Washed Out
By the time I opened my tent vestibule in the morning, my views of Mount Baker were gone. The sky was once more a thick gray sheet, and it would remain that way for another three days. I pulled on my rain jacket before I set off to protect against the drizzle, but I knew I would have to contend with dampness for the rest of the day.
The trail going west from Park Butte was well-travelled and well-maintained, but the Book of Tim had warned me that it wouldn’t be like this forever. The trail grew more ragged the further I headed west and out of the land that had been protected from logging. It would be logging territory from here on out, at least until I made it to Samish Bay. My target camping spot for the day was a tiny 1/16th-square-mile patch of DNR land at the top of Mount Josephine, an island in the middle of a sea of logging company property.
After a few more miles, The trail turned into more of an old forest road and ran south along the bank of the Nooksack River. This forest road ended abruptly in a parking lot, but traces of an older road continued through the forest. Here, my progression became a bit more difficult. The only things saving my sanity as I fumbled through the forest were the river and my compass. I tried to head south as much as possible, but I had to weave around impassable alder strands and young spruces. The old road bed that I was supposed to follow was nowhere to be found.
I worked my way through the forest for the better part of an hour before I picked up traces of a road again. Suddenly it became much more well-defined, although erosion and fast-growing plants (mostly alders and blackberries) were overtaking it. Following any visible path, though, boosted my confidence and helped me continue forward.
The old road bed was punctuated with huge wash-outs, like something took a 3-foot-wide bite out of the road. Usually, this corresponded with springs draining off of the mountainside to my left. The navigation and bushwhcking challenges were mentally and physically draining – I was tired of maneuvering my body through thick alder strands and scrambling over old mudslides. Some of these obstacles were bad enough that I had taken off my pack to scout out the best route through or around. It was slow going, but I knew I’d be back on a normal roadwalk soon enough.
I took a long break at one of these wash-outs to eat lunch. While I was sitting there, I caught a smooth, gliding movement in the corner of my eye. Someone was watching me.
The barred owl’s persistent stare made me feel like an intruder on this land (I was, for many reasons). This old road was being taken back, and probably the only humans to pass through now were PNT hikers, a couple of people every few days.
Making it out to the logging roads felt both relieving and disappointing. I was now a much more boring type of interloper, just another hiker on monocultured patchworks of Douglas Firs cultivated by large logging corporations. It’s hard to walk through these types of areas without feeling depressed by awareness of the vast species diversity that was destroyed by mass wood harvest. I had learned about Potawotami harvesting guidelines at night in my tent reading Braiding Sweetgrass: When harvesting any living thing, it is imperative to take just what you need, no more than half, and to ask before harvesting. These traditional guidelines had a realistic view of the relationships between species that make up an ecosystem. Over-harvesting was short-sighted and a symptom of greed (the subject of many taboos and horror stories, e.g. the Windigo).
The last leg of my hike for the day was the homemade Mount Josephine Trail, which climbed at an incredibly-steep grade up the eastern shoulder of Mount Josephine. Someone had attached a rope to some of the boulders toward the top to assist with a difficult rock scramble – a preview of what would come in a couple weeks along the Olympic Coast. A jeep trail spiralled around and up to the summit, where the concrete and metal remains of an old fire tower were scattered about. I caught my first glimpse of Samish Bay in the distance, reflecting the cloudy sky.
Most of the ground was too hard to put my stakes in, but I did find a spot just a couple of feet away from a sheer cliff over a 40- or 50-foot drop. Not ideal, but it would work. I made a mental note to remember the cliff if I woke up in the middle of the night.