Cusp
We woke in the early morning, perched in our camper on the edge of Forest Road 2870. We looked east toward Dirty Face Ridge, our first objective of the day. The window over the bed was open wide, admitting the cold air, framing the brilliant blue of the sky and the green on green on green of the Olympic Mountain ridges that stretched out below it.
I climbed down from bed and changed into layers of wool. I made coffee. We piled into the cab with our steaming mugs and drove the rest of the way up the pitted road to our trailhead near its terminus. Despite the blue skies, rain was forecasted for midday, and we wanted to be off the trail by the time it fell.
We’d hiked up and down Dirty Face Ridge toward the end of fall. The views from the top were spectacular, I remembered, but the trail was steep enough – a 30-40% grade that gained 1,250’ in the first mile – that the descent was worth avoiding if one had the time.
The next day I pieced together a route that went up Dirty Face Ridge but then looped through the north-eastern corner of the range, cresting Mount Townsend and tapping Silver Lake, before returning to the gravel forest road not far from the Dirty Face trailhead. I had to wait three seasons to try it out.
We set out at a pace to match the brisk thirty-six degrees. The dog, ever the show-off on her four, spry legs, led the way. We ascended through the woods, the under canopy filled with blooming rhododendron. The grade warmed us perfectly, and we had it to ourselves.
We reached the first open, level shelf and found wild onion blooming on the exposed, upslope side of the trail, their leaves curled on the ground at their feet. After a final stretch of steep grade through trees, we ascended the ridgeline. When we reached its openness, we found a thin sheet of snow blanketing tufts of just-as-white phlox.
Thick pillowy clouds had formed over the Welch Peaks to the south and the Copper and Silver Creek drainages that fell to the north below us. Brilliant patches of blue shone between them, and the sun cast their shadows on the emerald valley bottom.
Then the trail descended below the treeline briefly, and when it emerged again, the view was entirely transformed. We were in a cloud. The one that had been scuttering north from the top of the peaks to our south. The ridgelines had disappeared, as had the shadows of the clouds on the valley bottom. The colorful world we’d been in just moments before – emerald green, cold sky blue, rhododendron pink – was gone.
This one was entirely grayscale. Hoarfrost cloaked the foliage, masking its identity under glinting geometry. The furrow of the trail remained free of snow, and ribboned darkly up the white mountainside under a sky whose tone fell somewhere part way between the two.
We sensed the greatness of the shrouded view. We agreed to return at the first opportunity. This was a new, one and a half mile stretch of trail. Our curiosity burned.
As we crested the western shoulder of Mt. Townsend, an icy breeze blowing up off Puget Sound met our faces and fingers. We didn’t linger at the top, moving quickly for the windbreak of the treeline below us.
When the trail forked we began climbing, shouldering the ridge of Mt. Townsend again for its western slope. We dropped back into a colorful world, down to the edge of Silver Creek. We followed its tumbling song uphill until the mossy tunnel of a trail opened into the Silver Lake basin.
We sat on a domed rock that jutted into the water to eat some breakfast. I watched the trout swimming their tangents. A man cast for them on the far shore of the lake. I quietly wished the trout luck and the man none. With the cold of stillness setting in, we took off again to follow Silver Creek downstream for three miles until the trail spit us out at the end of the road, a mile from where we’d started our morning’s adventure.
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In place attachment science, a person - place - process framework is used to describe the dimensions of the phenomenon. “Thus, given any place attachment, the framework leads us to consider who is attached, what they are attached to, and how (psychologically) they are expressing their attachment,” write Professors Gifford and Scannell in The Psychology of Place Attachment.
The how has captured me of late, the “psychological process dimension.” We both express and experience our place attachments affectively (with emotion), cognitively (with thought), and behaviorally (with action). We love our places; we memorize them; we visit and care for them. These psychological process components feed each other until what we know of the place matures into something more akin to instinct.
Gifford and Scannell write, “As one becomes attached to a place, they develop a mental representation of that place, containing a mental map and route knowledge of the place’s arrangement.” Mount Townsend – easily the most popular hike of the entire range outside the national park – was the very first hike I went on in the Olympic Mountains, ten years ago in November. We’ve hiked dozens of trails and hundreds of miles since, returning to the same switchbacks, to the same peaks and saddles and passes, year after year, tracing with our feet lines simultaneously being etched in our mental maps.
It’s not that I don’t crave novelty, but that I find it constantly, without having to leave home. To know a place with the intimacy of feet on earth for miles and miles, time and time again, year after year, and yet find these moments of astonishment – in its endless iterations of weather, of flowers, of circumstances – is to me a richer reward than far-flung travel. With investments of time and attention we’ve earned the privilege of witnessing this place intimately. The dimension of relationship makes any novelty all the more surprising.
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Three mornings later, on the eve of Summer Solstice, we were back. We woke in the camper on the edge of Forest Road 2820 at the sound of the first bird. It was 3:58 in the morning, two minutes before our alarm was set to go off. The day was just beginning to suggest itself in our west facing view.
Alex made coffee. We piled into the cab with our steaming mugs and drove the rest of the way up the pitted road to our trailhead at its terminus. The skies were blue, the air was ten degrees warmer than it had been three mornings previous, and the forecast called for a perfect day.
We started out at five o’clock, ascending the Little Quilcene Trail again, but this time from its opposite end – the one that gave us a thirty minute advantage in driving time from home. We climbed quickly, following the dog who seemed to sense the work day that stretched beyond our morning hike, and bound up and down the trail, easily covering three times our mileage.
We reached the trail junction. The stretch of trail for which we’d returned lay beyond. As we continued south, the Welch Peaks, Buckhorn and Iron mountains rose up, snow still clinging to their steep, north facing slopes. Looking north we could see the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the San Juan Islands. The blanket of snow and hoarfrost had melted, exposing perfect mounds of phlox that dotted the wide western shoulder of Mount Townsend.
As the trail crested, Mount Rainier greeted us from across Puget Sound. St. Helens, Adams, Glacier, and Baker were all visible, rising above the glinting waterways and velvet punctuation of the Salish Sea and all her islands. We took the victory lap around the top of the broad mountain, taking in the 360 degree views before the time constraints on our day spurred us to hustle down again the way we’d come, reveling in the convergence of good fortune and deliberate action which allowed us to welcome summer in such a way.
