Memories of Evening Shooting Stars and a Pacific Dawn

John H Reif

I awoke at dawn in a thin sleeping bag on a cold rock ledge high on Mount Hood, a volcanic peak. There was a silence broken only by occasional windblasts and a rasp of my lungs from the high altitude. In the sulfuric air was a violence and magnificence that far exceeded anything I had experienced before. Looking away from the bright emerging sunlight in the east, I glimpsed the Pacific Ocean for the first time across lines of clouds and mountain peaks. I had not reached the summit of Mount Hood; for although it was only a few hundred feet above me, it was unreachable from my location without ropes and climbing equipment. But the experience of that dawn and the prior night was sufficient. I had achieved something that would provide a vivid memory, and more importantly, provide me with an understanding of my true self.

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The day before had begun for me also at dawn, on the floor of a VW van that remains in my memory like a soggy, funky marijuana roach; on the van’s floor were many of these, along with soiled clothing and remains of paper containers of fast food meals. I was on my fifth day of hitchhiking from Boston to the west coast that summer, inspired by a reading of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” The hippy couple driving the VW van had picked me up the day before, and we had driven all that day and night - 800 miles or so further west. We were now on a highway nested in a river valley of Oregon, still hundreds of miles from the Pacific Ocean. To the south of us, I glimpsed in the clear morning sky a peak far higher than the other nearby mountains and looking unreachable with its crown of snow and ice. It was Mount Hood, the highest peak in Oregon. Although my goal was getting to the Pacific Ocean, this peak was an irresistible challenge.

Leaving the van, I took a series of hitches up a side valley to the Timberline Lodge at the base of Mount Hood. My last ride was in the dusty jeep of a retired mountain climbing guide. His misshaped leg told of a long ago trauma on the mountain’s high peak. He talked with such reverence of that mountain that I knew he loved it still, in spite of the violence he had suffered from it. The ex-guide told me of the splendor of the mountain and some of its hidden dangers. A few days before, the parents of a family of four had been killed near the high summit in an icefall released by the warming summer sun. He described a route on the south side of Mount Hood that provided a degree of protection from these icefalls, as long as the climb was done at night when the ice remained stable. He offered to loan me an ice axe that he still owned, but it seemed to me too precious of a memento of his years of climbing the mountain to accept. Instead I found and trimmed a stiff wooden walking stick that was later to provide me with a safety from dangers of which I was not yet aware.

At dusk I began hiking above the Timberline Lodge through forests of Douglas firs that dissolved in a fine mist smelling of the distilled essence of the darkened green forest gloom. These forest groves alternated with short fields of grass, boulders and snow. The snow was still warm from the day’s intense sun and granular like corn. As the evening descended, the moon ascended, and the way was lit by a luminance from the snowy fields and peak above. I was hiking barefoot, with my boots dangling from the back of my pack. From hiking all summer in that way, my feet had hardened even to the snowfields that I sometimes had to slush through.

Hiking through midnight and past it into the dead of the night, I moved upward, leaving the forests on the mountain shoulders and then reaching open fields with only boulders and snow patches, with the summit peak above. The air thinned and cooled, and yet I sensed a still-warm draft of air moving from the lower slopes upward, bringing with it the smells of the lower forests. My eyes grew accustomed to the moonlight, which burned more and more intensely, with flickering sparks from reflections off the lengthening fields of snow. I reached a section of these slopes, which steepened so I had to trudge deeply to form ice steps. These slopes went forever upward, like a discarded loop of time-rope, repeating ever upward, ever upward.

But this was broken by the sudden remembered expectation of the mound of rock that the ex-guide had told me could provide a shield from icefall dangers above. I peered upward and saw a few hundred feet above me a monster of dark rock, far more forbidding than the light volcanic boulders otherwise cluttering the way. It was a huge basalt knob thrusting upward from a jumble of ice and broken stone that reached towards the final summit cliffs above me, lingam-shaped like a effigy to the Hindu destroyer-god Shiva. It was the caldera of Mount Hood, originating as a hot magma pipe penetrating deep into the core of this volcanic mountain through the soft ash and foamy rock that it had spawned. Encountering a pocket of water, the magma had exploded and tore away the south side of Mount Hood, leaving the caldera protruding through the mountain’s shattered remains.

The caldera was reached by a steep snowfield. Using my walking stick as a wedge to hoist myself up in stages, I climbed to a jumble of rocks just below the caldera. From these rocks I built a rough one-foot-wide ledge. I laid my rather insufficient sleeping bag on this perch and tried to sleep, but it was far too cold.

In the sky I discovered shooting stars that in the high altitude appeared almost as close and immediate as lightning bugs crossing just in front of my face. The first one made a long sweep that gave me a slight tingle of surprise, and was followed by a troop of many more, all emanating from a single section of the night sky. I forgot the cold and exhaustion in the glory of the dance of these shooting stars in the clear night sky, made far more intense by the high altitude. They entertained me for hours into the early morning. I must have dropped to sleep an hour or so just before dawn, for its arrival awoke me from a deep slumber.

In spite of the intensity of the rising morning sun, the upper sky had a darkness that hinted to the altitude and thinness of the air. Although the view from the perch of this ledge was magnificent, the dangers of remaining there increased. Within an hour or two after dawn, my soaring silence was shattered by a thunderous icy violence that reverberated deep through to the rocks of my ledge. By then, the sun had warmed the ice on the cliffs above me and refrigerator-size boulders of ice began to drop and smash just above me on the caldera’s upper parts. Only then did I appreciate the eons of battle the caldera had endured since its creation.

The caldera was providing me a partial protection from the icefalls, but perhaps not for much longer, so my thoughts turned to the descent. But it appeared that the descent was even more challenging than the ascent. The slope below was very steep and a section of the slope curved both downward and sidewise below me, like a giant slide made of blue-green ice, leading down to a near-vertical hanging glacier descending many hundreds of feet.

One further smash of an ice boulder propelled me to lace on my boots and grab my walking stick. I stood up on the ledge, peering downward with an unexpected elation. It felt like I had dropped a rope of time downward, secure at one end on the ledge in the here and now, and dropping into the safety of the future far below. Guided by this imaginary safety-rope, I descended downwards by an alpine technique known as a glissade, sliding on my boots through the corn snow while leaning backward on the walking stick so as to slow and control the rate and direction of descent, avoiding the glacier’s upper slope.

On this descent, the time-rope which I followed swept exhilarating arcs downward through the snow fields, like the arc of the shooting stars I had observed crossing last night’s sky. The time-rope stretched to almost breaking, and time itself slowed almost to a stop. In slow motion I slid on steep snow slopes between cliffs that I had not clearly perceived on the ascent. In a few minutes I had dropped a thousand or so feet to the safety of the more moderate slopes and green forest groves below. By hiking from there, I was able to make my way to the base of the mountain.

I would later experience many other challenges both intellectual and physical, but this overnight on Mount Hood provided me the most riveting experience, for in it I discovered for the first time the power and magnificence of a true and memorable adventure. And it is my view that building intense memories (whether with other people or alone) is the one thing we do that allows us to fully reach our human potential – beyond even any of our achievements.

The meteorite shower I experienced that night on Mount Hood provides an encore every summer on August 11. Although it is muted at lower altitudes, it still triggers vivid memories of that overnight on Mount Hood, and it is at those times that I feel most alive.