"There she is!" yelled Happy and in the swirled-across top-of-the-world
fog I saw a funny little peaked almost Chinese cabin among the little
pointy firs and boulders standing on a bald rock top surrounded by
snowbanks and patches of wet grass with tiny flowers.
I gulped. It was too dark and dismal to like it. "This will be my home
and restingplace all summer?"
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In the afternoon the marshmallow roof of clouds blew away in patches
and Ross Lake was open to my sight, a beautiful cerulean pool far
below with tiny toy boats of vacationists, the boats themselves
too far to see, just the pitiful little tracks they left rilling in
the mirror lake.
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Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most beautiful mountain I ever seen ...
but what a horror when I first saw that void the first night of
my staying on Desolation Peak waking up from deep fogs of 20 hours
to a starlit night suddenly loomed by Hozomeen with his two sharp
points, right in my window black... Over 70 days I had to stare at it.
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When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on
mules and I'm alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata
and find once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence
and suffering and going to and fro in vain" but instead I'd come
face to face with myself....
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At night at my desk in the shack I see the reflection of myself
in the black window, a rugged faced man in a dirty ragged shirt,
need-a-shave, frowny, ...
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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" ...
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...as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned
and knelt on the trail and said "Thank you, shack." Then I added
"Blah", with a little grin, because I knew that that shack and
that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and
went on down the trail back to this world.
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I have included some other pictures of the hike. (Some even in color!)
Click here to go to the second page.
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Click here to go to my travel photos page.
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