September 19

Twelfth consecutive day hiking alone. Deep into the re-route now forded two rivers, crossed two high passes, saw no other people, my mileage is unknown, probably somewhere around twenty. Easily the most difficult hiking in all of Washington, if the weather hadnt been so good I may have broke down. The trail winding endlessly upward for 4,000, through bowls and around knobs and eventually to a windy ridge that broke out into views of the Napeequa Valley: a narrow valley framed by high, almost vertical, walls draped in a mosaic of granite white and fir green and autumn ochre, tied together by a meandering stream. It all felt like a taste of Alaska. And then, after a dinner by the river, I shot upwards out of the valley, toward Little Giant Pass, along an unmaintained trail that lashed straight up against the valley wall, overgrown with alder thickets, crumbling gravel, massive root balls. Reaching the ridgecrest, looking out at the crowds of peaks, I was overwhelmed by the absolute fierceness of the land, the angle of uplifted rock, the vertical sweep of it all just looking at it struck me with some kind of fear, as if I didnt belong in such a place.

No one in sight, feeling that I have vanished completely into a vacant world and that I am struggling, sometimes futilely, in the face of a landscape occupied by nothing but emptiness. At moments, any fragment of loneliness is amplified into a momentary meltdown, my own inability to deal with deep unbroken silence. My own inability to deal with the mess of my own mind. At other moments, I am filled with electricity, melting away at the edges, dissolving into the crisp grass at the valley floor, leaping from the high crags and soaring into the skys solidity of cloud mass. I am so alive that I can fly. Or my emotions will brake and switch, suddenly I will want to be lifted away and carried home, the landscape horrifies me, I must leave. And then, I am just as equally horrified to leave these hills, terrified of returning home to the theater of human drama.