Tiny Adventure
After doing next to nothing yesterday, I feel as if I’ve done a big adventure today.
I am sitting in my camp chair facing the lake, of which I do have a view, if only partial. It’s another perfect, clear, vivid August day without a wisp of smoke in the sky in any direction. I should be hearing the screams and splashing of all the children from the still-designated swimming area here at Lake Useless, but of course the summer-long algae bloom prevents that. Why come here? I’m sure the vaunted fish taste like mud now. A prize kokanee with pink mud-tasting flesh, ick. Kokanee are “land-locked” salmon, and I think I first heard of them long ago when they were referred to as bluebacks.
Last night close to midnight I was awake, and staring up through Janet’s little skylight I saw a white blob. Puzzled, I got my glasses. Well, it was just a particularly bright star, but I could also now see a whole bunch of stars, tightly framed in the little square in the pop top. I was enchanted, and lay there quite some time looking at them. They seemed like friends. I know that is cliché, but that was my first experience of it. I thought I recognized part of a constellation from the Zodiac. Leo? Perseus? I thought, “This can’t be much of a meteor shower if all this time has gone by and I’ve not seen…” and zip, a shooting star streaked clean across the skylight. I laughed out loud and waited for another, but that was all.
This morning was nice, a bit cloudy (the phone gods were right), which burned off just in time for a hike. I had a slow coffee time with my new novel, The Snow Woman by Stella Gibbons. I know nothing about it, so will find out if she ruined another plausibly good novel with her sort of bizarre intransigence. I packed my hiking book 100 Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades, by William Sullivan, my new camera and something to drink. I had an idea from the book of a hike to a little lake, and another idea of some “lookout” that Pam had told me about, without having the faintest idea how to describe to me where it was. It was not in the book, nor on any maps.
Climbing about five hundred feet, I hit the PCT and entered the Diamond Peak Wilderness Area, dutifully filling out the “mandatory” registration form. The trail went through that high elevation forest that grows the draping moss that indicates very pure air. I started to see the mountain huckleberry, looking deep purple, but still too tart. I could not figure out how to get my new camera’s macro feature to work, so I won’t share one of the darling berries. 
A side trail led to a pond with no name. I fussed with the damn camera some more.
Why doesn’t it have a name? Is it too late? We no longer have the effrontery to fling whatever name comes into our heads at things, blithely ignoring any previous names. So, now everyone gets to name it.
My destination, Midnight Lake, was off the trail maybe a hundred yards. It looked promising; there was a light breeze and not a soul to be seen. I sat down and stared at it for a while, drinking my beverage.
Then I thought I’d go back and try to figure out where this lookout was that Pam had talked about. There had been some signage at the start of the wilderness area, and an old dirt road. Maybe it went to a lookout, as they were manned in the summertime, back in the day, and supplies were needed.
Starting back to the PCT, I mistakenly chose a different path, and as I figured it out quickly, and also knew where the main trail was, I figured I’d intercept it just a bit to the south of where I’d left it. And soon I remembered something about the woods. Featureless forest, without a stream nearby, quickly makes you lose your bearings, so that you feel positive you are going in a straight line, when you are not. I stopped in my tracks, turned around, went downhill toward the lake, thankfully hitting it on my first try. From there I considered the ground, found the correct trail, and made the PCT, where I still had not seen any hikers. Confidence kills (well really it’s “cotton kills,” and I was wearing that as well), and many would have blundered around for some time and ruined at least an afternoon.
At the wilderness edge, I followed the dirt road for a bit, but quickly decided it wasn’t going anywhere to suit my purpose. Now heading north on the PCT, I got to a sign for a snow shelter, for cross-country skiiers, and it also mentioned an overlook. Ah. Lookout, overlook, someone might mix those up. No wonder it did not appear on any maps at all. Old fire lookouts generally do. I figured I’d walk until I knew if I continued I would be too thirsty and too tired to make it back comfortably. Sure enough, I came up to a turn and voilà, the edge of a cliff, a little rock garden with natural seats, and kinnikinnik and manzanita and other little flowers long gone by—and a view over the entire length of Lake Useless as well as Diamond Peak! Yay!
I think that the mountain on the right is called Lakeview Mountain, and is 7,065 feet high. I zoomed in on Diamond Peak which is to the right of this picture. It is 8,744 feet high.
I settled in the warm rocks there at the edge of a high cliff, and said hello to the thru-hikers who passed, two young men, not together but separated by several minutes. Then I took some selfies. I avoid this nowadays, but I need a picture for a profile, and it suited my vanity to have this sort of thing in the background. How small a distance separates me from the thru-zombies. I read literature and they don’t, I presume. I’m sure they only read non-fiction. Current non-fiction.
As I appreciated the contorted manzanita bush near me, I attempted the macro feature once more. I need more practice, but here you go.
The adventure concluded with a train and a French girl, but you’ve already heard about those.
