Skippy the Wonder Squirrel vs. the Volcano

What goes on beneath the surface of things has always been a fascination of mine, I’ve been all about volcanoes since childhood.

I used to drool over National Geographic every month–the science porno mag for budding geologists–looking for full page spreads of naked Earth. Think of it: Our planet with its layers stripped away in beautiful cross-section. You could see everything, the vents, the fissures, the chambers full of molten rock that could liquefy your finger at a touch. Magma was pulsing beneath our feet at all hours until it erupted into the glowing orange stuff of cheesy sci fi movies that everyone ran from, screaming.

Delightful.

You made one of these in school but only us cool kids added food coloring. 

To this day, I’m dying to see real lava. Burning gooey masses of the stuff, you know, moving. I missed the action at Mt. St. Helen’s back in 1980, being 1500 miles away at the time, six years out from a legal driver’s license, and no gas money. Or a car. So, yesterday I aimed for the second-youngest eruption I could find in the continental United States: Belknap Crater.Belknap burst its most recent gusset in the middle of Oregon about 1400 years ago, around the same time China started printing books, Indians invented the decimal system, and Arabs decided that 28 letters was plenty. It regurgitated approximately 1.3 cubic miles of spanking new rock, formed a broad shield volcano 1700 feet thick and five miles wide, and snowed ash down up to 100 miles away. Not too shabby for a youngster. It featured all the excitement any volcano could aspire to: explosive pyrotechnics, dripping lava, sailing pumice chunks, and congestive particulate clouds.

Sadly, all that remained by the time we hiked across it on Saturday was cold, black rock as far as the eye could see–barren as the moon, sharp as steak knives.

Our hike began gently in a forest setting. Well, it would have been gentle had my hiking partner not been a beast of XXL proportions. Meet Joe.

Joe is 6.2 stories tall. It certainly felt that way after trying to keep up with his long legs for eight miles over uneven terrain. The brief forested part was okay, but suddenly–and I do mean suddenly–the lava presented itself. It presented itself all over the trail.

There was no way to go but up and once you were up, it took all your concentration and ankle strength to stay there. Hiking on loose lava rock is a singular experience. Imagine trying to keep your footing across a massive pile of creosote-flavored Grape-Nuts. The endless crunching sound slowly drives you mad while the constant promise of a blood-letting keeps your senses sharp. You hike the razor’s edge of sanity for 2 to 4 hours, depending on your compulsion to explore (mine is intense), and then collapse in a heap of lunch at the crater summit.

Joe knew a little about the area, so I was whisked through the flashy tourist magnets first. Dee Wright Observatory is why most people get out of their cars, march up the tiny, groomed trail, and take off their lens caps. It’s pretty cool. Made completely out of lava rock like a child’s snow igloo, it features an upper deck with a huge bronze compass pointing to every peak visible on a clear day. Below lurks a dark room with windows that center each mountain in its frame, sort of a cross between a Hobbit summer cottage and an Orc lair.

Getting your camera to play nice in the darkness requires a willingness that I do not possess to read the half-inch thick manual for an Olympus Stylus point and shoot. Those with patience (and a better camera) achieve a fine effect.

Okay, so back to the Grape-Nuts. My eternal goal is always to experience something new. Like Mae West said: “Between two evils, I generally like to pick the one I never tried before.” This was definitely a brand new evil.

Never before had I spent so much time looking down at my boots rather than around at the view. Every single footstep had to be gravely estimated and carefully placed. To fall was to bleed. Pumice can either lightly exfoliate your little heels or excoriate your entire foot, it all depends on how hard you push. Joe was heavy, to be sure, but since he traveled on sturdy size 15 klodhoppers, his weight was more spread out. He didn’t even need poles for balance. I gripped mine like an octogenarian grips a walker and by the end of the day, I swear my dainty size 8’s rode lower from loss of rubber.

All day long, I scurried along behind him with quick steps and epithets. Balls of pumice rolled under my feet, grey dust billowed up to coat my pants and the rims of my nostrils, and all around was a blank wasteland of geologic destruction. I was in heaven.

After all, the harder the trail, the fewer annoying tourists you have to share it with and, anyway, I adore giant swaths of space cradled by rock. There’s something about a vista scrubbed clean of visual distraction that lends itself to walking meditation. I immediately found a rhythm. I pulled my focus up and out of myself to reach around me into the delicate subtleties of the landscape.

For instance, I became aware by degrees that I was not only seeing an absence of life, I was smelling it, too. All the familiar scents of a hike in the forest–moisture, oxygen, and the sweet rot of decaying plant matter–were gone. I only caught vague hints of them on the wind from many miles away. In their place were notes of ash, tar, chalk, and minerals that the warm sun drew from the lava. The place looked barren but to a mystic follower of sweet sensory deprivation, it felt clean. This was a new kind of desert.

There are two routes a hiker can take at Belknap: The first is moderate and the second is memorable. Most hikers opt for the moderate. They take the Sullivan guide’s word for it and march the 2.6 miles up a section of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) to Little Belknap Crater, squint into the scary lava caves, compare and contrast their collective wounds over bottles of Snapple and soggy sandwiches, and then head home.

This affords a little over 1000 feet of vertical gain, minor bragging rights–“Check out this scar!”–and one guilt-free beer when they get home. But Joe and I sat through three hours of driving to get to that trailhead, damned if we were going to spend less time on our boots than on our butts. We opted for the memorable trip, the big one, Belknap Crater, itself. We’re talking a six-pack of craft beer, here.

Belknap Crater looks close but it’s farther than you think, mountains always are. From the crossroads between the two, where passing PCT thru-hikers smirk at the weekend sweat on your brow, it’s about a mile to the summit. You can see the route options running clearly up the east flank like so many Kardashian stretch marks but what you don’t see is the condition of those trails and what’s involved in surviving them.

First of all, it was windy. When I say windy, I don’t mean “Feel that breeze!”, I mean “Hold up for a sec, will ya? I have something scraping my cornea off.” Every contact lens wearer in the vicinity was wishing they’d packed ski goggles. Secondly, it was just chilly enough to illicit cold-induced rhinorrhea, that nasal drainage that has you sniffing every ten seconds like a blow junkie. Lovely.

Thirdly, this was the angle of our quarry:When your hiking buddy blurts platitudes like, “Hey, it’s not like it’s as steep as stairs,” your brain screams, “Yes. Yes, it is. It is worse than stairs. Because stairs do not slide away in a skittering cascade of loose firmament beneath your soles with the slightest movement, and stairs are not so narrow that you have to walk a thin line like a nervous cat to prevent becoming like those loose stones, and stairs do not come equipped with a sand blaster set to HIGH and aimed directly at your pupils, and stairs are not a third of a mile long. And railings.”

So, Joe grinned when I said, “Bite me,” and then he lapped me like a track star and literally left me in the dust.After teetering over several miles of dark grey razor blades, after taking water breaks standing up because there was no surface to sit upon that wouldn’t violently aerate my hiking pants, after peeing surreptitiously between boulders while the wind scoured my heinie, after all that, THIS was my reward: Goddamnit, this was my first real, honest-to-Hades look down into the gaping maw of a volcano! Dormant, sure, but still.

A little more than a thousand years ago, the solid matter I was standing on was over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It would have glowed with heat and energy unthinkable to hike across, much less sit on. Shallow earthquakes would have made any sort of standing or sitting impossible, anyway. The wind would be an asphyxiating cocktail of carbon and sulfur dioxides and sundry other poisons that would have dropped me like a canary in a coal mine. The force of each blast would have sent a shock wave through the air that tossed my body like lint. The lava it belched up would be so hot, I would have been irretrievably burned and scarred before ever getting near enough to touch it. Every event this crater produced would have been bewildering, terrifying, and fatal to any living thing unfortunate enough to wander by. And it was only a baby, just recently birthed. I was looking down Earth’s belly button. So cool.

We hunkered downwind from the summit where calmer eddies swirled and fewer Grape-Nuts found their way into our lunch. On such a clear day, we were able to see all the star players advertised in the brochure, former eruptions that have earned the name mountain.

Looking north, Mount Washington (7795′) in the foreground, Three Fingered Jack (7844′) peeking on the left, the distant eastern slope of massive Mount Jefferson (10495′) on the right, and burnt swaths of recent forest fires strafing the woods below.

Of the Three Sisters extreme climbing combo, North Sister (10085′) or “Faith” can be seen on the left and Middle Sister 10047′) or “Hope” on the right. The baby of the family, “Charity” or South Sister stands tallest at 10358′ behind them and out of sight.

If you are a badass wilderness athlete, you have a story about climbing a Sister, and not in the Playboy kind of way. Their nicknames sum it up: Charity is Big Sister, Hope is Little Sister, and Faith is affectionately referred to as The Black Beast of the Cascades, or Ugly Sister for short.

For all the action of actually climbing The Beast without the DOMS, watch this. As an experienced peak bagger from Colorado, I can tell you it’s a true account of what a climber really experiences: lots of meticulous, slow-moving gymnastics punctuated by occasional pauses to take in the view. You’re just trying to have fun and not die.Black Butte (6436′) to the northeast, of recent forest fire fame. You can see fresh scorch marks. Take a place that dry, add lightning, and Presto! Instant charcoal.

Post-lunch, we headed back down to Little Belknap Crater to ogle some caves. Joe does pretty well with heights (when you’re that tall, you get used to looking down) but he balked at the depths. It was decided by a quick vote that if there was spelunking to be done, I would do it, and if there was sitting and uttering sarcastic commentary the whole time, he would take care of that. I shrugged off my heavy pack, scurried into the first hole like a gopher, and started feeling around while my pupils dilated to the edge of human night vision. If it was cold outside, this cave was the deep freeze. There was snow at the bottom of a 40-foot plunge straight down. Signs warned you not to get too close. I got close. I heard air moving around down there and my own heart pounding in my ears. A small rock helped over the side with my boot fell silently into the snow, giving the acoustical impression of a bottomless pit. I did not take a photograph (we discussed that earlier), but here is an artist’s rendering:

“So, where the fuck does Skippy the Wonder Squirrel fit into all this?”

Glad you asked.

There is a turnout along the MacKenzie Highway (Oregon Route 242) where a grand view and a sexy pile of rock beckons travelers to pull over and whip out the DSLRs. These travelers have snacks, the squirrels know this. Generations of breeding have evolved them into unbearably cute shakedown artists who waddle right up to unsuspecting families and talk them out of entire bags of Cheetos.

I know better than to feed a wild animal for all sorts of reasons, but watching the antics was hysterical. One furball seemed to lead the pack. We’ll call him Skippy.

Skippy had no shame, no hesitation, and no fear when it came to panhandling. He ran up to everybody standing still. Sometimes, he ran right over shoes and partway up legs. Charmed humans obediently leaned down and fed him whatever they had on hand–some even ran back to their vehicles to find more treats to perpetuate the cuteness–he was like a plump, coin op plush toy. When there was a lull in the vehicles and Joe and I were the only ones left, Skippy set his sights on me. I was only holding a camera but I was holding something and that’s all Skippy needed to know.

I leaned in for a close up and Skippy made his move. He grabbed the camera like it was the last doughnut in the bag and wouldn’t let go. I snapped this shot in surprise:

World’s biggest photobomb. I laughed for five solid minutes. Joe thought I’d lost my mind. I used this picture as an avatar for many years afterward on various hiking and outdoor forums. To this day, I bust a gut every time I see it.

There will be a lot of wildfires here in the future, violently redecorating. The view will become truly desolate, so colorless that I won’t need to shoot in black and white. Still, I wanna go back. With goggles.

September 23, 2006