Fighting drowsiness after many miles of dusty road, I listened to a radio drama called The Brain. Nothing like an audio monster movie to send the night sinister, but it didn’t. I felt only the calm of the wild dark and a growing desire to close my eyes. A bit after midnight I turned on to tiny Forest Road 2325 and followed it to the end, just a mile of ruts and rocks. I camped on the border between a clear-cut and big trees. Not far away the voice of Dark Creek talked me to sleep in no time.
−−
I have to admit that I was attracted to the Dark Divide at least as much by its name as by its other qualities. “Dark Divide”—an evocative label naming two traits bottomless in implication, endless in association.
The “divide” part of the name is no mystery. This ridge serves as the watershed between the Cispus and Lewis river drainages. As for the “dark” part, I’d assumed the name derived from the black basalt of the region’s most prominent landforms—Hat, Shark, and Kirk rocks, Dark and Snagtooth mountains, Craggy and Badger peaks—or perhaps from some tenebrous history I did not know. But it turns out that Dark is a patronymic, as I learned from Keith McCoy’s book The Mount Adams Country: Forgotten Corner of the Columbia River Gorge. (McCoy was an insurance man, local historian, and third-generation resident of the Columbia Gorge country south of the Dark Divide.)
I’d noticed that one of the mountains west of Juniper Ridge was McCoy Peak. It was named for Keith’s grandfather and uncle, Will and John McCoy, who arrived in 1882, working on the Oregon Rail and Navigation Line as it punched its way out the Columbia River slot toward the sea. Both left their jobs as engineers to plant orchards and build mills in the White Salmon Valley, but in the winter they mined gold up north in the black rock heights then called the Niggerheads. They had a mining partner by the name of John Dark, and it was he whose name stuck to Dark Mountain, Dark Meadow, Dark Creek, and, eventually, the Dark Divide. In time the term became a descriptive and acceptable alternative for the old racist name.
Even as Dark and his partners were panning gold, the area that would be sprinkled with their names became a part of the Mount Rainier Forest Reserve—“created,” as McCoy wrote, “by a far-off Congress in 1897 for future division into national forests of manageable size.” Had the entirety of that set-aside become a real reserve, broken wilderness would not be a question here. There would also be few towns and little population for many miles around. Instead, large areas were given to the railroads, thus entering the private estate (mostly flowing later to the large timber companies), while the remaining public land was indeed divided. In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt carved out the Columbia National Forest, and in 1949 Congress changed it to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest—establishing the long-term landlord of the denizens of the Dark Divide.
For a far longer term, perhaps twenty thousand years, the Klickitat and Yakama Indians roamed these punctuated lands. The poles of their universe were the Cascade volcanoes—Tahoma (Rainier) to the north, Pahto (Adams) on the east, Wyeast (Hood) to the south, Loo Wit (St. Helens) in the west. The mountains themselves became personalities in their pantheon; Loo Wit and Wyeast were said to have been frustrated lovers whose forbidden tryst caused the collapse of the fabled natural arch known as Bridge of the Gods, where a steel span now crosses the Columbia. Particular bands made strongholds near each of the peaks.
The Indians traded among themselves—salmon from the river, obsidian from the Oregon deserts, shell from the coast, mountain-goat horn from the Goat Rocks, east of Tahoma. The crosspiece of the Dark Divide made both a highway between the Pahto country and the lands in the shadow of Loo Wit and beyond and a barrier between Tahoma and the big river. This natural pathway became indented long before the Forest Service designated it Boundary Trail No. 1—boundary because it is a border between the ancestral Columbia and Mount Rainier national forests, No. 1 for the primacy of the route. On the western flanks of Mount Adams, Council Bluff furnished a gathering point for local bands and all who passed through. A settlement at Council Lake, at the bluff’s base, was long ago abandoned, some Klickitats say, because of numerous Bigfeet near there.
As the local culture and lands shifted from Indian to white, Asian, and Hispanic, and sometimes back again when tribal lawsuits succeeded in enlarging reservations (such as the Yakamas on Mount Adams), people of all colors were drawn to the valleys beneath the peaks. Villages sprang up along the Toutle below St. Helens, the Cowlitz under Rainier, the White Salmon down from Adams. Farms replaced camas-lands, muzzleloaders took the deer and elk instead of arrows. But through it all, the black-capped highlands between the peaks remained remote. Except for a few prospectors like Dark and the McCoys, the odd trapper and hunter, and early graziers following sheep and errant cattle, next to no one penetrated the Dark Divide.
Then a succession of land routes—two sets of rails, a scenic highway of mossy masonry, finally an interstate freeway—made their ways up and down the Columbia Gorge. Dams pooled the river and blocked the salmon, even as they let barges pass for the first time to the Snake River and beyond, and the great trees fed mills as they became something more than obstacles to farming. Hood River, Washougal, White Salmon, and The Dalles; Stevenson, Underwood, and Carson; Morton, Randle, and Packwood; Woodland, Cougar, Toledo, and many other settlements grew into more or less permanent towns along the lower flanks of the southern range. Several new types of anthropoid apes began to roam the old Indian trade route and the high valleys springing from it: the logger, the miner, the grazier, the homesteader, the hiker. And then a great power, the United States Forest Service, dedicated but confused, began to divvy up the Dark Divide among them.
Camping on a line between the land as it was and as it had become, I dreamed strange sagas of knives, trees tumbling among shaggy black rocks, and a land with a brain of its own.
−−
I awoke to see Dark Mountain above me. Jumbo Peak bulked up to its right, and in between lay a lump with no name. I christened it Dumbo Peak, for the obvious reason and because anyone would have to be a Dumbo to be up there without water (as I nearly had been on my Juniper Ridge hike) and because to get up there it would be nice to have that esteemed pachyderm’s ears. Mountain chickadees and dark-eyed juncos chipped open the day at my breakfast of banana pancakes, and a raven scouted over, flapping audibly. Two young grouse hunters from Amboy, a village on the far side of St. Helens, came by in a truck. One had a plug of chew in his mouth and wore a Woodland Logging Supply cap; the other wore a red hunter’s cap. They’d seen one grouse, had a shot, missed. Chaw said you could get up the side of this unit to the Dark Meadow Trail—“It’s nice up there.” That’s what I planned to do. I heard bikers’ motors and hoped I wouldn’t encounter them.
Dark Mountain projected a prominent visage: not too dark, scabbed with patches of yellow huckleberry and green willow, subalpine firs candling up here and there above the forest hem. Jet lumps of ragged rock cankered both shoulders beneath the gentle top, like dangerous moles. Well, that was one way of looking at it. In the morning’s cool, clean light, I was more inclined to take the mountain as a mountain, minus the metaphors. Malice, after all, springs from our own kind alone. I had found it just possible to project a sense of the sinister onto the Dark Peak of the Pennines during a dangerous, boggy crossing of a waterlogged moor one sodden English March. But this Dark Mountain, actually rather bright in the September overcast, seemed anything but malevolent.
I set off up a Cat-track on the south side of the clear-cut unit with gray jays following. They love these edges. Against my principles, I tossed a couple of crackers to see if the jays would take them, but the pearly corvids ignored my offering. How refreshing to find a flock of camp robbers unused to the camp. Perhaps it was just native curiosity that put them on my trail. A winter wren followed my “cherks” onto and around a slash pile. No bird carries a bigger voice or heart in a smaller package of feather and flesh. Talk about sophisticated micro-components: the
tiniest chip will never match a winter wren’s complexity or virtuosity. It was curious too, or maybe attracted to my T-shirt’s logo of the Winter Wren Society, an unorganized band of Northwest nature nuts.
The turf at the edge of the cut was alive with the bright red berry clusters of the prostrate dogwoods known as bunchberries, along with tiny hemlocks, queen cup lilies, mosses, and huckleberries. Few of these will last without shade, as the sun becomes too drying, or with too much shade, as the young conifers come in thick. But for a time such edges can be prolific. The “edge effect” says that habitat edges are supposed to be rich in species. Citing this, logging apologists say we should furnish many more miles of edges through the regenerative process of clear-cutting. What they don’t say is that overedging an ancient forest robs it of the ability to sustain populations of specialist species, which are far less likely to prosper on the borders than adventitious, generalist (and therefore quite common) animals and plants. So if you want a forest of jays, juncos, weedy grasses, and short-lived bunchberry, maximize the blunt borders of cuts. Soon you get to the point where it’s all edge, as in the Willapa Hills. By then the dwellers of the deepwood are long gone—the spotted owls, the flying squirrels, the martens and fishers and swifts, the trilliums and mistletoe hairstreak butterflies—gone with the trees that sheltered them from the fecund generality of the edge.
The day was sunning up. I shed my wool sweater and headed up southwesterly through splendid wet old growth, mostly four-foot-thick western hemlocks and Douglas firs five feet across. The understory was hemlock too, along with oval-leaved huckleberry, whose sparse blue fruits I ate. Big brown inchworm moths called Triphosa flitted through the shadows. Their larvae consume vine maple, whose green arches vaulted old clearings nearby. Slugs and squirrels had nipped the fleshy caps of mushrooms of many species. Elk had passed this way within twenty-four hours, their pellets still fresh.
Higher up the slope I entered noble firs, short-leaved and stiff, and white pines, with their languorous, damp brushes of long white-striped needles. A four-foot pine was a beautiful blue thing among the blue nobles and blueberries and blue lupines. Coming out of the forest I had the sharp impression of having indigo filters over my steamy glasses.
After two hours of climbing, I hit the flat ridge just below Dumbo Mountain. Beargrass, basket material supreme for the ones who went before, bound up the red, green, and blue huckleberries on the small-grained pumice of the plateau. Above, bikers raged, sounding like a motocross, then faded into the dominant silence. When I found what I took for the Dark Meadow Trail, No. 263, I saw fresh motorcycle tracks. My bearing at the point of intersection was 260 degrees Dark, 340 de-grees Dumbo. There was a water bar with a log on its left, a short stump on its right. These details could be important if I wanted to find my car again that week.
After a while I hit good old Juniper Ridge Trail No. 261, by which I would have come here had I persisted in my original plan. It swung me around the hefty flanks of Jumbo. Up here it was cool, cloudy, autumnal, silent but for an exercised Douglas squirrel, an equally agitated chipmunk, a few birds tinkling or screeing, a quiet burble of water . . . So! I could have obtained water here when I was hiking—if I’d made it this far. Only one dark little brook was not dry, and this trickle was buried deep in brush, hard to reach. Mercifully, the cycles I’d heard were gone, headed down Boundary Trail No. 1. I reckoned the squirrel and chipmunk were registering their opinions of the recent invasion, though maybe it was me they were yammering at.
Dark Meadow consisted of grassy strawberry clearings littered with old logs and stumps from a great burn and studded with clumps of huckleberry, willow, and mountain ash. The openings were small, more willow flats than great meadowlands. Red vegetation climbed the nearby lap of Dark Mountain, facing east-northeast. The mountain’s jagged basalt horns protruded above a soft-looking pelage of huckleberry underfur with patchy guard hairs of alder, ash, willow, and occasional fir. To the west it was lighter, rockier, almost arctic-alpine in aspect. Dumbo lay to the north beyond the pass, like a supine mammoth tufted with fir fur. Then came Jumbo, clothed with a heathy pelt rolling up to the jutting dome that from the north I’d seen as a great black molar—here it was more of a mastodon’s hump.
Cedar waxwings probed the mountain ash berries, their thin “sweet, sweet” giving them away. One of the tufted birds, with cinnamon chest and cherry-studded wings, crowned a noble fir scepter—taking it for a cedar? Sprinkled along the rutted trail I saw evidence: bittersweet-colored berry skins. These pert birds ate just the seed and pulp. Eating was on my mind, too, as I watched the waxwings and crisscrossed Dark Meadow. I tried a mountain ash berry and found it tart and juicy, a little like rose hips, to which it is related. I chewed the tough seeds and decided ash berries might make a nice chaser to the surfeit of sweet huckleberries.
Behind my grandmother’s house in Denver grew two stately mountain ashes, her favorites. When the thick clusters of berries came ripe, more orange, less red than these, my brother Tom and I would pluck bunches, take shelter, and pelt one another with the hard fruit. The riper ones made realistic red splotches on the target’s skin. When one tree became diseased, Gram had a tree service come to remove it—but they took the healthy one instead. No more berry wars. A pallid, nonfruiting double cherry, useless to birds and to us, took the place of those treasured trees. Gram never got over it. And I, in the absence of our favorite pellets, never investigated the other utilities of rowan berries. Now, nibbling, and seeing the bushels of berries of this and several other types all around, I was struck again by how much there was for an enterprising primate to eat.
I spotted a parsley fern at the base of a massive hemlock, its golden-fruited fertile fronds erect. Sedges and marsh marigolds greened the marge of a little pond, shallow and silty. A savannah sparrow, adaptee to this fire-sponsored savanna, called and showed in the willows. Where I turned back, before Trail No. 1, I crossed Dark’s lap and headed up over the saddle to the west, a field of corn lilies lay fading. Their seedpods split out like many-legged beetles crawling down the stems, ready to green next year’s meadow. Rattly in the afternoon breeze, brown and withered like tobacco leaves curing, they gave a deeply autumnal feeling to the place and time. Beside a dry ephemeral pond, a few blooms of Douglas spiraea—that most ethereal of flowers, with hazy pink puffs and ineffably sweet scent—stayed summer a bit. And down in the azalea scrub, one last white blossom survived among all the seed heads. Its scent was sweet too, pearlike and very faint, with a hint of gardenia. But the season was spent in Dark Meadow; the late afternoon chill said so. How the winter winds would howl up from Snagtooth and down from Dark I didn’t want to know.
I picked a bunch of dwarf huckleberries, a species new to me, reminiscent of the wild blueberries of Maine. It was past time to head down. I found the point where I’d come up from the forest, more or less—though everything looked different going the other way, and the compass came in handy. I struck a route a little to the south so as to see new things, like the first Alaska yellow cedar of my journey. This is the tree whose wood has held so many carved and painted impressions of Bukwus and Dzonoqua on the totems and masks of the north, but these droopy specimens were barely big enough to make a rattle.
Coming down was much faster as I swung apelike through the old growth. I left it in the deep hope that it would not become a unit. I reached Powdermilk, opened an ale, and drank to the Dark Divide and its constituents: mountains, meadows, plants, animals, pikas, Bigfeet . . . whatever. Everything but dirt bikes and chain saws. A varied thrush strummed in the distance. Jumbo was mist-swirled, Dark cloud-dulled, and a pale pink light glowed over Dumbo. The evening came on cool, but the sky blued into the dusk. There was nothing very dark about this wilderness.
−−
Only it wasn’t a wilderness. Not, at least, in the sense recognized by the U.S. Forest Service. The Dark Divide is the largest unprotected roadless area in Washington, hotly conte
sted between those who would keep it that way and those who would road, log, and tame it. One view favors “productive” (that is, extractive) use of the public estate by providing for the well-being of nearby mills and the towns they support; the other outlook wants to keep substantial areas inviolate for the experience and stored wealth of wilderness and for the well-being of the society as a whole. The mill-town folks favor recreation, usually with motors. The city conservationists, with their livings elsewhere, want trails for their horses and themselves (and increasingly, for their mountain bikes). In a short time, in Klickitat terms, the Dark Divide has gone from an unknown smudge on a foggy skyline to a cause célèbre for wildly differing publics.
Both the original Wilderness Act of 1964 and the notorious 1979 USFS Roadless Area Evaluation known as RARE II somehow allowed the Dark Divide to fall through their filters. Wilderness advocates responded with their own proposal, hoping to have the divide included in a future Washington wilderness bill. But when such a bill passed in 1984, the idea of having three new wilderness areas in the southern Cascades—the Dark Divide, Trapper Creek, and Indian Heaven—was one too many for the congressional delegation to swallow.
Senator “Scoop” Jackson personally nixed the Dark Divide the first time around, and Senator Slade Gorton assumed the same position later. I remember gently lobbying his colleague, ex-governor and then-senator Dan Evans, about wilderness in southern Washington at a Nature Conservancy Christmas party. A longtime hiker and sometime environmental advocate, Evans was interested but skeptical about the chances that all three areas would be accepted. In the end Indian Heaven (with little merchantable timber and strong support from hikers and horsemen) and modest-sized Trapper Creek made it in, while Gorton prevailed and the Dark Divide was dumped again, despite the best efforts of the citizens’ Gifford Pinchot Task Force.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 11