BobRat

The North Cascades

Permanence. That was all I could think when we arrived at Louis Lake, set in a high basin, in an out-of-the-way arm of the North Cascades. The big granite faces and jagged peaks rising 2,000 feet above the lake did not care about us at all.

It put me in mind of the epigram that Ken Kesey, who also had in mind the landscapes of the Northwest, includes in Sometimes a Great Notion: "A man might struggle and labor his livelong life and make no mark! None! No permanent mark at all!"

There was something small-making about the steady lake, barely wind-ruffled, and the stoicism of the mountains, which are impervious to clouds, sun, and the winter storms that leave them streaked with inaccessible snowfields. Strangely, I can't say that the mountains seemed inanimate. In fact, they seemed concious, only very, very old and completely unconcerned with the epiphenoma of human civilization, wars, and knowledge. For them, I imagined that the gathering and passing of ice-ages marks something like we perceive a single day.

Our lunch at the lake and our afternoon of scrambling around on boulders and through pines went nearly unnoticed by the impassive and inscrutable mountains. Even more so than the rest of nature, mountains are beyond ethics or concern. They bear you neither malice or benevolence.

We sat quietly for a while and watched the subtle changes of light on the big rock faces. Their crags and lines shifting with the sunlight, mediated and softened by the angle of summer sunshine. The air quite still on a nearly silent afternoon. And during the whole time that we ate trail mix, swatted insects, chatted, snapped photos, and startled a frog-- they did not change at all.

(Photos and descriptions here: Hiking Blue Lake, Hiking Louis Lake, and Methow Valley.)