Anodyne
Monday, August 22, 2005
 

Sleeping overnight at the store, then leaving at 4:50am to go do something I've wanted to do for twenty-odd years: climb Desolation Peak, in the North Cascades. Jack Kerouac spent the summer of 1956 on the summit as a fire lookout, an experience he movingly recounts in his novels The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels. "Desolation in Solitude," the first 70-odd page section of Angels, is a mini-epic, striking themes sounded elsewhere in his work with even greater clarity and humor:

"Those afternoons, those lazy afternoons, when I used to sit, or lie down, on Desolation Peak, sometimes on the alpine grass, hundreds of miles of snowcovered rock all around, looming Mount Hozomeen on my north, vast snowy Jack to the south, the encharmed picture of the lake below to the west and the snowy hump of Mt. Baker beyond, and to the east the rilled and ridged monstrosities humping to the Cascade Ridge, and after that first time suddenly realizing 'It's me that's changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void. . . .'"

My artist/mountaineer friend Arnold Shives is driving us out to Ross Lake, where we'll catch a motorized barge down the lake to the trailhead. After that, it's your typical Team Cat outing: over 1300m of relentless elevation gain to the summit and the fire lookout, originally built in 1933.

(Desolation Peak lookout photograph by Pete Hoffman, from his terrific Desolation Peak webpage. There are other views of the summit on the Web, but Pete's looks most like the one I've imagined ever since reading Desolation Angels in my teens).
- posted by cjb @ 7:44 PM


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