Tangled Bank: Writings from Orion

Turning Fifty on Silver Star

17 Turning Fifty on Silver Star When Thea and I married, we built the living-room ceremony around friends,family,flowers;autumn leaves,the local judge,a littleWaltWhitman; and a best-forgotten sonnet with a well-remembered message: that getting OUT would define our lives together, so help us.And gotten out we have; but never enough. A regrettable but formidable tendency ensures that many would-be naturalists betake themselves out-of-doors all too rarely.This misdirection not-so-subtly subverts the very impulse that drives us to work on behalf of the outside world. So biologists spend their time in labs, committee rooms, and conference halls, while conservationists haunt offices, meetings, and legislative chambers. Rangers administrate, managers delegate.And they all devote much more time, unless they are clever or vigilant, to a computer terminal than to the wild, be it yard, park, or mountain fastness. Years ago,when I worked for international conservation groups,most of my colleagues had been inspired by a love of nature. But they had grown far from the model I envisioned for myself: an engaged, yet oft-sauntering naturalist. Plainly, they never got out; and then they forgot. I took steps to avoid that fate, and over the years I have made certain to get out often, if only modestly.That is one reason I live where I do, where even fetching the mail is an adventure.But I have not escaped that insidious counter-pull altogether,especially when it comes to longer,more physically demanding excursions far from the desk, mail, telephone, terminal, and all other anchors on the ambler’s drift. Inourearlytwenties,TheaandIbelongedtotheUniversityof Washington Conservation Education and Action Council.We watched David Brower movies on the North Cascades and other imperiled wildlands, secure in the knowledge that we would see all those charmed scenes with the aid of boots and backpacks.Thirty years later, the treks to high meadows and wilderness beaches have been far fewer than we’d anticipated.The summer we both turned fifty, we decided to mend our ways. TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 18 I suppose we did it partly to prove we still could, partly out of a sense of summers slipping by rapidly and irretrievably.No matter.On July 18 we girded, loaded, and stretched our loins, and set out on a trailhead recently redeemedfromanoldforestlookoutroadinWashington’ssouthwesternmost Cascades.Silver Star Mountain was reputed to be a fine place for butterflies. Since these insects favor flowers,the mountain held high promise forThea’s primary interest too. Our first morning broke to Mount Adams emerging from the night into a slurry of rose mist and summer sun.The snowy cone suffered in competition with the dawn-and-dew-struck flora.Tall orange Columbia lilies swayed on a light breeze all around the carefully placed gray dome of our tent. A canopy of creamy umbels and full-maned yellow composites wrapped outbursts of magenta paintbrush, furry mariposa lilies, blue gentians,and scarlet columbines.Our perch on the flower-strewn slope was solitary, since a lack of surface water deterred backpackers.You wouldn’t know it from the lushness of the turf. For two days we explored the slopes, trails, hollows, and peaks of Silver Star, and I turned over my first halfcentury in the embrace of four white volcanoes. And the butterflies? I have never seen such a spectacle in butterflysubtle western Washington. Only fourteen species, but thousands of golden western sulphurs,hundreds of wax-and-cherry Clodius parnassians, chalcedony and Edith’s checkerspots by the score.Sharp-eyedThea spotted the small brown chrysalis of a western meadow fritillary on a granite chip beneath its host-plant violets. And as sunset glazed Mount St. Helens, she saw three backlit butterflies bed down: a diaphanous parnassian on a pinkened umbel, a meadow fritillary on a rush, and a checkerspot on a blown dandelion.There they stayed till morning rays warmed their wings and sent us down the mountain to water. One week later, we again took up our beast-of-burden packs for a trek into the proposed wilderness of the Dark Divide, northeast of Silver Star. On the summits of Sunrise and Jumbo peaks, among native plant society friends and mountain heather, we found alpine butterflies never before recorded in Skamania County. Come September, we kept Thea’s fiftieth among the red-and-blue blaze of ripe huckleberries that gave Indian Heaven 19 Turning Fifty on...