COOPER SPUR / ELIOT GLACIER - MT. HOOD

My backpack sat open on the driver’s seat. I was stuffing last things into it. I made a little nest out of a fleece pullover, put half a dozen bananas in it, and carefully stowed it in the top of my pack where it wouldn’t get squished. (Monkey-cams, in general, become very cross on those occasions when you proffer bruised bananas as reward for risky photography work.)


I could see the Monkey-cam sitting in the passenger seat of the car, staring out the side window, sulking. (Note: The Monkey-cam and I, by mutual consent, have agreed not to call each other by our given names. We believe that this policy will help depersonalize our working relationship and allow us to more easily recover from grief should disaster befall one or the other of us during our photo expeditions.)

I ducked down and leaned into the car. “O.K.,” I relented, “would you feel any better about it if I agreed to carry all the water?”

The Monkey-cam whipped his head around and glared at me as if I was the world’s most stupid child. He scrunched his lips together in a stereotypical chimpanzee frown and shook his head back and forth so that his lips and oversized ears wiggled in a parody of whiplash. Then he extended a long hairy arm and pointed at the digital readout on the dashboard radio. The chunky green numerals said 3:29 P.M. He bounced up and down in his seat to emphasize his point.

“So what.” I said. “The hike isn’t that long. We’ll have plenty of time.” I placed my roast beef sandwich next to the nest of bananas. I put extra batteries, a flashlight, and my keys in there too.

The Monkey-cam just got more agitated, especially when he saw the flashlight. He quickly raised his hands to his ears and stuck his elongated fingers up in the air as if they were some kind of horns or elaborate antlers. Then, quite without warning, he screamed and charged at me as if he were a bull. People don’t seem to realize that chimpanzee’s are typically much stronger than humans. Monkey-cam’s pantomime charge was impressive enough that I flinched. As soon as I flinched, he retreated with his hands held over his eyes all the time pretending to run into things.

Suddenly it occurred to me that he was describing the incident at Lava Canyon which had been somewhat traumatic for both of us. I could see that he was worried about getting caught out in the wilderness after dark.

“Look, it’s only about a three mile round trip to the shelter. Besides, we’re practically at the timberline…there isn’t much dark forest to worry about.”

There was no convincing the Monkey-cam. He screamed and pointed a quivering finger at me. Then he pantomimed driving a car, turning the steering wheel back and forth. Then he pointed at himself. Finally he grabbed himself, squeezing his disproportionately large ‘berries’.

I tried to ignore his comment. “Ya’ know,” I began, “technically, you’re not supposed to be able to construct novel sentences like that.”

He went back to sulking and staring out the passenger window. As a kind of casual afterthought, he flipped me ‘the finger’.

Now it was my turn to get agitated. “Listen you!” I tried to sound assertive. “I’m going to take care of some business at the Cloud Cap trailhead restroom, but by golly, when I get back you had better have that camera ready and your pack packed or I’m taking you straight back to the zoo!”

I stormed off to the restroom.

When I came back to the car, I noticed the Monkey-cam was rooting through my pack…no doubt pilfering bananas. I tried to sneak up on him, but I guess there’s a reason for those disproportionately large ears. I almost caught him when he had to dive past me to get to the campground, but once he made it to the trees it was no contest.

It was probably just as well. I wasn’t sure how I was going to tell him that I had forgotten to bring the guidebook again anyway.

I picked up my pack, slipped my arms through the straps and cinched up the left one a little bit because it was loose again. I locked the car doors and shut them. I walked through the campground to the trailhead.

It looked to me like there were three, maybe four trails to choose from and it seemed that all of them were unhelpfully labeled ‘timberline trail’. Without the guidebook, I just guessed and went up and to the right. I eventually wound up at the base of the east edge of the Eliot Glacier Moraine. When the glacier is advancing, it pushes rock and ash before it as if it were a giant bulldozer. When the glacier recedes at the end of summer, or during bouts of human triggered global warming, it leaves a tremendous scoured out path.

(click on this image to see larger version)

NOTE: There are signs at the trailhead warning that parts of the Timberline trail are impassable - I think particularly heading west to Elk Cove. I believe this section of trail rising out of the West side of the Eliot Moraine is the problematical area, though I suppose getting across the Eliot Creek is also a challenge. From my distant vantage point, it looks like a detour path is beginning to stand out over the top of the slide. The part that worries me is the unstable nature of the moraine wall in general. There are big rocks just waiting to tumble down and it seems that walking down to the bottom of the moraine and out again is a little like playing Russian roulette.

The moraine walls are steep and not very stable. Rocks about the size of Volkswagens periodically tumble down the wall. Unfortunately, it is hard to get a sense of the immense scale from this image.

There are four or five mountain climbers headed back down the mountain on the trail at the right of this picture (at about the midpoint).

As I continued to climb, I suddenly heard the commotion of car horns blaring and tires squealing. Though I could make out Cloud Cap Inn perched on a little hill at the base of the moraine, the trees from the campgrounds obscured the parking lot, and I was unable to discover the source of all the noise and evident pandemonium.

As I gained altitude, Mt. Adams - previously invisible - began to poke out above the clouds.

The crest of a moraine edge provides a wonderful vantage point for observing the intricacy and character of glaciers. It is hard to imagine a more paradoxical presentation of the concept of motion – paradoxical in the sense that every crack and fissure shows that the glacier is pouring downward under the relentless tug of gravity, but as far as your eyes are concerned, they might as well be looking at stationary rocks.

(click on this image for larger version)

This is where rivers are born.

I ran out of negotiable moraine and was forced to traverse over to Cooper Spur proper.



It wasn’t too long before my path intersected the Cooper Spur trail which meandered its way through a field of truck sized boulders. The trail switched back and forth a lot and thereby resulted in a very reasonably graded path. What wasn’t so obvious was the fact that all the switches to the east were a little bit longer than the switches to the west so that ultimately, the net effect was to cause the hiker to actually progress around the mountain in a clockwise fashion. Suddenly, topping a crest, the whole southern horizon came into view.

I kept expecting to run into the Cooper Spur shelter - the one I described to the Monkey-cam - but by the time I reached this windbreak, I began to suspect that I had somehow missed the shelter long ago and that I was now on the more difficult, longer trail rather than the short easy one. I decided the best plan at this point was to utilize the wind break and eat my sandwich. I opened my pack and pulled out the sandwich. “That’s funny,” I thought to myself, “none of the bananas are missing.”

At 8000+ feet, I learned a hard lesson about photography. When your fingers are numb from cold and your body heat is wicking away at a dangerous rate because of your damp cotton/polyester blend T-shirt, setting up your tripod really seems like a low priority task. However, when you get back home and review all your blurry, not sharp pictures, you realize setting up your tripod is the whole reason you went there.

Winter never goes away. It just stays up high swirling around the mountain tops, waiting impatiently for any excuse to start its yearly campaign for territory.

I got the uncomfortable impression that the sun was accelerating as it neared the horizon. The shadow of Mt. Hood began stretching inexorably toward the East. I felt kind of rushed eating my sandwich.

Eventually, a full moon peeked out from behind a band of clouds. I relaxed a little as I began to anticipate its silvery light for accompaniment on my long night journey.

I passed through the plains of giant boulders with nothing but the moonlight for illumination. It was quiet and beautiful, both strange and familiar. I started singing quietly, “I hope that my legs don’t break…walking on the moon.”

Eventually the trail led me past the shelter I had given up finding.

I lost the trail when it descended into a valley of looming shrubberies - hidden from the moon. Fortunately, I had previously established a useful waypoint on my GPS device. Though I was essentially lost in a dark depression, to my left, the massive wall of the Eliot glacier moraine thrust up into the night sky and glistened in the moon-glare. This landmark - coupled with my waypoint - it was all I needed. All the same, I was glad to have spared the Monkey-cam this brief moment of uncertainty.

When I got to the campground, I stopped briefly to get my keys out of the pack. I knew they had to be in there somewhere, but as I dug around and probed the deep recesses of the pack, the horrible realization began to dawn on me that I had lost them. Maybe it was at the windbreak when my hands were numb? Maybe they fell out when I grabbed the sandwich? But just because my hands were numb, I reasoned to myself, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have heard them if they did fall. I was stumped.

Then it occurred to me. Maybe the Monkey-cam took them when he was rooting around in my pack. And then…Oh no. Maybe that explains the turmoil in the parking lot.

In a cold panic, I ran to the spot where my car should have been. It looked a lot like my car except it was missing the rear bumper. All the windows were rolled down and the radio was playing mournful cowboy tunes. Through the back window , spread out unconscious among an extraordinary quantity of beer cans and whiskey bottles, I could see the Monkey-cam, snoring loudly and quivering spastically now and then to dreams that only a chimp can have.

The keys were in the ignition.

Not too much later, I found my bumper hanging on mile post 3, its chrome flashing under my high-beams.

That monkey is going to get such a spanking when we get home.

Shooting for McNeil Point - Ending up at Muddy Fork

“So why do they call it ‘Burnt Lake’?” was one of the recurring questions I was asked after last week’s hike. To find an answer, I checked out Lewis McArthur’s Oregon Geographic Names, but Burnt Lake didn’t make the cut. I searched a lot of hiking sites and perused the ‘regional’ shelves at local bookstores and generally, most references to the lake include a story about a forest fire that wiped out an old growth cedar forest sometime around 1904. Supposedly, you can still see the stumps of the ex-forest if you hike to Burnt Lake from the north.

I thought a dead forest might be interesting to photograph, but I also suspected that the trailhead for the north end of the Burnt Lake trail was beyond the washed-out bridge that still doesn’t go to the Ramona Falls trailhead either. It seemed prudent to come up with an alternative hike and The Portland Hiker’s Field Guide, because it has hikes arranged by area, made it extremely easy to find a nearby option (http://www.portlandhikers.com/).

The bridge was still impassable, so this week’s lesson: If you go to the trouble to print out directions for an alternate hike, you might as well bring them along.

I was forced to rely on my memory to find Top Spur Trailhead which is why this week’s hike starts from McGee Creek Trailhead instead.

A pattern starts to emerge on these hikes which start on the flanks of a mountain and gently ascend towards the timberline. In the beginning, the hiker is enveloped in the greens and browns of dense, moist, pine forests. This bi-chromatic world is seldom interrupted save for golden shafts of sunlight that manage to filter in beneath the canopy, here highlighting a patch of ferns as if in a spotlight, there saturating the color of a rotting cedar stump to an unusually intense red, or in the case of this hike, accenting the unlikely flamingo pink of a wild rhododendron.


I could faintly remember the Hiker’s Guide's directions explaining how a more scenic route to McNeil point wraps around the south side of Bald Mountain, and that an obvious but unmarked trail quickly leads to the other fork of the Timberline Trail. Well…it isn’t so obvious.

Whatever trail I was on, it eventually dead ended at the site of what appeared to be a giant tree explosion. Something had rolled down the hill and shattered the edge of the forest like – well, like that meteor that flattened a forest in Siberia.

Ducking under and scrambling over downed trees, I emerged into an open valley that seemed subject to the same scouring forces that have wreaked disorder in the area around the Ramona Falls trail.

Standing in this pathway – this giant chute – I got the same sense of impending doom that I once got trying to cross a railroad bridge.

Occasionally, the mountain would peek at me from behind its white burqa, perhaps gauging how long it would take me to reach relative safety along the banks of the valley and preparing to let loose a house sized rock or two.

The devious Muddy Fork attempting to appear tame and docile - never-mind that it lurks at the bottom of vicious scar two stories deep.

Hydraulics – a force continually underestimated.

I lose the trail. For awhile, I follow the streambed upward, but the looming unstable boulders in the freshly eroded banks make me uneasy. I eventually resort to following the tree-line on the left, but my growing uncertainty about the location of McNeil point soon has me questioning whether my labored efforts at climbing are cost effective.

This colorful flower suggests that the Muddy Fork is a giver of life.

On the way out, I stop to take pictures of Mt. Hood in the lengthening rays of the setting sun. I’m sitting on a path on the side of Bald Mountain that is nearly two thousand feet above the Muddy Fork valley. Suddenly, a guy that looks an awful lot like a photographer walks up from behind, catches a glimpse of a stunted tree branch on a dangerous slope and simply walks off the side of the trail (see photographer in lower right portion of image above).

In this picture, you can see the photographer setting up his camera. In the lower right corner you can see his pet mountain goat desperately clinging to the side of the cliff after it lost its footing – and just seconds before it plunged to its death - or maybe that’s just a rock.

Now I am jealous because the photographer is spending an awful lot of time composing his picture which I suppose will have a wonderfully evocative snag in the foreground leading the eye to the grandeur of the mountain.

“Damn it!” I say to myself. “I only have pictures from the path that everyone else and their uncle takes.”

Eventually, I decide that since I have no wonderfully evocative snag, I will at least document the taking of a photograph by a daring photographer. By walking further back on the trail, I see an unofficial side path that leads down to an outcrop of rocks on a patch of soft ground that is almost level. I end up using the other photographer as my foreground element.

I don’t want to miss the changing faces of the mountain, but I’m keenly aware that I will once again be stumbling back to the car in the dark over an unfamiliar trail. Additionally, the other photographer has just told me about the beautiful black bear he saw earlier in the day.

“Could you tell,” I ask, “did it look hungry?”

In the fading light, I ponder facts about bears with a new urgency. Are they nocturnal? Can they really run 35 miles an hour? Can they effortlessly climb trees using their great strength in combination with giant claws?

If that black bear finds me in the forest in the dark – I guess the only thing to do is poop my pants (likely this won't even have to be a voluntary response) and hope the smell ruins its appetite.

EAST ZIGZAG MOUNTAIN AND BURNT LAKE

There probably aren’t a lot of things worse than death, but the onset of dementia or a sudden diminishment of mental functioning - so severe that your ‘you’ is lost - might be two of them. That’s why, when evidence shows that I can still learn by experience, I feel exceedingly pleased with myself. For this hike (the directions to which I found in Douglas Lorain’s 100 Classic Hikes in Oregon: http://www.mountaineersbooks.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=577 ) I made sure that the entire route was well below the 6000 foot level, and I mentally prepared myself to test any gate I should encounter, closed or not. (See my June 11th entry about how I lost an encounter with a closed gate: http://thenarrativeimage.blogspot.com/2007/06/road-to-cloud-cap-trailhead.html ).

While there were no gates to worry about on this trip, possible future lessons to learn might have something to do with just how far you should go into the wilderness with a two-wheel drive vehicle on really crappy dirt ‘roads’, especially if rain is imminent.

Since I was previously sensitized to the plight of trees close to the timberline on the road to the Cloud Cap Trailhead, I was interested to compare them to the trees living close to the 2000 foot level. I know it is appalling, but I’ve realized I don’t really know the names of any trees or plants besides the descriptive generic terms flower, tree and vegetable. I’m trying to think back to when I was younger to determine if I ever knew the names of trees and plants, because if I’ve forgotten them, then maybe that’s a sign of dementia …but I can’t remember.

Despite not having an adequate vocabulary, I will attempt to describe some differences I noted. The higher altitude forest seemed to be composed exclusively of ‘pine’ trees. In clearings on the forest floor, young trees compete for the light that manages to filter through the holes in the canopy opened by fallen elders.

On the Burnt Lake trail however, a whole second layer of deciduous trees were struggling for placement underneath the taller ‘pine’ canopy. In the picture below, a wide stretch of young, broad-leafed trees are mysteriously leaning downhill.

My working hypothesis is that the trees’ posture is the result of being buried under winter’s accumulating snow which may at times even slide down the hillside thereby effectively teaching the trees how to dodge.

Vegetable wise, I saw many plants that looked like they depended on enormous amounts of water to be happy. I wondered if perhaps some of them might not make good salads.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the slightest idea which plants are edible.

And, edible or not, there’s no way I’m eating this thing. (See my recipe for French Tickler Salad below)

View towards East Zigzag Mountain Summit.

When I reached the edge of the ridge that leads either up to the summit of East Zigzag Mountain, or down towards Burnt Lake, I felt immediately rewarded for my long uphill walk with the sudden appearance of Mt. Hood, which had been hidden behind the ridge. True, most of Mt. Hood remained hidden from sight in the clouds, but it was still impressive. A beautiful, dangerous mountain, teasing from within an amorphous shroud of light and shadow causes the same kind of suspense and anticipation that is sometimes created by smart directors of horror films, the kind who don’t actually show their monsters until close to the climax.

AND NOW A WORD ABOUT THE RAW IMAGE FORMAT

I was challenged by a photography enthusiast at work to try out the RAW image format available for my camera. Up until now, I’d been using the highest quality JPEG format that the camera is capable of which typically results in images of approximately three megabytes in size.

It turns out that these JPEG images I’ve been taking are the equivalent of a stenographer’s shorthand notes for what the camera’s sensor is actually capable of recording. The typical file size for the RAW images taken during this particular hike weigh in at about eight megabytes each. Each RAW image file also comes with a secondary file which records the camera’s settings at the time each particular picture is taken. It is this secondary file that translates the RAW image into a JPEG file that is easily recognized by most computers.

The interesting part is that Canon’s supplied software, Digital Photo Professional, makes the record of the camera’s settings at the time of the shot irrelevant. In the picture immediately below, the image appears according to the instructions contained in the secondary file – as it would have appeared at the highest quality JPEG setting. However, since I have saved the complete RAW data, I am able to go back and essentially write my own translation instructions. In this case, I decide that the daylight setting for the camera’s white balance doesn’t support my eerie, almost mystical intuition that the mountain was consorting with heaven behind the shielding wall of clouds.

The second version of the mountain shows how I can ignore the camera’s original translation scheme and choose to alter the white balance output according to color temperature. The warmer colors work better for me. Since the RAW data remains intact and only the translated output changes, there is no image degradation.

Mt. Adams impersonating a cloud

My first view of Burnt Lake

A close up of Burnt Lake from East Zigzag Mountain Trail reveals what appears to be an improbably large duck.

Is this where fishermen go when they die?

View from the shore of Burnt Lake

(I was kidding. There is no recipe for French Tickler Salad.)