Some Musings on a Recent Excursion

I made several tactical errors before and during a trip I made to Mt. Hood on the 5th of July. They all involved not recognizing the realities of the situation, and/or my own needs, limitations, or proclivities. Though they were all minor, the sum total really got into my head at times, so that I was berating myself for my poor judgement, and was frequently mired in the muck of judgemental criticism, rather than being present in that alpine splendor. 

My first mistake was in planning the trip for the day after the Fourth, though not because that was a bad day in itself. The problem was that I couldn’t get to sleep until well after midnight because of the sounds of war (the ban on fireworks within Vancouver city limits doesn’t seem to have deterred many people from firing them off, possibly because there is almost no enforcement of the law) coming through the bedroom window, which needed to be open to cool the room to a temperature at which I could sleep after what had been a 93⁰ day. I have been stubbornly refusing to install the air conditioner that I’ve been using in that window every summer for the last 11 years, partly to save money, and partly because I don’t want to give up the fresh air, but mostly because I am not fond of heat and have been known to camp out under the ac on any days over 85⁰, and last summer I never actually acclimated to the heat. That led to some less than pleasant trips afield, and even to a couple scary experiences of borderline heat exhaustion. 

Speaking of heat another mistake was the wearing of shorts to try to remain cool. This is one I seldom make anymore, since I have finally implemented a pretty strict ‘no shorts in forests and swamps’ policy after so many times of ripping my legs up on briars and other sharp objects, but because I’d be on an established trail in fairly open country I thought I could get away with it. However, I hadn’t taken into account the fact that all of the ground up there on the mountain is either rock, or rocky pumice sand, and by the time I was following the trail back to the van my knees were so abraded that I was quite reluctant to take photographs from anything but a standing position. 

Because of my late bedtime I didn’t wake up until almost 7am, nearly two hours after my planned time of arisal, and even then I was so groggy that I didn’t get out the door until about 8:30, which put me on the mountain at 10, by which time it was really warming up, and the bugs were becoming very active. I’m probably somewhere on the ADD spectrum since I am so easily distracted, and despite my love of plants, fauna almost always trumps flora in the battle for my attention, so that my best days in areas with an abundance of unknown plants involve botanizing quite early in the day, so I can focus on the plants before it warms up enough for major arthropod activity. 

My next blunders involved rushing away from the van very shortly after my arrival at the parking area at Timberline Lodge, forgetting to take an insect net, and deciding to take only limited fluids and no food with me, under the foolish assumption that my activities would be centered around the van, and I would be returning for refreshments. But as soon as I hit the portion of the Pacific Crest Trail that passes through that area I was off, always wanting to see what was around the next bend, and by the time I returned 6 hours later I was dehydrated and seemed to be suffering from low blood sugar. But the lack of a net was even more galling, because I knew that only a few of the dozens of insects I’d photographed would be identifiable without a specimen in hand, although I had, surprisingly, managed to capture five of them even without that tool. 

Another bad decision was telling Pam I’d be home around 6. This was based equally on my desire to spend the evening with my wife, and on thinking I’d be worn out by that point. And I have to admit that when I got back to the van I was pretty much done for, because it took awhile for the fluids and calories to reinvigorate my system, by which time I was already back on the highway. However, if I’d taken the proper supplies with me I’d have had plenty of energy to keep exploring, and the time constraint left me feeling somewhat rushed at times when I was on the trail, as well as forcing me to deal with rush hour traffic in Portland, and the stop-and-go pace added an extra 30 minutes to the drive home. I do have to say that my beloved wife is quite accepting and forgiving when I text/call to say I’ll be later, maybe much much later, than she was expecting, but over the years I’ve come to prefer to be back sooner than I’d said I’d be, rather than later, and in this case it just seemed the right thing to do would be to get home when I said I would. 

And but the reason I mention all of this is that, unlike so many times in the past, I managed to not let these mistakes change the narrative of the trip into one of failure rather than success. It was a glorious day, in a beautiful setting, with an abundance of plants and wildlife, and while it may not have been as productive as I’d have liked in terms of fodder for my website, I did successfully find, photograph, and identify at least a dozen wild organisms not previously profiled on this site, and finding these signs of life in what must be an area that is pretty inhospitable to life for most of the year was usually enough to pull me out of my head, and my head out of my arse. Incredibly, I have watched beetles mining for nectar and pollen, or butterflies fluttering by in their brief period of adult freedom, and bemoaned my own self inflicted problems. But, for me at least, it requires a certain amount of vigilance to be present and grateful for the experiences that have been gifted to me, rather than dwelling on what may be lacking, and Wednesday on Mt. Hood was a rare day where I consistently exercised that vigilance, although I have to admit that I seldom remembered to do so immediately, and many of them kept cropping back up. 

So, my biggest takeaways from this day are to be realistic about both the start and end times for an excursion, to recognize that I’m not a kid anymore who can go all day without food or drink, to dress with all of the conditions that I’ll meet in mind, and not just some of them, and not to let my impatience for adventure and finding cool stuff override the need to remember to carry certain tools that will maximize my appreciation of the interesting things I find. And to remember that when I inevitably make these mistakes again, or find new blunders to commit, to be vigilant against allowing those errors to be the defining aspects of a trip. If I can see all of the ways in which I didn’t do or plan perfectly as insignificant factors that are only important to my ego, and focus instead on the grandeur inherent in the landscape and all of the wild living organisms inhabiting it, I can’t help but have a great experience every time I go afield.