BELOW ST. ELMO PASS
We were always below
St. Elmo pass.
We were hikers.
We walked while the
others climbed.
This is the week the
park closes for winter.
Three young trail
crew
working, shovel and
pickax,
creating runoffs
for next spring’s
snowmelt,
and first snow on
summit
and you can see the
trail to the pass.
a dusting, fresh,
crevasses, rock
visible, clarified,
stunning—it’s
early
fog burning off,
and this mist
not missed
stopping us.
This week a
different us.
Three Johns and me.
I know. Three Johns.
There’s a sadness
in this, permeating this hike.
Glacier Basin, below
St. Elmo Pass.
Who’s here, who’s
not.
II.
In those days, we
came together from two places.
We came from both
sides of the mountains,
The Cascades, and we
hiked each summer.
The mountains. We
were an odd number,
three, and, in flux,
flowing.
We were trying to
figure it out. Force fields.
Moss, bridges.
Ourselves and each other.
Someone made these
bridges for us.
The two places where
we went.
The Goat Rocks and
the Pasayten.
Wilderness areas.
We went into the
Goat Rocks
from White Pass and
then,
South of Packwood,
out of Chambers Lake
with Higgins.
We looked for
lonesome places,
high lonesome places
and tried to stay
away from horses.
These were the years
before the fires.
We were in the
Pasayten the first time
when the smoke
boiled over the mountain.
Moss angels today.
We were a different
three,
and not even three,
we were odd numbers.
When we started 40
years ago
There were 40 hikes.
Wilderness walks.
Vance recorded them,
our archivist.
We wrote poems, made
jewelry.
The men’s hike.
The wilderness
years.
Those hikes were
gone a decade and more.
Becoming myth.
Men over time.
III.
St. Elmo Pass is the
saddle between Steamboat Prow
(the lower part) and
Burroughs Mountain.
We were drawn to Mt.
Tahoma.
We always called it
that, not using
the name given to it
by European explorers.
We called it ours,
too, it wasn’t,
We’d say, The
Mountain’s out.
St. Elmo Pass is on
a climber’s route
to Liberty Ridge and
Carbon Basin.
From a hiker’s
perspective, it collapses the mountain,
and of a sudden, one
seems closer to Muir than Sunrise.
It was here that
Major Ingraham, during the early days
of the Mountain’s
exploration camped.
During the nightmare
they were startled by the St. Elmo fires,
an electrical
phenomena.
Going up today,
Winthrop
Glacier, even
diminished, mighty.
Cracked and crevassed,
and dirty-desolate
river of ice.
One year we
discovered White River.
White River
Campground.
It drew us there and
we kept coming back.
We got older.
White River
Campground is how we found Glacier Basin.
And from Glacier
Basin,
we came to Burroughs
Mountain.
All the hikes around
Sunrise.
Water sources.
Tom’s Dutch
Oven.
So many threads.
Elevation gain to
St. Elmo Pass is roughly 1700 feet.
And then Third
Burroughs became my hike.
My son and the
Vision Quest.
My brother.
The Wonderland
Trail.
Tyler was the first.
The first death.
Fitted for his mask
one day,
delivering his
daughter the next.
Then it wasn’t
even a week.
The death of Lena.
When the dying
started to happen.
Somewhere solitary
hikes took over.
Once, in Chihuahua,
I got on the train
through Copper
Canyon, El Chepe Express,
through the
mountains to Los Mochis,
got off in Creel,
and stayed in a hotel
until I found a
guide who took me
into Tarahumara
country, where we found
the native women
living in caves
cooking smoke piped
out of the rock.
There were children,
but no men.
Everything is
walking he said to himself.
He was sitting on
the porch.
Reading a story by
Barry Lopez,
the teacher saying
to himself
what he’d just
told himself last week.
The last thing, the
worst thing.
IV. Years before,
defense of theory had concerned him. Not now. ‘I’ve thrown away
everything that is no good,” he told a colleague one summer
afternoon on his porch, as though shouting over the roar of a storm.
“I can no longer think of anything worse than proving you are
right.’ He took what was left and he went on from there. Barry
Lopez, Winter Count
Marty and Vance
brought us to Lopez.
I was the last one
to get it.
Walking was no more
than this,
What comes up from
below
while you’re
walking--
and if you’re
lucky
you’ll have a
match book
in your pocket and a
pen
to write with as you
walked.
There were notebooks
in camps.
Barry carried poems
of Jeffers
and I had a bulky
Whitman biography.
And then those hikes
were gone.
And these are winter
counts
V.
The three Johns are
Gospel good.
They’re climbers.
They’ve camped at
Schurman.
This is how they
know St. Elmo,
how they don’t
think of the pass
as either high or
far. The one John
summitted at 14, the
first time.
Above the Basin
we look at the
rusted pipe
left over from
mining days.
It’s leaking
water, still flowing.
The ridge is steep
on both sides.
The glacier below to
the left.
That gaping mouth
gone
in the few years
since I
camped here alone on
this ridge
studying bonsai
trees,
White River loud.
On a spine like this
practice becomes
a kind of belief,
steep talus,
yet for the three
Johns
this is a kind of
play,
an October get-away.
The last week before
the mountain closes.
I feel like the new
guy
awkward pulling
folded paper
from my shirt pocket
taking out a pen.
For Marty,
Barry, Vance
Jim Bodeen
2-10 October 2023
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