Journey Journals

Day 76: There are many adventures in these pages of trail notes, although they only cover two decades of hiking. The texts are often too personal to permit access to other readers, and the art...well, let's just say that my talents lie in other fields. The penmanship is appalling, but when you take into consideration my normal penchant for unreadable notes-to-self and add in writing by flashlight with frozen fingers, some of it requires extreme effort even on my part to decipher.

Singly, these journals are widely travelled, at least in my definition of the phrase. You'll find a climb of Mt. Shasta in one, obscure geysers in Yellowstone National Park in another, and the deep backcountry of the Olympic Mountains in a third. For the most part, though, they chronicle a repetition of footfalls, thousands of miles...thousands, I say...walked within a stone's throw of home.

If the art is poor, it is good enough to jog the memory. The outline of a rock, the silhouette of a tree, the rise and fall of a ridgeline horizon...these have been executed with attention to detail. The sharp spires of the Tatooshes are recognizable, if not their faces, and the planes of fractured stone and sweep of a branch allow me to say, "That's the rock at the end of Switchback 3," and "Ah, this was that trip to Indian Bar when I saw the bear damage."

That said, as I grew older and the distances to destinations seemed to turn longer and harder, my time for sitting down to sketch and write shortened accordingly. I found myself making notes at home after a trip was done, even though I'd carried the current journal with me in my pack. It felt like cheating, that, so I abandoned writing in favour of arriving at my goal. Thus "A Wildwood Journal" ends as it began, not at any particular point in my backcountry career, nor upon the occasion of a particular event, simply as the rambles of restless feet and a spirit bent on adventure.