Gnarl Ridge

Today we hiked up to Gnarl Ridge on Mount Hood. If you fancy grainy mpeg panoramas of mountains and sharp volcanic rocks we’ve got your stuff. (2.1 mb video)

The film starts facing north (toward Mount Adams, if the ridge wasn’t in the way) and pans west to Mount Hood’s eastern slopes. Today was a really clear day and to the south we could see Mount Jefferson, the Three Sisters and Broken Top. Somewhere to the east is the where all the trolls live.

And what you can’t see is me holding a knife, sneaking up on an old man picking huckleberries, a pile of bear vomit filled with poisonous red berries, us trundling rocks down Pea Gravel Ridge, Primitive Man’s First Boomerang, a pack of ground squirrels skeletonizing a horse in twelve minutes and coyote poo with shark teeth in it. You also can’t see our conversations about hunting squirrels with rail guns, bears swimming upstream to spawn, giving Jimmy a pistol and shoving him down a dark hole to flush out a badger, painting poisonous berries and selling them to people in Hood River as blueberries, and why pushing rocks down hills is necessary as a human defense against Mother Nature.

“I mean, before you know it beavers will evolve chainsaws, and then where will we be? Where will we be, I ask you? We need to assert our dominance over other species or risk being out-evolved by them. Do you think the reason trees can’t pluck you from the ground and eat you is out of the goodness of their hearts? You’re only kidding yourself if you think they can’t see the long-term advantage of having such abilities. No, the only reason deer don’t have hammers and apes don’t run around with books on calculus is because we have stared them square in the eye and told them, There’s no way in hell we will tolerate that.”

Typical fare for when the brain gets cooking.