Olympus
N the hilly residential section of Tacoma is a studio-workshop. On a certain September morning its inward appearance indicated the recent passage of a tornado—a human tornado of homecoming after a long campaign of camping. From dunnage bags, scattered about the floor, showered sleeping-bags, ruck sacks, a nest of cook pots, "packs," the rubber shoes of the north country, belts, knives, ammunition, and a thousand and one odds and ends. In a corner was an oiled silk tent, the worse for wear. Elsewhere, a clutter of ice axes, snowshoes, glacier spikes, guns, photographs, and hides occupied the available space.
The room and its contents smacked of the regions that lie about the Arctic circle, and thence, indeed, they had just come. For Mine Host was barely back from Mt. McKinley and many months of venturesome exploration in Alaska.
Next to watching the other fellow prepare his camping kit and discuss plans for the Big Trip, when you yourself are to stay at home, I think the most exasperating experience is to hear the good tales told by the man fresh returned from some thrilling expedition. As you listen to the story of the big untrodden places, the routine of your everyday life seems woefully petty, and you are all at once distracted with a mad resolve to go and do likewise. It is a dangerous symptom, and should be prescribed for immediately—though the only real remedy I know is to close one's eyes and ears and flee from the place of temptation. For this is the Wanderlust, the joyful plague of the sinner who has lost all count of time and ties in following some wilderness trail, and desires nothing more than to lose them again.
If McKinley and Alaska were out of reach, across Puget Sound lay a closer land of mountains and little-trodden trails. "Why not try Olympus?"
The suggestion was no sooner made than accepted. Before I entered the room six months of stay-at-home was my unquestioned outlook, but all at once a hike to Olympus appeared the most reasonable thing in the world.
"Canoeing is the most satisfactory method of travel extant"
The pack train above timber line
From a photo by Belmore Browne
Mine Host, upon whom the blame rests, was out of the running, for he started East the next day. But his companion, the Mountain Climber, although scarcely yet with a taste of civilization after months in the wilderness, was in a receptive frame of mind. It took us two minutes to decide definitely upon the excursion. Twenty minutes more and we had picked outfits from the wealth of paraphernalia all about us, and at midnight we saw the lights of Seattle's water front vanish astern as a Sound steamer bore us toward Port Angeles on the Olympic peninsula.
At times on our journey the Mountain Climber reminded me that on his inland voyaging Stevenson traveled with a donkey. Inasmuch as our pack animal was a horse, that rather hurt my feelings; the inference was so obvious. However, that horse was more than half mule, so far as disposition is concerned. We hired him at Port Angeles and Billy was his name.
"And when I walk, I always walk with Billy,
For Billy knows just how to walk,"
chanted the Mountain Climber as we started out blithely. But long ere we crossed the divide separating the town from the valley of the Elwha River we realized that if Billy knew how to walk he emphatically refused to put his knowledge into practice. For Billy was a stubborn loafer until it came to night time, when he bent his pent-up energy to getting as far from camp as possible between dusk and sun-up.
There are three distinct methods of travel on the trail. You may ride horses and carry your supplies on a pack-horse. You may walk and let the pack animal do the burden bearing. Or you may be a host unto yourself and bear your entire household on your back, with your own legs supplying locomotion. On this trip we chose the middle course, and walked, while Billy was our common carrier. Back packing is a strenuous undertaking where many miles are to be covered, and yet a superfluity of horses is a nuisance if the going is rough and instead of gaining speed with many animals you actually lose it. So it seemed to us the best way was to go afoot, with a single pack-horse.
The brawling Elwha was our guide to Olympus, for its headwaters spring almost from the base of the mountain, and our trail wandered up the bank of the stream until, perhaps a dozen miles beyond our departure point from the highroad, we came to an appetizing meadow, and the pleasantest mountain home imaginable.
It was the log house of the "Humes Boys," who seem as much of an institution in the Olympics as the mountains themselves. Bred in the Adirondacks the Humes migrated westward and hit upon this isolated homestead in the corner of Washington, where a growing influx of hunters and fishermen finds them out and they are kept busy during the summer months as guides and packers to the many vacationists who know them and their knowledge of the surrounding regions. In the winter they trap and—I imagine from the evident tastes of Grant Humes—read good books on out-of-door subjects, close to the glowing stove, while the winds whistle up and down the valley and the snow piles high. Gardeners, too, they are in a modest way, raising all their vegetables. And cooks! What cooks! In years gone by some pioneer settler had planted plum trees, and when we first saw Grant Humes no housewife was busier with jelly-making than he.
"It's a bother now, and I don't suppose I enjoy it more than any other man likes such work," said he. "But when we're here in January and February, pretty well shut off from the world, and there's a great sameness about the food, I tell you a hundred glasses of plum jelly look almighty good—not to mention tasting!"
I can vouch for the taste of it in September; if the midwinter season improves the flavor I'm in a most receptive mood for a Christmas invitation to the cabin on the Elwha!
For those who have the right sort of taste, existence such as the Humes's must seem quite Utopian. Their garden and their rifles, supplemented by importations from the store "down below," feed them; their meadows supply hay for their stock; fuel of course is everywhere, and a little captivated stream brought to the house in a hand-hewed flume supplies an icy approximation of "running water." Hemming in the meadowland oasis are giant hills, their neighboring flanks hidden by mighty timber, their summits gray and brown beneath mantles of brush and berry, closing in the valley so resolutely that its hours of sunlight are almost as meager as in the cavernous fjord lands of Norway.
After Humes's the trail wound through abysmal forest depths, skirting fir and pine and cedar of unbelievable girth, or making irksome detours where some fallen monarch blocked the way. Needles and ferns there were underfoot, a drapery of moss overhead, and everywhere a penetrating silence. The most silent woods imaginable are those of the wet coast country, where the trees are enormous and set close together, thickets and ferns clutter the ground beneath them, and moss clings to the lower limbs; sunlight, if not a total stranger, at best is but an itinerant acquaintance.
When the whim seized it the fickle trail deserted one bank of the Elwha for the other, one of us leading Billy across while his companion, in vain effort to keep dry-shod, essayed perilous crossings on logs, often as not resulting in disaster.
Toward evening of the fourth day we dragged Billy up a final hill. Except for scattered and weather-beaten blazes, all vestiges of the trail had vanished, and, in fact, Grant Humes had told us that no one had been that way for two years, a fact testified by fallen trees and the unrepaired destruction of spring freshets. Hidden at the base of giant Douglas firs was all that remained of the Elwha, now scarcely more than a brook, its waters opaquely white with the silt of glaciers close at hand. Suddenly we emerged upon a hillock and below us lay Elwha Basin, where the river has its birth.
A cup, carpeted with grass, walled with crags; an amphitheater studded with trees, hemmed in by banks of snow, and roofed by blue sky—such is the basin of the Elwha. At the far end is a wall of rock, over which tumbles the jolly little infant river in a silvery cascade, and beyond is a snow bank jutting into the greenery of an upper meadow. From a dark cave at the glacial snowbank's base the river seemed to have its start, though beyond the snow, from still loftier cliffs, fluttered another ribbon of water coming from unseen heights beyond. Westerly a few jagged snow peaks peered down upon us over the nearer cliffs, and great shadows reached across the pleasant valley to the very base of our little hill of vantage.
At the near end of the basin we found a wonderful camp place all prepared by our thoughtful nature hostess. It was a cave at the foot of a cliff, whose ceiling of overhanging rock protected admirably against the vagaries of the elements, while wood and water were close at hand, and ferns and flowers made Elysian setting. We turned Billy loose in the knee-high grass, where he spent a week of loafing, unable, for once, to escape, thanks to the cliffs and a back trail easily blocked by felling a few small trees. Happily, then, we sprawled upon our blankets, with the sweet-smelling spruce boughs beneath us and the warm light of the fire playing odd pranks with the dancing shadows in our rock-roofed resting place. Beyond the ghostly circle of the firelight were the jet outlines of trees, and, farther, reaching up to a million stars, the mountains. And beyond those mountains lay Olympus, for whom we had come so far and now must go still farther.
The few unessentials of our commissary we left at the cave, and with grub for five days and bedding on our backs, and the ice axes in our hands, like the bear of the song, we started over the mountain to see what we could see.
A steep snow chute called the Dodwell and Rickson Pass was our way of passage over the divide to the Queets Basin, where the river of that name commenced its journey to the Pacific, while behind us the melting snows that formed the Elwha found outlet eastward in Puget Sound. As we trudged up the steep slopes of the Pass it was soon apparent that other travelers beside ourselves used the snowy route, for broad tracks showed where bruin on his own broad bottom had coasted down the incline but a few hours previously, a recreation youthful bears seem to enjoy about as thoroughly as men cubs. There was indeed a goodly population of bear in the upper regions of the Queets, and the hide of one of them is at my fireside now. It would have been no trick at all to kill several, for we saw them daily foraging among the blueberry uplands, with their pink tongues snaking out first on one side, then on the other, garnering in the fruit from the low bushes. But we could pack only one skin, so we left the others warming their owners, where they most properly belonged.
Queets Basin is a rough mountain valley, covered for the most part only with berry bushes, and with rocky gorges cutting its surface where the river's several branches had worn away deep courses. Overshadowing the basin were the outposts of Olympus itself, with the snout of Humes's glacier thrusting its icy seracs almost into the berry land, and the pinnacled peaks behind rising majestically against the northern skyline. Westward, the roaring Queets vanished down a canyon, through a country of the roughest kind, and, we were told, one hitherto unexplored. A journey to the sea following the white-watered Queets would be a worth-while experience, we thought, seeing the first mile of it; but like many another, the Mountain Climber and I, unless we live to the age of Methuselah and devote all our years to outings, will never be able to take one half the trips we have planned and secretly long for; exclusive of our cherished ramble down the Queets!
The packs slipped from our backs at the base of a giant fir, and we called it camp. Next to the bear who almost thrust his nose into my bed next morning, my most vivid recollection of that camp was the blueberry bread we concocted in the frying-pan, which was fit for the very gods of old Olympus.
Then we climbed Olympus.
Coming on the heels of Mt. McKinley, it was no great feat of mountaineering for the Mountain Climber, but nevertheless it combined happily all the varied attractions of climbing. The ascent of Olympus does, indeed, entail almost every sort of mountaineering, and some of it reasonably difficult and dangerous. In the first place, the approach to the mountain is perhaps its crowning feature; it is a man's sized trip to get within striking distance, and to its inaccessibility is due the fact that up to 1907 it was unscaled. When once reached, there are goodly glaciers to be conquered, vast snow fields to be negotiated, some hard ice work, and a lot of stiff climbing, all at long range from the nearest practical base camp.
By daybreak we were under way. Through bushes, across a ravine, up a narrow tongue of snow in a "chimney," and then over a shoulder of rock débris, an outshoot of the lower lateral moraine of the Humes's glacier, and we found ourselves on the seracs of the glacier's snout, with no choice but to take to them. By the time we had found a way over the broken green ice, with its sudden chasms, the sun was warm at our backs and the chill of the dawn was forgotten. Then we emerged from the ice hummocks which mightily resembled a storm-tossed sea suddenly petrified, and commenced the leg-wearying ascent of the long snow field above, which clothed the glacier and stretched toward a rim of dark cliffs, the summit of the divide between us and Olympus proper. Toward the lowest saddle in this rocky wall we set our course.
"The Humes glacier, over which we went to Mount Olympus"
"Our nature-made camp in Elwha basin"
From the top of this new divide we gazed upon the clustering peaks of Olympus across the huge glacier of the Hoh River. Jagged peaks they were, half-clothed, at times, with clouds, their ragged rocky pinnacles showing black in contrast to the dazzling fields of snow which stretched away below us as in some Arctic scene.
Getting down to the Hoh glacier proved difficult work, nearly every foothold of the descent being cut with our axes in the steep ice wall down which we worked, while yawning crevasses below our course were distinctly unpleasant reminders of what might happen should the leader slip and the rope man be insecurely anchored with his ice axe.
Then a mile up steep snow slopes, and detours around the base of lesser piles of rock rising almost perpendicularly from the floor of snow, and we were at the foot of the final climb. A last wild scramble up a chimney, the way made risky by slipping stones and treacherously rotten rock, a tug of the rope, a helping hand, and we were on the summit of Olympus!
From no peak that either of us had ever climbed, in the Pacific Playland, Alaska, or Northern Europe, had we looked upon more picturesquely rugged, varied, or altogether fascinating mountain scenery. Olympus stands at the dividing of the ways of a half-dozen watersheds, and from its summit one sees canyons radiating in all directions from the glaciers that cluster on its flanks and those of its lesser neighbors, in whose depths are growing streams that rush away to Puget Sound and the Pacific. All about, west, northeast, and south, are snow-clad, saw-tooth peaks, lined with glaciers. Billowing over these wild summits and hiding them each in turn, were wondrously tinted cloud banks, whose overhanging effects of light and shadow, and freakish alteration of the view made of the broad panorama a titanic kaleidoscope.
For an hour we sat there, our sweaters about us, munching raisins and reveling in the scenic wonders of the world below us. From a metal tube, well protected in a rock monument, we took and read the records of previous climbers, left since the first ascent in 1907. And then, after the habit of our kind, we added the story of our own expedition to the others and started on the homeward trail toward our cave and patient Billy.