have serious technical expertise, you could get in big, big trouble on a snow field) and announce your victory over Inter Glacier.

You skulk around for awhile, eating a granola bar. You don’t want to start back just yet, because you went to all this trouble and it is so, so beautiful. You toy with the idea of maybe trying to get a little closer after all – because how hard could another mile and another thousand feet up really be? – and then it starts raining.

In fact, it isn’t really rain, it’s just that the clouds have descended upon you and everything has become damp. You realize that you just don’t have enough calories in your backpack to fuel the insane thing you (only theoretically at this point) really want to do, and you’re cold. You grab one more grateful eyeful of the magnificent sheet of ice (such a minor one compared to all the others the mountain has to offer, and still so, so grand!) and start picking your way back down into the valley.

The drizzle lets up a little as you descend lower into the valley, but everything is a little damp now and the contrasting colors dance in the morning light.

At least as long as there aren’t boulders or steps involved, down is still easier than up. But barely. You take your time.

On your way down the trail, you stop and give advice (and bugspray) to several other hikers who are starting their trip up. You are an expert now.

You stumble back to the car and congratulate your legs on having supported you through this extremely extracurricular hike. You look back at the mountain and see it shrouded in the clouds you could feel rather than see just a few hours earlier. You think really hard about the fact that you’re supposed to head to another backcountry site to camp in tonight.

You head to the nearest wilderness office with your backcountry permit for the night clutched in clammy hands. Tonight would be a three-mile hike in on fairly level terrain in a back corner of the park where views of the mountain will only be so-so. It was the friendliest campsite available, but you’ve already done 6.5 miles today and everything is cold and wet.

“Between the weather and the wobble in our knees,” you say, “we’ve decided to move on a little early. I don’t suppose anyone else wants this campsite, but in case they do, we won’t be using it.” The ranger congratulates you on your good sense and accepts the return of your permit. She does not offer you a refund.

You turn and point the car toward Olympic National Park instead, knowing you have done everything that the love of glaciers demands of you, plus just a little bit more.

And it was glorious.