Snapshots

My wife and I have an ongoing debate about whether I take too many photos. Or, more to the point, whether I keep too many of the photos I take. The matter has come to a head lately because our photo account just filled to 89% capacity. We get warnings all the time now. I tentatively offered that we could simply pay a little bit more to double our storage, but she rejected that on principle, arguing it was too much in keeping with a general ethic of endless, heedless expansion. “How many f—–g pictures of the same thing do you need?” she said. “Before we even think about getting more storage, you should go through and really decide what’s worth keeping.”

Our debate was on my mind a couple of weeks ago as my daughter B. and I set out on the Hummocks trail near Mount St. Helens. My wife was out of town visiting friends for the holiday weekend, and I had thought it would be a good time for B. and me to do a little winter camping. B., as might be expected, wasn’t terribly enthused at the prospect, but she came gamely along. Not that I gave her much choice.

I say “winter camping” rather than “snow camping” because my corner of the Pacific Northwest is currently in the midst of one of its worst snow seasons in recent memory. Things started reasonably in the late fall, with a decent dumping in October. But November was unseasonably–are we still saying that?–warm and dry, and in early December a massive atmospheric river swept through and poured up to eighteen inches of rain in the mountains over the course of a few days. In addition to causing devastating floods in the northern part of Washington and the Fraser Valley in southern British Columbia, the rain decimated the regional snowpack. It has yet to recover.

The Hummocks trailhead starts at about 2,500 feet in elevation. The area is called Hummocks because its dominant feature is series of mounds that are the lumpy remnants of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. The eruption had begun when an earthquake caused the mountain’s north flank to collapse. More than three billion cubic yards of summit and slope rumbled down the North Fork Toutle River valley, burying it with rubble that eventually settled to form enormous mounds, most of which are dozens of feet tall. Trees have grown up in the decades since—red alder, sitka alder—and the depressions between the hummocks have filled with water, making pocket ponds. Hikers can now explore this varied terrain on a roughly two-mile loop. Or, after a mile, they can turn left and head up the Boundary Trail towards Johnston Ridge.

B. and I were taking the Boundary Trail. My plan was to camp up at Johnston Ridge next to the observatory, which has been closed for two years due to a washout on the road leading to it that has yet to be repaired. It was late afternoon by the time we reached the Boundary Trail—we had gotten a later start than I wanted—and we still had several miles to go, so there was a certain amount of hustle. But the day was bright and clear and cold and lovely. Once we had climbed to 4,000 feet, there was even a little snow.

If the Hummocks Trail tours the debris avalanche, the Boundary Trail takes you into the Blowdown Zone. There, a different eruptive process called the lateral blast flattened every tree over more than two hundred square miles. All of which is to say that on the Boundary Trail, Mount St. Helens rises in front of you, resplendent from almost every vantage. Naturally I took a lot of pictures. I love Mount St. Helens, love its geometry and shadows, the lay of the land around it. I did not love that I could see so much of the mountain itself, that its appearance was more typical of late spring, with lots of rocky ridge striating the snow, so it looked like a zebra. But still I snapped away, trying to catch the prominence in different light, like Monet with his haystacks. (Perhaps I flatter myself.)

The sun had set by the time we reached Johnston Ridge, and the wind was blowing steadily, much more steadily than forecasted. B. bundled up while I hunted for a spot to set up our tent, but it was impossible to find perfect stillness, so I did the best I could. That done we crouched in a little alcove of the observatory and had dinner. In the lee, eating hot noodles, we marveled at the bright ribbon of color in the west until it was gone, replaced by a dark sky full of stars. So many astral bodies and arrangements. We pointed to them all: Jupiter, Taurus, Orion, Gemini, Canis Major, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia. They were a perfect prelude to one of the most unpleasant nights I have ever spent in a tent, battered by arrhythmic thirty-five mile-per-hour gusts. B. tried to sleep, her eyes clamped shut, occasionally moaning in weary distress. I had brought an extra sleeping bag and wrapped her in it. When I finally heard her muffled snores from her deep, downy cocoon, I almost wept in relief. I’m not kidding.

The next morning we woke before dawn. The wind had died down some, and B. dragged herself from the tent while I made breakfast and warm drinks. Together we watched the sun rise over the eastern hills. Once it was up, we packed everything and started down. B. was quiet, looking out at the landscape. I followed behind, hoping she’d had a decent time; or, failing that, a reasonable enough time that could after an interval transmogrify in her memory into a sufficiently good time such that she might perhaps be willing to try again, feeling some affection for this place. This, for me, the paradox of the shifting baseline: that the present state of the Earth, which so often can drive me to near despair, will be the historical ideal that she in the future will have to fight to bring back.

My wife came home a day later and asked how the trip was. “It went okay,” I said. That night, after B. had gone to bed, I asked if she (B.) had shared any unvarnished opinions out of my hearing. I was bracing for a harsh review. “You know, I think she actually had a good time,” my wife said. “She went on and on about the stars.”

All photos by the author, naturally

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