“We cannot overlook the importance of wild country as a source of inspiration, to which we give expression in writing and painting, in mountaineering and in just being there.” – Olaus Murie
This started a long way from the North Cascades. The sun slanted through big, south-facing windows inside the café of REI’s administrative campus. It was July, warm. We had just settled into cushy, overstuffed chairs across from each other in a quiet corner, and Matt was going back in his mind, retracing his history in wilderness to its beginning.
For me, this story had started a month earlier, on a hike to the summit of Mount Persis. Through the stillness and quiet of the tangible fog, hanging out at the back of the group photographing as they climbed through trees and up over snow, I caught a snippet of conversation meant for someone else. Matt was talking about a trip into wilderness that had changed his life. After summiting and celebrating, on the way down I caught up to him long enough to ask about it. The trip, he confided, had been to Whatcom Pass in the far reaches of North Cascades National Park, now over a decade and a half ago. It still held a place within him, as wild as the pass itself. I needed to hear more about his experience, his thoughts on wild places.
Although he grew up in the Midwest, Matt was no stranger to wilderness, having backpacked throughout the Appalachians of West Virginia, and in Kentucky, learned to climb on the sandstone cliffs of Red River Gorge. Even back then he wanted to get out, explore. “I can remember pretty clear,” Matt explained as I sipped my coffee, drawn into his story as it began to unfold. “I was sitting in a huge auditorium at the University of Cincinnati, in the back, flipping through a Backpacker story called ‘The Back Of Beyond,’ about the North Cascades.” Matt had never heard of them, the North Cascades. He didn’t know where they were, or anything about them, but as he read the article something clicked in his head, and it became somewhere he was going to go.
Months later, my living room dark after the last lamp on its timer clicked off, the sound of wet streets beyond the window panes, I try to remember my own first experience in the North Cascades. Certainly not as evocative, definitely more embarrassing. I had heard about Mount Baker so, seventeen years ago, as my first summer in Washington waned, I made the trip up to Artist’s Point to explore and photograph. The thing was, I realized months later, I never made it to Artist’s Point. I had stopped short of it, at Picture Lake. Mesmerized by the view across to a spectacular peak, the heather turning shades of crimson and gold, I walked around and fired off some frames of what I assumed was Baker before turning around and heading for home. When I discovered what I had actually photographed was the renowned west face of Mount Shuksan, I felt sheepish. But something, too, clicked about that place in my head, and I knew I had to return. And just like Matt has, I would, again and again and again.
Returning to his story, Matt told me how he had, from the back of that auditorium in Cincinnati, hatched a scheme to head out west. He ended up visiting the Tetons, Yellowstone, Glacier. “All the good stuff,” as he put it. He and his wife-to-be had spent five weeks, and all of their money, without making it to Washington. That would have to wait. Following that trip, he read an Outside piece about the least-visited national parks. North Cascades was one of them. The article, Matt recalled, mentioned how “a visitor would be more likely to see a bear than another human.” Something about that, too, resonated with him. “So the trip the next year became all about coming to Washington.” The two spent a week walking around Mount Rainier along the Wonderland Trail, then a week walking across the Olympics. Then, finally, Matt would see the mountains that had graced the pages shimmering with late-nineties-Velvia color in that issue of Backpacker. Driving up the Mount Baker highway, they stopped at the ranger station in the hamlet of Glacier and told the ranger, “We’ve got eight days, tons of food, massively heavy packs, and we’re willing to suffer.”
The ranger had the quintessential trip.
“We ended up going over Whatcom Pass, coming back down, going up Copper Ridge. It was….” and here he paused for the first time that morning, while he gathered the words to convey the sheer epicness of the memory—“It was amazing. It really was. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was amazing. It changed my life.” There it was. That sentiment spoken on the hike through the fog to the summit of Persis, now echoed to me, my coffee long gone. “I can remember the second night,” he shared, “we were at Tapto Lakes sitting there looking at Whatcom and the sun setting and seeing ice calve off the glacier hanging there and instantly I knew… it was a really pivotal moment.”
Knew, he explained, how everything came together in that “moment of synchronicity.” How clarity was gained. It was “the point in your life where you’re like okay, I’m done with grad school because I’m tired of accumulating debt and I don’t want to be in the rat race to try and have a job as a professor somewhere at some point in time, and I really am in love with being outside and being in the wilds, and it’s really important to me. It all made sense.” I relate in my own small way, in my own efforts to balance my career and my family and my passions, for photographing wild places and writing music, building and creating things. Matt was speaking to me that morning in the café, in more ways than he was aware.
I’ve also been to Whatcom Pass and Tapto Lakes. I, too, have stood alone overlooking the Little Beaver Valley while the gibbous moon rose over Wiley Ridge and the colors of the Challenger Glacier faded from vermilion to violet to pink, then darkness. And I, too, think of sunsets, the “elemental half-light”, as Laura and Guy Waterman wrote in Wilderness Ethics. Indeed, as Matt felt that pivotal evening, the pageantry of sunrises and sunsets in wild places has been well celebrated by nature writers over the centuries. “The loneliness,” the Watermans write of it. I feel Matt would understand, regard even, the words of Thomas Mann: Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
Ever since that moment overlooking the wild, wild Little Beaver and the scene of cascading creeks and glaciers and the setting sun, Matt and his wife Barb have done their best to go to the North Cascades at least once a year. Trips up the Big Beaver, bushwhacking into Luna Cirque. Up the east side out of Hart’s Pass, into the Fisher Creek basin. Up in and around Cascade Pass and the big mountains found there, down even towards Dome Peak. They have two boys now, Nick (seven) and Alex (four). They’re thinking of taking them up Thunder Creek, or maybe Cutthroat Pass. “Starting them young,” as Matt put it. Proper.
Our conversation slowly shifted from unequivocal trip reports and memories to more esoteric, romantic ideas. Of humanity, and wildness. He started by offering the notion of how, in describing the North Cascades, “it didn’t take long to feel really far away from absolutely everything.” And of how then, “in some instances, it’s like walking—not walking away from civilization, but walking backwards in geologic time.” Being in places that are still very wild. Places that, as he says, “remind us that we are not that advanced…not really that far away from the complete wilds that are still around us.” Connecting with that is a good thing—“a soul-worthy endeavor in a big way,” as Matt put it.
I was blown away.
So I asked him about wilderness, what it meant, how it translated in his mind. Our thoughts were echoes of each other, about reconnecting to the wild within, rediscovering a distilled sense devoid of all the clutter and chaos and all of the mechanisms we build up for this modern life we live. As he explained, he spoke more softly and more slowly. “Wilderness is a place to understand yourself as a human devoid of all those things. It’s also a place”—he paused longer this time, grasping at the thought—“a place that’s devoid of us.” The catch is, we humans indeed must want it, must as a species consciously choose wild places over developed ones, must recognize not everything of value has worth. “Part of the beauty of having places that exist on their own terms is still wildly important. It reminds us that we’re not masters of the universe, it reminds me who I am aside from any of those other things, whether that be just sitting somewhere looking out into amazing nothingness, having the time to do that,” and here he lowered his voice even further, almost to a whisper, “the silence to do that.” Again, a pause. “To remember that the keen sense of human observation is really sharp there, and we lose a lot of that when we’re not in the wilderness. Just a day worth of that is fuel for years of living outside of that.”
It’s a predicament: that we cherish solitude in wild places, but need fellow humans to support and protect them. “On one hand, I love the fact almost nobody knows about the North Cascades,” Matt confessed. “But on the other hand, people need to know about it. They need to go there, and it needs to have an element of human connection, because wilderness and humans are intimately connected no matter how you want to slice it.” He was right, of course. This was the quagmire of wild places, the issue that had seemingly no easy answers, even as our perception—and the very definition—of wilderness begins to evolve.
“I would like to think,” he offered, what seemed on the surface to be a step toward a solution, as the morning quiet gave way to the bustle of the lunch hour, “that the North Cascades can exist on the merits of just being wild, spectacular, and amazing and unknown, and that is good enough reason for them to be there and that will never change.”