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I survived our 1/2 circumnavigation of Mount Hood. I’m plum exhausted and chilling to the new Mates of State album, eating Hot & Spicy Cheez-Its, sniffing Nag Champa and trying not to fall asleep.

My nose, neck and arms are sunburned. I had forgotten that I’ve been working an inside job the last few months and have lost my bronze Hook armor. My boots absolutely munched my feet to pieces. The bottom of my right big toe is missing, my heels are shredded and I have countless other blisters pocketing my toes. It makes sense, considering. We rode hard this weekend. Twenty-two miles of hiking between 5,000 and 7,000 feet over two full days, with god knows how much elevation change. Charging above the timberline and through snow fields, alpine meadows and old-growth forests.

I realize now that those awful feet of explorers, with their huge raw wounds and oozing holes, are just a matter of degree. Eventually you reach a point where you just stop caring. The pain becomes part of the challenge; a morbid ballet played between the will of man and the fury of nature. You bite your lip and charge on not for the benefit of your body, hardly, but for the enrichment your soul. You realize that you need the intensity, the colorful agony that reminds you that you’re alive, that the atmospheres of a billion worlds are being pulled into your lungs and circulating red beneath your skin. It’s a brutal worship of sky and earth, body and soul. It is under this terrible strain that we can truly discover ourselves.

And at the same time the sheer beauty was enough to pop your skull. Rugged and graceful, gritty and elegant. I watched spiders drift up the mountainside on silken threads. We spent saturday night at 7,000 feet atop Gnarl Ridge. We watched the sun set on forested hills and mists gather in valleys. We watched as the sun fell behind Mount Hood and cast its shadow beyond the hills and into the deserts of eastern Oregon, a huge dark tooth spread out across hundreds of miles of countryside. And we could see the edge, the line where the sun met darkness in the barren and dry wilds of Oregon.

Mars dominated the heavens long before the sky grew black, and stars slowly popped out and filled in the growing darkness. The Milky Way stretched out above us and we decided against setting up the tent. Satellites sailed silently over our heads, their strange patterns summoning explanations of conspiracy. The wind picked up. At first we thought it was indicative of bad weather approaching, but as the sky stayed painfully clear we realized it was the just air on the mountain channeling through the Newton Creek valley. Mount Hood’s icy breath chilled us until dawn.

And then. Heather Canyon, Mount Hood Meadows, the White River and finally, after a grueling ascent, Timberline Lodge. 180 degrees of Mount Hood complete. Celebration with beer and burgers at a rough bar in Government Camp, the premier lawless snowboard town of the Pacific Northwest. If you don’t ride, and if you don’t smoke, and if you don’t get in fights, you have no business here in the winter.

And if you get the two-for-one drink pin at Charlie’s, it will pay for itself over a long weekend.

While kiting today I received my first round of threats from a windsurfer. I had to emergency land my kite twenty feet away from him:

THUMP!

“Sorry about that!”

“Get the hell away from here, smelly kiter!”

“Dude. Sorry.”

“[incomprehensible]!”

“Relax, man.”

“[incomprehensible]!”

“So what are you gonna do about it? You gonna tack upwind and kick my ass?”

“. . .”

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.

I’m fine, I’m just lazy. Now that summer is unspun I am sleeping again and I can feel the wit and acidic verve returning to my marrow. Sweet, delicious marrow. The skunk outside my window just shot off another round, as though he was at risk of being completely forgotten and had to do something before he ran off to hibernate, lest all his efforts in the past months be forgotten.

Do skunks hibernate? I really don’t know on this one. With that white stripe it may be that they don’t hibernate at all, and they just blend into the snow so well they look like a completely different animal. A half-skunk that in the wild always appears right next to another half-skunk. Maybe with all the environmental funding in the Pacific Northwest channeled into finding out what a male sasquatch chooses to write in the snow, there’s never been a serious inquiry into whether the skunk and half-skunk are indeed the same animal in different seasons.

Or maybe on the fall equinox all skunks run into the freeway to get flattened by trucks so they don’t have to decide what to do for the winter. Who knows. Maybe the few that survive migrate to Tijuana. Or camp out under my window.

Today was an awesome day; one of those lovely fall days where the clouds suddenly part, you hit all the green lights, people wave you in front of them in the checkout lane, you conjure a delicious Thai meal out of broken English on the side of a jar and some good ol’ Scandanavian ingenuity and you find that your CDs were indeed stolen, but they were stolen by your evil and forgetful and forgetfully evil doppelganger Self, and hidden in your room.

You also fixed your kite, which had spawned another busted bladder thanks to a leaky nipple (ahem). There’s nothing more fun than going to Wal-Mart, buying nothing but baby powder and condoms, and pretending to be all nervous and secretive at the register. People talk, and you know it because you talk, and it’s quite delightful to outright give them something to talk about. You also smack your face into a door that you swear opened automatically last time you were in the store. They no doubt talk about that, too, even though that wasn’t intentional.

You also realize that you’re kind of washed out, so instead of penning more words to try and fix the problem you post a few pictures of monster trucks: