COUGAR – On occasion I have been accused of not being the world’s greatest planner. That assessment is probably fair in most instances and I typically don’t even bother to quibble with the statement, other than to say, “everything is going to be fine.”
A million trilliums exploded along the path beneath the sylvan ceiling of the forest. Their symmetrical blasts of purple and white were more abundant than I’d ever seen and served to lift my spirits in the earliest stages of the day’s expedition.
The air there was cool and damp, but not cold or wet. The path had only patches of snow and was cushioned with a soft sponge of soil and tree detritus. It was a wonderful moment in time as I trudged onward in my attempt to summit Mount Saint Helens while simultaneously attempting to ignore the onerous symptoms of a full blown chest cold and chill inducing fever that had settled in overnight.
Since I didn’t plan on getting the cold and I had three friends, including former editor of The Chronicle, Eric Schwartz, counting on me, I decided again that everything would be fine and hit the road. We met at The Chronicle at 4 a.m. and started up the trail about three hours later. It was orange juice and water all the way for me.
When we rounded another corner in the forest all of a sudden it came into view. More accurately, it became THE view and everything else seemed to be cropped out of the mind’s perceptive borders. A wall of white that seemed to just straight up into the heavens, like some god’s monument with its top destroyed by unfathomable forces.
As we crossed a creek and began to slowly emerge from the thicket of trees we passed a man wearing shorts and a shiny marijuana leaf hat smoking a cigarette with his friend as they craned their necks up at the new dominant vantage. They said they’d come from across the country and had never climbed the mountain before.
The other sounds on the trail were notable mostly in their absence. Aside from the sparse chatter of climbers trying to conserve their breath the only other sounds consisted primarily of snow crunching and rocks slipping underfoot. With the trees gone and the sun beginning its ascent toward high noon the temperature was beginning to rise rapidly when I first heard the babbling of water. The persistence of its sound was so stark on the icescape of the mountainside that at first I didn’t believe my own ears and assumed I was simply hearing things. As we drew nearer though the din of the stream increased until I was able to see the mini-waterfall of pure mountain snowmelt.
With melting snow all around made it too dangerous to get close to the stream but even though there was no shade that rushing sound was soothing and seemed to make the surrounding air cooler. It proved a perfect place for a breather and as Eric and I turned around to see where we had come from we realized one of the cruel peculiarities of climbing a mountain is that while you continuously arch your neck to look up at the ever distant destination, a sprawling panorama of views unfolds behind you.
The next time we stopped as a group I noticed that we were roughly in line with the final gasp of trees. At that altitude they grow crooked and stunted and sporadic due to the lack of oxygen. That description seemed apt to describe my worsening condition as well. Each step began to exact a specific toll on my body or brain, or both. At times my old catchers knees would pinch with pain. Then my quads would begin to misfire and cramp. Worst of all, I could not seem to find a rhythm to keep my wind and found myself needing to stop to catch my breath at frustratingly frequent intervals while Mr. Marijuana Hat and his friend hiked on by and then lit up another ciggie along the trail.
As my condition worsened I began to take breaks at the top of each significant rock outcropping we passed. Under the right conditions it is truly amazing how comfortable a volcanic rock recliner can be. In fact, as my energy dipped I found myself waking up with a jolt after briefly napping at each of my assorted cold ground and rock pillow rest spots.
It was about that time that a pair of ravens began to stalk me up the mountain. The first bird caught my eye as it walked uphill beside me at a quicker pace than I could muster. Then, once the other raven joined in they began to fly ahead a ways and wait within eyesight for awhile, just to highlight exactly how out of place a person is on a mountain top. Or even a mountain without a top.
After four hours of dragging myself up the mountainside I could finally see the summit. A group of six or eight people appeared to be seated facing away from the crater, sharing snacks and soaking in their magnificent view as they savored their achievement. They seemed so far away, but at the same time, having a clear finishing point reassured me that despite my failing strength I would not leave the mountain a failure.
I had learned the hard way that when you’re on the move its best to keep your head down and focus on your next step. If you get caught up in looking ahead you’ll lose your footing and slide backward two steps. So I continued on, staring at the snow in front of me, examining the boot prints of those who came before me and trying to match my gait to theirs in order to create maximum efficiency. It’s an awful way to look for photos, but by that point it didn’t matter anyway as I couldn’t tell if my eyes were blurry or if I’d simply broken the camera.
As I drew within earshot of the group of people I’d been aiming for I heard a sinister laugh and finally broke my focus to look up. That’s when I saw the two remaining slopes and roughly 1,000 feet of elevation left between me and the true summit. The people laughed at my pathetic face and commented how everyone who had passed had made the same mistake and subsequent groan.
To the east a pair of snowmobiles jetted up and down a smooth flank of the mountain, racing from timberline to crest in a matter of minutes. Their mechanical whine thrashed the perfect silence of the mountain, which was annoying. It was their speed and ease at climbing a mountain that was infuriating.
The final 500 feet of the ascent was conducted in a single file line and without a word spoken between any climbers. Even with 20 yards to go I still wondered if my legs would give out and send me sliding all the way back down to the trailhead. When I took my final step the exhausted throng at the summit cheered my accomplishment as I cursed in exasperation and collapsed just shy of the rim and the steaming crater below.
After taking my most scenic nap of all time I was finally able to string words together to converse with my newfound summit friends. We laughed about the absurdity of our collective decision making processes and snacked on whatever we could find left in our packs. One group busted out a six pack of Rainier beers and gave a toast to friendship as they looked north to the regional suds monolithic namesake. One man launched a drone and flew it over the crater while I maneuvered around for photographs while trying not to bust loose the snow cornice that would send us all plunging into the volcano’s craggy orifice.
Mr. Marijuana Hat and his friend the Marlboro Man never made it to the top.
After a climb that excruciating it felt wrong to leave the mountaintop at all, but the reality of the decent that lay ahead and the limited hours in a day meant that I had to leave that place of wonder behind for more hiking and diminishing returns on the view.
At first it wasn’t all bad though as I was able to push off from the summit with gusto and glissade down the steep slopes that had worn me out earlier in the day. To glissade, for the uninitiated, is to sit on one’s butt and slide across the snow as if on a sled. After such strain to go up it is an inexplicable thrill to be able to cover so much ground with such ease.
The problem is, if you get off on the wrong glissade chute laid by some misguided soul before you, you’re bound to wind up somewhere you shouldn’t be, and that’s exactly what happened to me.
By the time I turned around to see how much ground I had covered the true summit was already out of sight. There was nobody around and no sound could be heard. As I looked to the horizon I noticed that Mt. Hood was not due south as it had been for the entirety of the ascent but was instead off to the east a bit. Taking note of my miscalution I hopped on another glissade chute on my left and gradually made my way east little by little.
Eventually though I reached a massive ridge that was too tall for my tired legs to climb and so I was left with no choice but to continue down the mountain in a direction I knew was not entirely correct. Eventually I saw a group of six or seven people ahead of me so I picked up my pace and caught up with them to check on our location. A woman with a smartphone and great service said she had just looked up the map and we were only a few hundred yards off the trail. She said if we continued down and hugged the ridgeline to the east it would eventually take us where we needed to be.
A man in the group looked at me and said sheepishly, “Glissading is too much fun.”
Enthused by that news and deciding I would make better time alone I left the group behind and lurched down the mountain, falling into the occasional tree well or a sinkhole caused by the seasonal snow melt. I laughed each time and got up even more determined to find the end of that rocky spine and my trusty hiking group that I had lost.
The ridge never did end though, all it did was grow more trees that made it more difficult to traverse. As I solo trekked through the snow covered woods I second guessed my decision to leave the group with the phone and directions behind but I took solace in the fact that I was still headed away from the sun and toward the parking lot, in theory.
That’s when the treeline ended abruptly and I found myself standing on a road of some sort. There were snowcat tracks heading in both directions. One way went east and the other went west. I needed to go east, but that was uphill, so I went west. Cutting a path through the snowcat tracks I made decent time toward the unknown. Having run out of water at the summit I would stop occasionally to scrape away the top layers of snow and eat a refreshing ice ball.
At one point I came across a sign with a YOU ARE HERE marker. It said there was a cutoff not too far away that led to the parking lot where the misadventure had began some 11 hours earlier, so I continued with just a bit more pep in my step. But that cutoff never materialized and my hopes again began to diminish.
At six o’clock I gave myself one hour before I would begin to let panic set in and start planning for a night alone in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Continuing my march downhill I eventually reached a junction to another snow covered forest road without any tire tracks. A sign said McBride Lake was uphill while Cougar lay 13 miles downhill, so I kept on going downhill.
After nearly an hour making my way on those roads I came to another locked gate and recognized a location we had stopped that morning after a wrong turn on the way to Marble Mountain Sno-Park. I laughed then, knowing where I was, and how far away that was from where I needed to be. Just then a car drove up, it seemed to appear like manna from heaven, and I tried to wave it down but they just looked at me strange and drove away.
By the time I made it back to the truck my friends were all waiting for me with water and a change of clothes to perk me up. We all shared in contagious delirious laughter and agreed that the experience and stories we’d accumulated were well worth the temporary hurt and scare. What’s more a member of the Search and Rescue team told me the later that more than a dozen people had become lost in a similar fashion that day, and I was the only one to rescue myself.
It may be true that I’m not the best planner, but that doesn’t bother me. If I had let that stop me over the years I wouldn’t have anything to write about. And after all, everything is going to be fine.
FISHIN’
Salmon season is beginning to hit its stride around the region as we bank into summer. The mainstem Chehalis open all the way up to Adna. Tributaries to that watershed and smaller drainages up into the West End of the Olympic Peninsula that head straight to the ocean are open already, or poised to see their first hooks in coming weeks and the Cowlitz River is still fishing well for springers and winter steelhead. That leaves the lower Columbia River as one of the only watersheds without any prospects coming down the pike.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, last week on the Cowlitz River the WDFW was able to find a roughly equal number of anglers above and below the arbitrary I-5 Bridge cutoff. The results for those matching efforts were decidedly different, though. From that bridge down to Gearhart Gardens 199 rods cast by bank anglers managed to keep just one steelhead while releasing one adult Chinook and one steelhead. Their boating compatriots put 49 rods in the river and pulled out three keeper springers. Meanwhile, 133 upriver bank rods kept 18 adult springer and one jack along with one steelhead, and 34 boat rods kept three Chinook and three steelhead. The first summer steelhead have been showing up at the barrier dam so prospects should continue to keep anglers interested for awhile at least.
The Kalama River also saw quite a bit of pressure last week. During WDFW sampling 92 bank anglers showed two keeper adult Chinook, one jack, and two steelhead. They also released one steelie. Another 51 boat anglers kept seven Chinook and one steelhead.
The Lewis River is another waterway that recently reopened for hatchery Chinook and steelhead retention. Technically a re-opening, the mainstem Lewis River’s first day back in business to anglers was last Saturday. The opening for Chinook extends from the mouth up to Johnson Creek. Both Chinook and steelhead are fair catch to bank anglers from Johnson Creek to the overhead power lines below Merwin Dam. No boat fishing is allowed in that stretch. Last weekend on the Mainstem Lewis River the WDFW sampled five bank rods and one boat anglers with no catch. On the North Fork 29 bank rods produced one keeper Chinook and six rods cast from boats also caught and kept one Chinook. The daily limit for anglers is six hatchery Chinook, of which one may be adult, as well as three hatchery steelhead.
A press release from the WDFW noted that, ”Chinook retention on the Lewis River was open under permanent rule until April 30 and subsequently closed to ensure hatchery broodstock goals were met. If spring chinook returns do not continue as expected, it may be necessary to close the retention fishery at a later date.”
If you don’t mind traveling a bit for your pisactorial pursuits, the West End of the Olympic Peninsula regularly offers some of the best salmon fishing prospects in the state. On June 1 the Hoh River will join the free flowing mix of mountain to coast drainages open to salmon fishing. Specifically the fishery will be open for Chinook, steelhead and trout until June 30. The Hoh will be open from the Olympic National Park boundary upstream to the boat launch at Oxbow Campground just south of Forks. Anglers are required to release all fish with an intact adipose fin. Bait may not be used and only one barbless hook with up to three points may be used. The daily limit is one hatchery Chinook, and up to two trout or steelhead at least 14 inches in length.
While the Lower Columbia Columbia River is currently closed to salmon fishing a rare harvest sport fishery for sturgeon will continue on select days into June. There are six sport sturgeon fishing days alloted in May and two days in June with a limit of one legal-sized sturgeon per day, and a total of two sturgeon per year.
All keeper sturgeon must measure between 44 and 50 inches from their snout to the fork in their tail. Those Lower Columbia River sport sturgeon fisheries are slated for the Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays of May 19, 21, 23, 26, 28, 30, plus June 2 and 4. That fishery will be open from the Wauna powerlines near Cathlamet down to the mouth of the river at Buoy 10, including Youngs Bay and all adjacent Washington tributaries. Legal sturgeon fishing will end at 2 p.m. each day, but catch-and-release sturgeon angling will be allowed on non-retention days.
HUNTIN’
Washington Outdoor Women are again offering their Pre-WOW Workshop to girls ages 8-13. Washington Outdoor Women is a group dedicated to fostering the participation of women and girls in sporting pursuits like hunting, fishing, and boating.
Typically events are reserved for women age 18 and older but the Pre-WOW workshop helps to stoke interest at an even earlier age. This year’s workshop will be held on the weekend of June 16-17 at Camp Sealth on Vashon Island. All participants must be accompanied by an adult woman.
“This year's day-and-a-half agenda includes expert instruction in archery, canoeing, and camp cooking, augmented with fun games using nature’s ‘equipment,’ sewing a simple bag for gathering plants and berries, and an afternoon horseback ride for the youth,” read a press release from WOW.
Registration fees are $100 per girls and $75 per woman, and cover all instruction, equipment, materials, and on-site accomodations. Registration is open now and will close on June 1, or whenever the workshop reaches full capacity.
“Please help us increase the outdoor confidence of women and girls across Washington!” wrote WOW executive director, Jen Syrowitz, in an email to The Chronicle.
Additional information, including registration forms, can be found online at washingtonoutdoorwomen.org. For additional information call 425-785-3555, or email info@washingtonoutdoorwomen.org.
Back in the here and now, wild turkey hunts are ongoing on both sides of the Cascades through the end of May. The general spring hunt has a combined limit of three birds for the season, of which only two may be taken from Eastern Washington, with the exception of Chelan, Kittitas, and Yakima counties where only one tom may be killed per person. A one turkey limit is also applicable in Western Washington, although two turkeys may be taken in Klickitat County. Only male turkeys, or those with visible beards, are legal for hunting.
As the end of turkey season draws near, the deadline for special hunt permit applications threatens to slip on by. Hunters have only until May 23 to submit special permit applications for deer, elk, mountain goat, moose, bighorn sheep and turkeys. Permits are doled out by random drawing based on a cumulative points system. In order to apply hunters who plan to target deer or elk must first purchase a hunting license for those species.
Applications can be purchased from vendors or from the WDFW website. Applications can then be submitted online or by calling 1-877-945-3492. Most special hunt permit applications cost $7.10 for residents, $110.50 for non-residents, and $3.80 for hunters under 16 years of age. However, residents purchasing applications for mountain goats, any bighorn sheep ram, any moose, and "quality" categories for deer and elk will have to pay $13.70.
As always, coyotes remain fodder for the firing squad all year round.
DRIVIN’
Just in time for the 38th anniversary of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens the main route up to viewpoints to the blast zone has been reopened. On Wednesday SR-504, also known as Spirit Lake Memorial Highway was opened after another winter on hiatus. The highway runs from Castle Rock up to the National Volcanic Monument, and can also be accessed by driving east from Toledo. Until Wednesday the highway had been closed at the Clearwater Lake gates. Now travelers can drive for another seven miles all the way to Johnston Ridge Observatory.
“Because winter weather is unpredictable, we’re always faced with new challenges,” said WSDOT Maintenance Supervisor, Aaron Yanez, in a press release. “This past winter was no different. It took a lot of effort over the past several weeks for crews to clear the highway of snow and debris, and we’re glad we could open it as soon as we are.”
Snowfall forces the closure of the road each winter due to safety concerns. Once snowfall ceases WSDOT crews work to clear any remaining snow as well as boulders and other obstacles that may have accumulated over winter. A press release noted that WSDOT works in coordination with the U.S. Forest Service in order to ensure that SR-504 is open to travelers looking to catch a view of the St. Helens’ crater during the annual event commemorating the mountain’s eruption on May 18, 1980.
RECOGNITION
The WDFW recently announced the winners of their Citizen Awards for 2018, which honor commitments to science, partnership and education in the outdoors.
The Westport Charterboat Association was tabbed as Organization of the Year for its work helping the state monitor salmon. Their work is credited with compiling almost 50 percent of the salmon encounter data provided by volunteers up and down the Washington coast. That information is used to determine overall impacts on salmon populations in mark-selective fisheries.
“Over the past three years the Westport Charterboat Association skippers have really stepped up to help gather the data we need, supporting our science and management objectives in ways that are both economically efficient and effective,” said Wendy Beeghley, a WDFW fish biologist.
The Lummi Nation was given the Director’s Award in recognition of their quick response to Cooke Aquaculture’s negligent release of non-native Atlantic salmon in Puget Sound last year.
“They were the first eyes on the water, providing the critical information Washington agencies needed to respond to this emergency,” said Joe Stohr, WDFW director, in the release. “Their fishers were on the scene immediately, working to contain the spill. We are grateful for their clarity of vision and expertise.”
Hank Jones, a land manager with the Calispel Duck Club, was honored as Volunteer of the Year. Jones volunteers with the department to monitor wildlife–including moose, white-tailed deer and mountain lions by placing cameras and ground blinds to assist researchers.
“Hank’s willingness to volunteer his time, labor and considerable outdoor knowledge has benefited wildlife research on dozens of occasions,” said Jared Oyster, a WDFW wildlife biologist, in the release. “He has even helped moose researchers weather snow emergencies in the field, including freeing a stuck snowmobile and housing our moose technician when the power went down.”
Other citizen awards announced by the WDFW were dedicated to volunteer educators. Those awards include:
· Terry Hoffer Memorial Firearm Safety Award: John Malek received the Terry Hoffer award for his contributions as a hunter education instructor. Malek’s work with teams of instructors in 21 separate hunter education classes from across the state resulted in certification of more than 500 students. The award honors Wildlife Agent Terry Hoffer, who was fatally wounded by a hunter accidentally discharging his firearm in 1984.
· Educator of the Year: Marty Kotzke was named Educator of the Year for his efforts in certifying 227 new hunters in 15 classes, recruit new instructors, and train more than 400 young hunters through state and national Youth Hunter Education Challenge competitions.
