Three swings and some misses

Bingen, Washington, is a town of 774 souls and less than a mile square on the Columbia River within the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, a popular tourist destination. Founded in 1892 with a view across the river toward the 11,249‐foot Mount Hood, the tallest peak in Oregon, the local chamber of commerce says Bingen is your launch pad for adventure, a gateway for windsurfing, skiing, snowmobiling, kayaking, hiking, horseback trail riding, mountain biking, and fishing and hunting. Since 1962, the annual Huckleberry Festival in Bingen has been celebrating small‐town spirit, community pride, and the sweet, tangy flavor of a Pacific Northwest icon for three days the weekend following Labor Day.

Last Thursday, a compact, gray‐headed man in Bingen was taking a day off work. He dressed himself in a white tee‐shirt and blue jeans and ate a simple breakfast. He had voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 national election, which placed him in the minority in his ZIP code, although far from alone. Bingen is in Klickitat County, which has a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+11, meaning its politics lean Republican. Its U.S. congressional representative is a Republican, and the county voted Republican in five of the last six elections for U.S. president. The elected county sheriff is a lifetime member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association and a self‐described constitutional sheriff, so, judging from what The Southern Poverty Law Center has to say, the company he keeps may safely be described as right‐wing extremists who owe a debt to the antisemitic, racist theology of William Potter Gale, founder of the Posse Comitatus movement in the late 1960s.¹ Our anonymous friend in Bingen had these local figures in mind as he furnished himself for his day. He had been reading the 2017 Timothy Snyder book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, a guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism. This morning, he was thinking of Lesson 7: Stand out. Someone has to.

One hundred twenty‐five miles away, my brother John and I were sitting down to breakfast sandwiches at Huxdotter Coffee in North Bend, Washington, there to begin a week‐long road trip around the Pacific Northwest on our motorcycles. Our wives had joined us to make sure we got ourselves right with Jesus before climbing into the cannon and to review the schedule for the coming adventure. Our route for the week was designed to reach three objectives: McKenzie Pass on Route 242 in Oregon, Slate Peak in the Okanogan Range of Washington, and Cal‐Creek placer mine in the Rocky Mountains beyond Burgdorf, Idaho.

McKenzie Pass and Slate Peak are two well‐visited destinations for motorcyclists in our part of the world. I had been across McKenzie Pass before, but John had not, while John had been up Slate Peak a couple of times, whereas the closest I had come was on a trip that ended short of the summit. The Cal‐Creek placer mine is at the confluence of California and Union creeks at the end of a primitive road our grandfather and his business partners paid to have ploughed through the wilderness in the 1940s so that a drilling rig could be driven to the site. Rich placers were discovered in the area in 1862, and before 1900 an estimated $15 million in gold had been mined from the district. In the early 1930s, four dredges were still extracting gold from the deep gravels a few miles to the southeast of the two creeks. Our grandfather, a pharmacist, had the fever.

Off we went on the Mountains to Sound Greenway - I-90 to Cle Elum, where we veered south toward sandwiches at the foot of the paved guideway leading into Maryhill Museum of Art in Goldendale, founded in 1917 by Samuel Hill and named after his wife and daughter. I always pause when Hill makes an appearance in my thoughts to acknowledge his ghost, as I believe the story of his life warrants attention even in his death, and so I cannot fail to pay respect to his shade. A Harvard‐educated Quaker born in 1857 in North Carolina, Hill was, among his many interests, a tireless advocate for good roads, at one time saying, Good roads are more than my hobby; they are my religion.² In 1909, he funded construction of the first macadam asphalt‐paved roads in the Pacific Northwest, including a four‐mile stretch of road descending the hill just to the east of where the museum stands. The roads were deliberately experimental, employing a variety of materials to discover their usefulness for building roads and, in 1913, after an inspection by Oregon governor Oswald West and several Oregon legislators, inspired the establishment of the Oregon State Highway Commission.

We continued onward to the west on Lewis and Clark Highway, tracing the north shore of the Columbia River past Wishram and Dallesport. Nearing the Hood River Bridge where we would cross into Oregon, in Bingen, while passing the public parking lot at Walnut Street, I honked my horn at and gave a thumbs‐up to a gray‐headed fellow dressed in a white tee‐shirt and blue jeans who was standing there on the sidewalk and carrying a hand‐lettered sign that read, Trump is destroying America.

We crossed the Hood River Bridge into Oregon for perhaps the last time. Built in 1924, it is the second‐oldest bridge spanning the Columbia River, and construction on its replacement is expected to begin soon. I had last been across the bridge in 2023 when Mike’s Ice Cream on its far side had played Aglaopheme and Thelxiepea to lure me from beyond the brimming river to confer la petite mort with frozen ambrosia. We continued on from Hood River along the Mt. Hood Scenic Byway to its junction with Highway 26, with no strain needed to see the mountain as it displayed itself beneath sunny skies. The temperature had reached 88℉ as we neared Sisters and the Left Coast Lodge, where we had stayed one night on our return from Iowa in 2021 and enjoyed enough to reserve again to end this first day on the road.

The town of Sisters is named for the nearby Three Sisters, closely spaced volcanic peaks named Faith, Hope, and Charity by early colonizers, each over ten thousand feet in elevation. Moraine-dammed lakes are commonplace here where glaciers have retreated, each sharing a geological narrative with places such as Lake Chelan in Washington and Lake Wānaka on the South Island of New Zealand (over which I had watched the sun set a few months ago). A sixty‐five‐square‐mile lava flow to the west of Sisters was used in the 1960s as a training ground for Apollo astronauts who were learning how to walk on the moon. These were the attractions that had drawn McKenzie Pass into our trip plan, as the road to its summit led directly into this landscape, and it was the first of our three trip objectives, scheduled for the next day. As we ate dinner at Sisters Saloon & Ranch Grill that first evening, John checked road conditions and the weather forecast at the pass and announced that it was closed due to forest fire.(PDF) Although it is not unprecedented for us to roll up to road closed signs and have to recalculate our route, still, as if the leather‐covered sphere had come hurtling through the air and, unheeded, sped by, the rules of the game declared that this was strike one.

Friday morning breakfast at Sisters Coffee Company had us energized for the road, and we had them make some sandwiches for us for lunch later in the day. We had decided to substitute a ride along the McKenzie River for the canceled McKenzie Pass venture and rode the Santiam Pass portion of McKenzie Pass–Santiam Scenic Byway to the river headwaters at Clear Lake in the Willamette National Forest. Lodgepole pine gave way to Douglas fir and red cedar, then, at the far side of Santiam Pass, we caught a glimpse of Lost Lake, a geological novelty, as it fills with water each rainy season and, like a bathtub, drains entirely in the spring down a seven‐foot‐wide hole, thought to be a twelve‐thousand‐year‐old collapsed lava tube eventually leading to Clear Lake six miles away. As we passed the intersection with Route 242 beyond Clear Lake, smoke from the fire that had closed McKenzie Pass hung in the air.

The McKenzie River itself disappears for three miles beneath the remnants of lava streams deposited about 1,600 years ago before setting into its course toward the Willamette Valley. The first of its famous covered bridges we passed is hidden from view from the highway, but there was a sign at the turn‐off that pointed toward Belknap Bridge, which was a couple of blocks away beyond a bend in the river, and put me on alert to pay attention as the Goodpasture Bridge soon appeared from around a corner. The Lowell Bridge was the last of them we saw and the easiest to admire, as the bridge that had replaced it was its adjacent companion. The ride down the river valley had been a successful consolation for having missed McKenzie Pass: beautiful scenery draped the sunlit water, the road bent to the shape of the earth molded by ancient volcanoes and epic floods, and two witnesses to the languor of nature as autumn prepared it for the long night of winter continuing onward.

A break at Greenwaters Park in Oakridge to eat our sandwiches led us to a memorial to Maximo Yabes, born in Lodi, California, who had moved when young with his family to Oakridge, dropping out of Oakridge High School in 1950 to join the U.S. Army. He had fought in Korea and, in 1967, was killed in Vietnam during combat, for which he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest military decoration the United States may confer, in gratitude for his conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty. A fountain, a flagpole, and a bronze bust with the likeness of 1 Sgt. Yabes set on a granite pedestal form the monument, which we paused to consider and to reflect upon its meaning.

A swerve up Highway 97 put us on Outback Scenic Byway for the drive to Lakeview near the border with California, and our destination for the night. Of all the miles over all the years of barreling around North America on a motorcycle, those in the Oregon Outback stand out because of how unprepared I was for the landscape to seize my imagination the first time I crossed its threshold. It is beautiful here in the high desert of juniper and sagebrush; long, shallow alkaline lakes; vast maars, and fault‐block mountains. The sound of the Aaron Copland balletic Rodeo dances over the land. Bald eagles, falcons, plovers, cranes, and swans stop for rest in the marshy fields, while pronghorn graze on grass trod by the people who made the oldest known shoes in the world. The barricade of Abert Rim, at 2,490 feet one of the highest fault scarps in the United States and the longest exposed fault scarp (at thirty miles) in North America, directs the last turn before Lakeview, where a fill‐up at the Shell gas station last year was the lengthiest stop I had made in town until we unfolded our kickstands at the Best Western Skyline Motor Lodge and peeled off our helmets for the day.

During the Second World War, the Japanese armed forces developed an incendiary balloon weapon that was deployed against the United States. Designed to ignite forest fires and to spread panic, the bomb was the first weapon system with intercontinental range, predating the intercontinental ballistic missile. Dependent on the jet stream to power them to their intended target, between November 1944 and April 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army launched about 9,300 of the balloons from sites on coastal Honshu, of which about three hundred were found or observed in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. On May 5, 1945, a balloon bomb explosion thirty miles west of Lakeview resulted in six deaths, the only civilians to die by enemy fire on the U.S. mainland during the war.³

Lakeview bills itself as the Tallest Town in Oregon because of its elevation 4,757 feet above sea level and is the seat of Lake County, one of the poorest of the thirty‐six Oregon counties. Reading the local newspaper and walking around the neighborhood of the hotel told a story of a community that is knit closely together; home to a civic esprit applying itself to the problems of today and optimistic about prospects for the future; in other words, a vigorous outpost in the American West. In the news was the September 13 opening of a skate park for local kids to enjoy. A 2.5‐million‐acre parcel of the county was made a certified International Dark Sky Sanctuary in 2024, one of the few in the world and the largest of them, and boasts some of the darkest and most unspoiled night skies in the United States; the designation requires community support for the preservation of the natural environment. The MC Chuck Wagon Western Heritage Exhibit, across the street from Lodge 1536 of the benevolent Elks, occupies a flower‐bedecked and fastidious white building on a green lawn and, despite no small measure of encomium in the text of the placards that describe the people being recognized, offers valuable insights into the history of a local ranch that once was larger than the state of Rhode Island.

As is quite often the case in small rural towns, there was a paucity of choices for dinner in Lakeview. John scouted a location a few blocks from the hotel that he reported smelled like cigarettes and reminded him of Owl Club Bar & Steakhouse in Eureka, Nevada, except here there were no colorful locals upon whom to eavesdrop. I poked my nose into El Aguila Real next door to the hotel and asked the woman at the front of the house whether they made their own mole, to which she replied enthusiastically, Yes, it’s really good! We found ourselves in agreement after pushing back from the table an hour later.

We had a great visit Saturday morning with the baker at The Bottom Of The Barrel Bakery in Lakeview while she made our breakfast, and sandwiches for lunch. We were interested in and speculated about the age of the dough roller she had purchased at an auction, which she said she put to use making thirty‐six dinner rolls at a time, and guessed it had been manufactured in the first decades after World War Two. A scratch‐made biscuit then appeared on my plate, where it was a delicious conveyance for an egg, some sausage, and cheese. Why none of the 2,418 residents of Lakeview were on hand on a Saturday morning to support this gem of a restaurant was a puzzle – we had the dining room to ourselves.

A thoroughly used Geo Metro pulled up to the curb outside as we were collecting our things to leave, and the driver came in to place an order. I heard John say as we exited, He needs a bigger car, and looked to see an enormous dog sitting on the passenger seat and filling its tiny cabin. Out on Highway 140 and into the desert, the absence of cars was a reminder of our isolation, though the particolored wings of hang gliders could be seen rising in the air above Doherty Slide, a dissected volcanic rim that placed us in its shadow as we hurried by. The state of repair of the road was excellent, reminding me of the quality of the rural roads of Idaho and Wyoming, among the best in the nation, and an indictment of the neglectful treatment of such roads in our own state. We dipped into Nevada to make the connection with Highway 292 at Denio and turned north toward a return to Oregon and a change of designations to Highway 205. At the Denio junction, the Chukar Chasers Foundation has adopted the highway corridor for purposes of litter control, and so a nonprofit group with a mission to support youth hunter education and wildlife conservation is setting a laudable example of stewardship even in the most remote of places.⁴

Shortly afterward, we passed Fields Station, where we had stopped for gas and to eat lunch in April. There were no airplanes in the parking lot on this occasion, although it is a popular destination for pilots interested in a burger and shake. Later, in the first instant after passing a sign identifying the Donner und Blitzen River that was guiding the highway at that milepost through black greasewood and meadow barley, I thought, The state let someone name a river after fictional reindeer? Wow! Then I wondered if that was even more cool than Pull N Be Damned Road back home. But then, as any student of Account of a Visit From St. Nicholas and a couple of years of high school German would, I realized that the conjunction meant the name of the river was plainly thunder and lightning in English orthography, which, in German, is donner und blizten; thus, it was neither a borrowing from the Johnny Marks lyric for Rudolph the Red‐Nosed Reindeer, nor a perturbing misspelling of Dunder and Blixem, the names originally used in the anonymous poem of 1823 that are Dutch for thunder and lightning, later revised to Donder and Blixen, before arriving at Donner and Blitzen in the mid‐twentieth century.

A woebegone head full of trivial knowledge crammed into a Shoei helmet continued on its way, no river of fabulous creatures having been discovered. We soon arrived at the boundary of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a place name that cannot fail to remind me of Ammon Bundy and his fellow clown car passengers, especially as he had recently once again been in the news after a federal judge upheld a $52 million judgment against him, levied in 2023 for his having defamed an Idaho hospital. Its cohort of militant goons and their scrofulous fugleman notwithstanding, the Harney Basin into which we had steered is one of the least populated regions in the country. As we transited its empty domain, we shifted in and out of the wildlife refuge amid the sagebrush and cheatgrass of the high desert wetlands, closing the distance to Burns, where, after turning east to put our shoulders to the 91℉ morning sun, we stopped for gas at the unusual Oard’s Gallery & Museum, which claims to feature the largest collection of Paiute Indian cradleboards in existence. We ate lunch a mile further on at Buchanan Springs, where the Buchanan schoolhouse once stood along Little Rock Creek.

The Buchanan family homesteaded here in 1886, and the Buchanan post office was established in 1911. By the 1930s, the Buchanan Ranch at the bottom of the hill was being mined for cinnabar and later became well‐known for its deposits of thundereggs, which, since 1965, have been the Oregon state rock. Not really rocks, but geodes, thundereggs typically have a hollow or semi‐hollow interior. When sawn open, they may reveal intricately laced formations consisting of agate, jasper, opal, and quartz crystals of exquisite and colorful designs that range from five‐pointed stars to miniature landscapes.⁵ Thundereggs form within volcanic rocks known as rhyolite: as lava flows and hardens into rock, trapped steam and gases expand, becoming bubbles of silica‐rich lava that solidify and crystallize.

We followed the thunderegg lode through Malheur County and into Vale, the county seat and the first stop in Oregon along the Oregon Trail. The first permanent building in Malheur County was built in Vale in 1872; restored beginning in 1988, its imitation Italianate‐style elements, composed of local sandstone, are a beautiful flourish on Main Street. Past Vale, we crossed the Snake River into Idaho seeking the Rocky Mountains, so turned north and drove hard for Council, where the Porcupine Race is held each Fourth of July holiday, summer temperatures are among the highest in the northwestern United States, and the Salmon River Mountains appeared on the next fold of the map. Exhilarated, we ran up the Weiser River and plunged into the forests of the Payette country, then, after a tremendous burst of speed to climb into the great cordillera, paraded into McCall, our home for the next two nights.

The clerk at the desk of Hotel McCall claimed to recognize us. John brought color to her cheeks by recalling details of her childhood story heard during our previous visit, while I could only agree we had all previously met. The Seattle Mariners were scheduled that evening to play the second of a three‐game series with their arch‐rival, the Houston Astros, in a classic race to the pennant. We were eager to eat to next be ready to tune in to the game, so quickly stowed our gear and met for dinner behind the hotel lobby at Rupert’s, where the food was okay, but the service was, charitably described, inattentive. The Mariners won.

While enjoying breakfast Sunday at the FoggLifter Cafe, we looked forward to achieving our second trip objective, which was to visit the Cal‐Creek gold mine, northeast of McCall. We had been to the old mining encampment more than fifty years ago and knew from satellite reconnaissance that the road our grandfather had helped create to reach it – which was an overgrown, rutted mess during the Nixon administration – was blocked by trees and ruined by eighty years of neglect. We had agreed before leaving home that we would call our day a success if we reached a spot on the map at the top of the hill that led down to the old mining encampment. That, alone, was going to be quite an accomplishment, because the road for 7.8 miles leading to that spot was itself an unimproved path scraped into the Burgdorf–Marshall Lake Mining District that started bad and got worse once past the cutoff to the War Eagle Lookout, a seasonally manned post maintained by the U.S. Forest Service. John and I rather famously will refuse to yield to any test of will or challenge to endurance, but we had also agreed that we would continue only until common sense and good judgment said it was time to turn around; our motorcycles are among the finest made, and we know how to ride them, but they are not the best equipment to use to go bushwhacking, and we expected a fight.

A man named James Warren was prospecting thirty miles from McCall in 1862 when he discovered gold on what would become known as Warren Creek. We set out for Warren Wagon Road, originally one of several pack trails upon which goods were sent to and from Warren, one of the oldest non‐native settlements in Idaho, founded by those who rushed to make claims in the area after James Warren reported his find. The State Wagon Road was built out of that trail in the 1890s as the need to haul increasingly heavy mining equipment grew, and we drove it now through the pine forests of the western shore of Payette Lake, then over Secesh Summit, where snow depths regularly reach more than fourteen feet. Fire had burned 300,000 acres of forest here in 2000, and the burnt trees surrounded us as we left the pavement and signaled a left turn at National Forest Development Road 325, upon which we began picking our way toward California Lake at the top of the hill from the mine, and past which its namesake creek flows.

The Salmon River, into which California Creek drains, is nicknamed River of No Return for its swift current and large rapids. We moved in its direction beneath threatening skies and worked hard to crawl uphill through loose rock and eroded soil, focused mightily on keeping the bikes under control despite the attempts by the poor road surface to wrench them from our grips. We got further than any other two senior citizens on quarter‐ton‐plus street motorcycles are going to get before we paused at a wide spot at the end of a steep and nerve‐wracking climb, examined our ambitions, and called a halt 5.2 miles short of our objective. After snapping a few photos and rehearsing strategy for delivering our bikes safely down the slope we had just climbed, disappointed, we came about and eased the reins of our machines toward the stable. We had bade the game go on, and once more the spheroid flew, but we had misjudged it, and so this became strike two.

We were back in McCall in time for lunch at Salmon River Brewery, where we lamented having failed to reach the mine but remained in agreement that we had made the correct choice to turn around. Our third and final trip objective was two days in the future, and we finished lunch determined to make that attempt a success. The rain had begun in earnest, and I spent the afternoon indoors catching up on email and reading a few chapters in a book before dinner at McCall Brewing Company across the street, where we watched the Seattle Mariners complete a sweep of the Houston Astros.

Monday sprung to life wearing blue skies in the shivering cold. We had a reprise breakfast at FoggLifter Cafe and hurried on our way.

The trip north of New Meadows into the Idaho panhandle on Highway 95 was as pure as a lotus flower. Venus hovered overhead, jealous of the foggy wisps that grazed the earth. The Seven Devil Mountains shouted triumphantly as the sun struck their peaks, and they pointed our way to the bend of the Salmon River that overtakes the road at Riggens, whence it races all comers to the gulch at White Bird. There the Salmon bids farewell as it traverses the Joseph Plains for one last, long westward pivot leading to its confluence with the Snake River. On the road, the original 1921 climb from White Bird to White Bird Hill Summit slowly switches back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, tracing the ground upon which, on June 17, 1877, the Nez Perce, outnumbered two to one and fighting uphill with inferior weapons, had trounced the U.S. Army in the opening battle of the Nez Perce War between a small, deracinated population of Nez Perce people and the entire United States. Finally, through the draw at the pass and then down the hill into Grangeville, with grins on our faces and miles yet to go, intoxicated by the fortune reaped from dipping our pans into the golden morning light, we felt as if wishes we did not even know we had made had come true.

At Grangeville, we picked up Northwest Passage Scenic Byway along the Clearwater River for the ride toward Pullman, Washington, where we were to stop for lunch with brother Bill. The Bitterroot Mountains to the east convey the river to the Columbia Plateau, where we turned away from the river mouth at the lowest geographical point in Idaho to climb the Clearwater Escarpment into the Palouse. The original 1917 highway route up the escarpment is still known as the Spiral Highway; Charlie Ryan was racing a beer distributor up that old highway in the early 1950s when he said he got the inspiration to write his signature rockabilly song Hot Rod Lincoln, and, true to its spirit, we were passing cars as if they were standing still as we crossed the border into Washington.

We met Bill for sandwiches and some brotherly ribbing. He is the youngest of the three of us and the only one not retired, so John and I made sure he knew that when we left, it was not because we were in a hurry to get back to work. We honked our horns and gave a final wave on our way to Colville for the night, then settled into the business of getting there. Through Colfax, where, since 1949, the annual Palouse Empire Fair has been held to promote, develop, and improve the agriculture, livestock, business, industry, and home life of resident families, youth, and visitors in a friendly atmosphere while maintaining their safety, welfare, and health. To Rosalia in Whitman County, the largest wheat‐producing county in the United States. To the landmark grain elevators at Plaza, an otherwise unremarkable place when on the road to elsewhere. Out of the scablands and into the Selkirk Mountains through Spokane – the Lilac City – to Addy, named in 1890 for Adeline Dudrey, wife of its first postmaster. We pierced the heart of the Inland Empire⁶ and then scrambled for shelter at the Selkirk Motel in Colville, where the proprietress had set out homemade cookies on the clerk’s desk, and the shower was hot.

Our occasional riding partner Doc had driven in from the Puget Sound Basin that afternoon to spend the night in town and join us for our climb to our final trip objective, and we all met for dinner at Colville Pour House to trade stories from the road and review the plan to reach Slate Peak the next day.

The summit of Slate Peak is home to the highest currently operating fire lookout tower in the state, built in 1924, and reached via the 6,197‐foot elevation Hart’s Pass. The pass, explored in the 1870s by a prospector named A.M. McGee, was named for W.R. Hart, the miner who opened a pack route through the pass circa 1893. Charles H. Ballard, who had come to the Okanogan country in 1886 from Butte, Montana, as a civil engineer, U.S. mineral surveyor, and assayer, surveyed and built a road over the pass in 1898. The road from there to the Slate Peak summit was not constructed until the 1950s as part of a national defense project, which intended to build a radar station for use by the U.S. Air Force. The fire lookout was removed in 1956, followed by forty feet of earth dynamited from the top of the peak to create a level surface for construction of the radar station, which was never built. Today, that 1950s road leads to the highest drivable spot in the state, a parking area just below the rebuilt fire station 7,440 feet above the shore of the Salish Sea fifty miles away. The Hart’s Pass Road and its offshoot to Slate Peak is a thirteen‐mile, one‐lane dirt and gravel affair with cliffs and no guard rails and is often referred to as the most dangerous road in Washington (a distinction favored statistically by Pacific Highway in King County). The route is also notable for being the most northerly point where the Pacific Crest Trail intersects with roads.

A fantastic breakfast sandwich at Crandall Coffee Co. in Colville made an auspicious beginning for our adventure on Tuesday. The woman operating the grill was also servicing a drive‐thru window, pulling espressos, manning the cash register, and bussing the tables, but delivered our food and beverages hot and done just so. On fleek. Five stars. Would eat again. There were forest fires burning to the northwest and the southwest of Slate Peak, but no indication that Hart’s Pass Road was closed because of those fires, and although the road is another unpaved Forest Service utility, it is reasonably well‐maintained, unlike the road toward Cal‐Creek mine in Idaho had been. We finished breakfast confident we were going to get pictures from the summit later that morning.

After a downhill plunge to Tonasket on this sunny first full day of autumn and a right turn at Okanogan toward Mazama, the third and final objective of our trip was before us.

Slate Peak is named after the gold mines that once were flush at nearby Slate Creek. Once free of the pavement, the road rose and did not fall, quickly mounting the hump where the earth suddenly notices it must give way to the Methow River. The surface of the road, tricky but not horrible, demanded attention but not complete absorption, so, when not busy at a switchback, one was comfortable looking at something other than the world straight ahead: we had come as sightseers, and what sights we saw. Up from the thick valley forest and onto a slender ledge that had been ground into a cliff face, before us waited the eastern peaks of the North Cascade Mountains, composed of old metamorphic rocks and young volcanic and sedimentary rocks that are intruded by large masses of granitic rocks, comprising some of the most complex and least understood geology in North America: that is, North Cascades National Park. There is a bend here in the road known as Dead Horse Point that helps earn its reputation as the most dangerous in Washington. The story goes that Frank Willis and a boy were leading a pack string into the mountains in the 1890s at this narrow spot when the last horse lost its footing and, because the horses were tied together, dragged the entire string of horses over the edge to fall, one by one, to their deaths 750 feet below in Rattlesnake Creek. Even now, this is a hazardous turn to make. In 2007 the road here was blocked by a rockslide. In 2015 the road was blocked by another rockslide. In the spring of 2023 the road was closed once more due to a washout. The view at Dead Horse Point is of a breathtaking couloir, and as we rode around its bend, I could not help but sympathize with folks who experience a period of alarm while skirting its precipice. Forward through the butterweed, western sweetroot, and mountain fleabane we climbed, a haze of smoke in the air from the surrounding forest fires.

This is fire season, and in Washington state we are no strangers to smoke from burning forests. Our day had begun in the company of fires that were scorching the Kettle River Range, and elsewhere in the state some had already been burning for weeks. The delivery of firefighters from the air as a means of fighting forest fires – smokejumping, in other words – was developed in the fall of 1939 in the Methow Valley we had just climbed out of. The history of the firewatching towers and the people who manned them is covered in depth by Ira Spring and Byron Fish in Lookouts: Firewatchers of the Cascades and Olympics, which features some great storytelling. During the summer of 1956, author Jack Kerouac spent sixty‐three days of solitude as a U.S. Forest Service fire lookout on Desolation Peak along Starvation Ridge, nineteen miles from the lookout at Slate Peak. The gig paid $230 per month. Kerouac – some of whose friends were blacklisted that summer for their union and political ties during the rage of McCarthyism – used his experience as a lookout to inform his novel The Dharma Bums, where he wrote, The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.

Butterflies, dragonflies, stoneflies, and mayflies – all were present in uncounted multitudes. The lynx, fisher, wolverine, and marten that live out their lives in these mountains and die in these fires were unseen by us. We were not worried about our own safety but fretful for those less mobile or visitors unaware of the danger even of simply inhaling the smoke. Then, as a large group of hikers at the Pacific Crest Trail meeting with the col were having a party and the Forest Service rangers were not ushering everyone off the mountain, we spun our tires up the sharp and barren slope and headed off to the end of the road, the last of the three destinations that had summoned us on our journey. Here upon this favored land the sun was shining bright; a band was playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts were light, and somewhere men were laughing, and somewhere was a shout; nor were gnashing teeth at Slate Peak – our team had not struck out.