Sabbatical Notes 5

North Cascades National Park is located, as the name suggests, in the northern range of the Cascade Mountains, just east of Seattle, Washington. One look at the top of the Cascade Pass trail and it’s pretty obvious why they are called the American Alps.

Day One: Cascade Pass Trail to Pelton Campground

The pictures below were taken on the first day of my three days in North Cascade National Park. The hike up from the parking lot to the camp site at Pelton Basin took about 3 hours. The first few pictures below are from various parts along the trail. The fifth is the ‘basin’ itself, the valley that falls away from Cascade Pass. I’ve had occasion to say this before; the pictures fail to do justice to the sheer magnificence of the landscape.

Day Two: Ptarmigan Traverse Trail

The Ptarmigan Traverse is apparently a famous trail that involves crossing a glacier. It was admittedly a little too much of a climb for me; but I did manage to stumble along the trail for a mile or so. The views over the mountains were something to behold. But at the point where the trail dissolved into a field of loose rock, I gave up and turned back.

I’ve spent much of the week reading Belden Lane’s Solace of Fierce Places, this past week. Lane writes a good deal about apophatic theology, which is essentially the idea that we cannot give words or create images or even construct ideas that describe the fullness of God. God is simply too immense to be easily contained with the natural limits of human language, or even human experience. Except perhaps at the very boundaries of our experience, in those places or circumstances that force us to confront and acknowledge the limits of our capacity to control our environment, or to conform the landscapes we occupy to meet our needs or expectations.

Much of his thought revolves around his spiritual practice of spending time hiking and backpacking in the wilderness; and he calls upon the story of the Exodus to give shape to his own experience. The story of Israel’s forty years in the Sinai wilderness reveals a God who defies human expectations, who invites a spirituality rooted in the practice of relinquishing, of giving up the demands our ego places on us to exert our impulse to control the world around us. Only in giving up the demands our ego to control the world around us can we truly come into an authentic experience of God.

I was thinking about all of this along the trail back from Ptarmigan Traverse, as I listened to the cracking of the ice of multiple glaciers, as the reality of walking (and sometimes crawling) through a landscape that held me entirely in its control. The mountain goat staring down at me from his perch at the top of the ridge above the trail seemed to confirm all this.

The pictures at the bottom show a glacial moulin, a roughly circular hole in glacial ice. Moulin is the French word for ‘mill,’ and they can run to hundreds of feet in depth. This was much smaller, only 10′ or so. They serve to carry meltwater from the surface to the drainage at the edge of the glacier; and to accelerate the movement of the glacier.

Day Three: Sahale Arm

Sahale (Sa-ha-lee) is the most prominent high point in this part of the Cascade range, reaching up to about 8600 feet. I ran into a number of people (much younger than I am) who were planning on climbing to the top. It seemed prudent to me to walk to the start of the glacier (Sahale Peak can be seen in the last two pictures in this set).

Even without reaching the peak, the views from the top of the climb were spectacular. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a range of mountains that seem to go on and on, without a visible end.

Day Four: Wind & Fog

Weather can change quickly and dramatically in the Pacific Northwest. I woke up on my final day in the North Cascades to a biting wind and this immense fog bank drifting over the top of Cascade Pass on pushed down the valley by an almost constant wind. It didn’t keep our resident bear away, though. Apparently wild blueberries are great in any weather.