for the Siskiyou Hiker
by Taggart Johnson
2020 is cancelled
In the last months, the world has become filled with uncertainty. Ironically, because of the nature of epidemiology, we can’t connect in a time when we really need to connect most. This is when we need to be with each other hiking, backpacking, camping, fishing and hunting, barbecuing, cooking out.
The Oregonian in me wants to be outside with my best of friends and family. But that annual camping trip is cancelled. Barbecues and cookouts: cancelled. Hunting, cancelled. Fishing, cancelled. Connecting is cancelled. Extended family visits, cancelled. Familiarity is cancelled.
So I find myself seeking those safe places that nobody else visits, which comes second nature to me, and they’re a real gift to me right now. In early March, before the axe fell, I hiked with a friend to a place familiar to me in the remote recesses of the western Siskiyou.
All around were mountains
The first time that I really went head over heels for the Siskiyou backwoods was on a hike by myself in early 2009. I hiked from a trailhead to a lake rim where there were endless jackstraws of dead trees killed by the 2002 Biscuit Fire. I lost the trail and dropped down to this old road bed that contoured its way around the high ridges at the border of Josephine and Curry counties.
The expired road prism was growing in with brush and downed trees, and an old aluminum post marked the wilderness boundary. Shortly thereafter, I was brought to this prolific saddle where another world opened up on that spring day in 2009.
The sky was clear and somehow a brighter blue than I’d ever seen. Right in front of me was a system of sharp and geometrically complex mountains, bare in many places, forested in a few random pockets. The land right in front of me fell to sharp, dark, canyons that seemed like blackholes, resting there as mysteries to be solved.
To the south I could see an unfamiliar range that I’d learn later was Preston Peak and its snow-capped kin. And across to the east, closer but almost just as high rose Kerby Peak, Grayback Mountain, Mt. Elijah, and the Red Buttes. To the south, the tip of Shasta, and to the north as far as the eye can see, Mt. Thielsen.
The names don’t matter. What matter is that on that day, I looked all around 360 degrees, and all I saw were mountains. From around that day forward, my life would become intertwined with these remote mountains we call the Siskiyou backwoods.
Rusty ramshackles and mountain valleys
I found myself at that same prolific saddle in early March with a friend, and things looked so much different than 11 years ago. Islands of forests were shrunken even more by a series of wildfires, Chetco Bar and Klondike. Many of those remote pockets of woodland were gone.
This year, there happened to be snow fields up around the rim of the lake. We of course didn’t bring crampons or ice picks, and I was worried if one of us slipped, we could have a long slide to a potentially dangerous crash, but we foolishly bellowed up these slick snow fields to a ridge we could traverse safely. We made our way west down the old road bed for a few miles, to the bottom of one of those blackhole canyons, to a dwelling abandoned long ago.
You might be able to make me out climbing that hill
I like these places, these old rusty ramshackle shithole cabins peppered throughout the Siskiyou. I like to think about how tough the people who dwelled there were, what their lives must have been like. Sometimes it feels like there are ghosts around there, and for whatever reason many of these places carry kind of a desperate spirit, remnants of a very hard life.
My friend, he really does not like these places. But I was going to do this hike alone and he asked to tag along, so I forget him and indulge in the old foundation for a few minutes, poking at old converters and rusty bits and pieces of junky little things.
I get bored with all of it, my attention veering toward a little river we follow upstream. The head of this watershed is an interesting place I’ve been drawn to over the last few years. There’s a miniature mountain valley there, with a shallow perennial stream lined by alders and azaleas.
This place is morbidly hot in the summer months, but even in August, the stream runs cold enough to fill small swimming holes that they take your breath away and drop your body temperature a couple degrees. That’s all between fields of bear grass and dwarfed old growth trees, some still alive.
Unlike the price of oil the day I’m writing this, a forest is really worth something out here, what with the shade of the conifers casting over a cozy and lazy river bank.
Precariousness and hyperfamiliarity
After an hour’s rest, my friend and I hiked to a ridge, met up with an old pack trail, and followed it back to the rim of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. That’s where we were met by more snow, miles of it in fact.
But the snow is not as precarious here as through those snow fields up above the lake. For the next several miles, I hobble along cautiously and meet up with my friend at another saddle with a view.
Each saddle is a resting spot as I bounce along the prominent ridge here at a snail’s pace, crawling along this no man’s land of roughened bedrock, beat up and pushed around by tectonic forces.
Each view brings its own perch over a landscape that grows only more familiar as the world outside becomes more unknown than the wilderness itself. This view to me is so comforting and engrained in my memory and in my heart. That geometry, the shapes of the mountains and the ridges, they are engrained.
No matter what vantage I spy on them from, they bring this comfort I can’t really compare to anything else. It’s not a deep or warm. It’s a wide comfort, this island of emptiness where nature plays out according to its own rules, and that isn’t always easy to accept.
See, I don’t have an overly romantic vision of wilderness. In the Siskiyou backwoods I’ve learned life’s hardest lessons, often by way of pain, misery, and overall disappointment. There are some amazing spots that make it all worth it, but I’m not one of these people who thinks wilderness means all meadows, emerald pools, and fairytales. I do cherish those places and definitely enjoy their bounty, but that’s not the only reason I go.
I like the backwoods and the mountains and the rivers because hiking uphill in the dark with blisters along random summits is more meaningful than anything else. It summons a sense of independence I just cannot find anywhere else. Out here, the possibilities are still endless, the opportunities vast. Out here from these ridges the American spirit is alive and well, thank you very much.
More poor decisions
We have to make a choice whether to go back down the snow fields we climbed up, or take a longer and more cautious way back.
“I don’t want to find myself sliding down one of those snowbanks with nothing to stop me,” I told my friend. “I’m going to go the back way, down the road, around the lake, and back up to the trailhead.”
“The snow will be soft now,” he said. “It will be fine.” But I disagreed and went further down the road, past more prolific saddles, and he followed.
“I’m just tagging along,” my friend said. “Whatever you say.”
“I don’t think there will be very much snow because of the exposure on that side. It will be nice,” I explained. But there was plenty of snow, miles more of it, and I realize we’d have been fine coming down the snow fields after all. Oh, well. Just another poor decision navigating the wild Siskiyou.
And you know, over the years, I’ve made a lot of dumb decisions in the Siskiyou, but never dangerous ones it turns out.
Those ice fields were rock hard and I was worried about sliding down and crashing into a snag or worse
We hiked around the lake into more snowfields and up some gentle slopes to the car. All in all it was about 18 miles, a torturous, wonderful, beautiful loop deep in the western Siskiyou. It was dark, and the snow was this mirror, dancing with the light of the moon to produce a bright light. I cautiously drove, navigating the snow banks, and drove back toward the new unknown. ###
Taggart Johnson is an enthusiastic hiker who lives in the Rogue Valley.
