Climbing a Peak That Stirred Kerouac

Ethan Todras-Whitehill

I passed through a stand of fir and out onto the bare ridge, and there it was: the squat white structure where Jack Kerouac spent sixty-three days as a fire lookout in the summer of 1956. I had assumed that the Desolation Peak lookout would be empty, a silent monument to the Voice of the Beat Generation. But the shutters were propped open on all four sides, the door was ajar, and inside, a small, seated silhouette was visible against the hazy late-afternoon sky.

I grew giddy as the figure stood and came into the doorway. Surely this was Kerouac’s spiritual brother, a man uniquely qualified to speak about the solitary days and nights that inspired major portions of Desolation Angels, The Dharma Bums, and Lonesome Traveler. A compact man with dark hair, he introduced himself as Daniel Otero, a Marine reservist who had served two tours of duty in Iraq. Kerouac, I remembered, was thirty-four during his time on Desolation Peak, and did stints in the navy and the merchant marine.

Otero, who had been up there all summer and was leaving in only a few days, invited me into the shack, which felt like the cabin of a ship with its desk, kitchen, bed, and astrolabe-like fire-finder tool all squeezed into the single, tiny room. My eyes latched onto the corner bookshelf, lined with Kerouac paperbacks.

We made small talk for a few minutes before I finally asked about Otero’s famous predecessor. He took a deep breath, obviously having gotten the question before. “I tried, but…” he said, gesturing toward the books. Those books, I now realized, did not belong to Kerouac’s spiritual brother. They looked new, untouched, as if they had just come out of an Amazon box. “Me and that guy just don’t see eye-to-eye.”

I knew exactly how he felt. For my college graduation, my uncle gave me a copy of On the Road with the heartfelt wish that I would find it as life-changing as he had. I was a likely candidate to do so: avid traveler, a student of English and political science in college, and, later, a writer. Instead, I found Kerouac’s “masterpiece” rambling and frivolous; it took me two years to get through it.

But when I moved to Seattle last year, I started hearing about Desolation Peak. Ten years older than the last time I read him, I decided to give Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” another shot. I picked up a biography and the relevant novels, organized a few friends for a fall weekend, and set out for the North Cascades.

The nice part about the Desolation Peak hike is that it can be as easy or as hard as you please. The trailhead is about three hours from Seattle, and day hikers can pay for a boat ride up Ross Lake to the base of the mountain from the Ross Lake Resort; the lakeside camp at nearby Lightning Creek offers the option to tack on a night in the wilderness. But for those looking to sleep atop Kerouac’s mountain, as we planned to do, the price of admission is steep: a 3,500-foot climb carrying all the water you will need for the next day (not to mention camping gear), as Desolation Peak is bone-dry once the snowfields melt in August.

And although Kerouac himself got boat rides both ways, my wife, buddies, and I opted to go farther and hike in from the highway, taking the boat only on the return trip. After all, Kerouac had two months in the northwestern woods; even with the extra mileage (almost thirty for the whole trip) we would have only three days.

The first day we hiked sixteen miles across slopes of sword ferns and Oregon grape shrubs, stopping occasionally to peer into the clear depths of Ross Lake, whose contours we followed. But pretty views don’t make sixteen miles any shorter, and we stumbled into Lightning Creek Camp with feet in full rebellion.

Many people forget that the publication of On the Road in 1957 came almost a decade after the events that inspired it. In the summer of 1956, Kerouac was still an anonymous wandering soul looking for truth in America’s boxcars, bars, and wildernesses. Nature as a subject was new to him, having been introduced to hiking and the mountains by his brief but intense friendship with the Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, an experience recounted in The Dharma Bums. Snyder was a Pacific Northwest native who himself had twice been a fire lookout in the Cascades; it was he who suggested the Desolation posting to Kerouac.

Kerouac arrived at the base of Desolation by boat on a wet July morning and rode up the mountain in his poncho, a “shroudy monk on a horse” with mules carrying the supplies. For our hike, we were the mules. Although hundreds of people a day hike up Desolation Peak every summer, according to Otero, fewer than a half dozen groups stay at Desolation Camp, one mile down the ridge from the summit with many of the same views. I can’t blame them; with the extra water our packs weighed over forty pounds. But the reward was having Kerouac’s mountain to ourselves.

I especially couldn’t wait to see Hozomeen, the unbelievably symmetrical, four-peaked prominence to the north. “Hozomeen, Hozomeen, most beautiful mountain I ever seen,” Kerouac wrote. The peak was his constant companion, his friend and tormentor. “Stark naked rock, pinnacles and thousand feet high protruding from…immense timbered shoulders…awful vaulty blue smokebody rock.”

The mile-long climb up the ridge brought ever grander views of fjord-like Ross Lake and moody Jack Mountain 7,000 feet above. At a couple of points, snatches of Hozomeen were visible, but it wasn’t until we were in calling distance of the lookout tower that we felt the mountain’s full impact. It wasn’t much for elevation, at 8,071 feet—only 2,000 above Desolation—but, oh my, Hozomeen wasn’t human-looking, but rather monstrous. Kerouac frequently connected it to the Abominable Snowman, but to me it looked like the back of some Cascadian dragon, wings folded as it waited until night to hunt.

Up at the peak, I met Otero. Like most fire lookouts—Kerouac included—Otero had little to do up there but watch for fires, sleep, and read. While he was indifferent to Kerouac, he was pretty enthusiastic about visitors who had climbed his peak because of the writer. All of his Kerouac books were gifts from hikers; other hiker-pilgrims would slip poems—Kerouac’s or their own—between the pages when Otero wasn’t looking. There was no explicit record of Kerouac in the shack, formal or informal, but Otero showed me air force forms of the sort described in Desolation Angels, given to Kerouac to record aircraft sightings, but used by the writer to roll cigarettes. If I wanted to get in touch with Kerouac’s spirit, he suggested, “you could stand on your head and look at Hozomeen. Lots of people do that.”

After talking with Otero for a while, we drifted down the north face to soak in the slanted rays cut for us by peaks with names like Prophet, Redoubt, and Terror. Taking full advantage of our nearby camp, we stayed up on the mountaintop until almost dark, drinking in one of Desolation’s “mad raging sunsets pouring in sea foams of cloud through unimaginable crags like the crags you grayly drew in pencil as a child, with every rose-tint of hope beyond” (Lonesome Traveler).

We hustled down the ridge in the windy dusk and zipped into our sleeping bags. As the night was fine, we slept in the open beneath a black blanket of sky pierced with winking stars.

When I started planning this trip, I had imagined this night as my last chance to “get” the Beat writer. But in reality, I was already a Kerouac convert. Not to his writing—the guy needed an editor after Desolation Angels possibly more than he needed a bath—but to the story of his life, as recounted in Dennis McNally’s biography and other places. It reads like a classical tragedy, or at least a high-minded Hollywood screenplay: a sensitive young man seeks truth in order to change his world; he doesn’t find that truth, not in any real, sustained way, but his quest makes him famous and inspires a generation to follow in his footsteps, even as he cannot cope with his fame and drinks himself to death.

Three months after Kerouac came down from Desolation, he learned that Viking would finally publish On the Road—ostensibly his greatest triumph, but in reality the beginning of his end. Kerouac’s time on the mountain was a literal and figurative apex for him, his last truth-seeking adventure before he was transformed by the hostile media into first a caricature of himself, and later a shadow. Of Kerouac’s major works (all of which are unabashedly autobiographical), only Big Sur describes events that took place wholly in the years after Desolation; it chronicles the writer’s descent into alcoholism and mental instability.

The next day, before we headed down to catch our boat, I climbed back up the ridge before sunrise, this time with only my friend Josh for company. We quickly separated once we hit the peak. The air felt cold and mystical, so I brought out the pages of Desolation Angels I had ripped from their binding for the trip. In the purpling dawn, I read Kerouac’s good-bye to his mountain. “No clock will tick, no man yearn, and silent will be the snow and the rocks underneath and as ever Hozomeen’ll loom and mourn without sadness evermore,” Kerouac wrote. He concluded the valedictory with a sentiment that echoes deep in the core of any hiker about to leave the wilderness: “Farewell, Desolation, thou hast seen me well…All I want is an ice cream cone.”

Originally published in November 2012.

Ethan Todras-Whitehill is a writer who lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and daughter.