On a sunny day in late June 1994, I stood atop Mount Baker’s summit hill, Grant Peak. Preceding parties, one with a black Lab, had retreated, and two friends and I had the summit to ourselves for more than ten minutes as though it were our turn, in a steady queue, at some panorama viewpoint. The image of that dog replays itself in my memory. Its presence made Baker’s summit a commonplace urban scene rather than any sort of wilderness experience as promised by policies and management practices in the past half century. The portrait with dog suggests the “different world” of the volcanoes resembles a familiar urban or suburban one, and that’s a dangerous illusion, one with baleful spiritual and practical consequences. That illusion derives from the prominent position the volcanoes occupy in the minds and hearts of a sizable segment of the population.
In the Pacific Northwest, the volcanoes form, for many, one strand of regional identity. Because of that strand, admirers and users need to adopt new habits and influence agency personnel to modify wilderness mandates while rebalancing the fraught tension between access and resource preservation (e.g., “wilderness experience”). The increasing scale of skiing, hiking, and mountaineering has changed the face of the volcanoes, especially at the convergence points (e.g., standard routes), where they’ve taken a beating. In too many places, usage conflicts with policy. Visitors particularly need to modify their practices in some cases and, however indirectly, influence agency personnel to modify their wilderness-driven mandates while strengthening resource preservation in the face of unchecked access: those abiding mandates and oft-contrary agendas. Increased accessibility and too much love for the wilderness result from a robust population increase.
Many Puget Sounders, myself among them, grow up watching the volcanoes—especially Mount Rainier—trying to catch their seasonal and daily moods, to understand their mass and place. It’s hard to stop looking. Approaching Mount Rainier by car or foot, knowing where it will be if it is “out,” visitors strain their eyes, willing its appearance before it actually appears. Walking to junior high in a Bellevue just before skyscrapers, I aimed directly for its broad dome looming above Somerset, dwarfing everything in sight. Some residents lean on Rainier sightlines all their lives. My family, like other northwesterners, used to picnic at Paradise or Sunset, primary destinations within Mount Rainier National Park (MRNP), and I ate too much as my eyes tried to consume the overwhelming curved mountain just above. On one picnic my family escorted my grandmother and a friend of hers from Bethesda, Maryland, who was making her first trip to the Northwest. A familiar pattern, wherein natives display their best goods to visitors. Rainier, after all, remains the Evergreen State’s number one tourist attraction. No state contains anything remotely like our biggest volcano.
Yet Oregon claims far more volcanoes than Washington’s five. How far must one travel to find a string of volcanoes comparable to Oregon’s?
In my youth I closed the distance between my home and Mount Rainier as frequently as I could, hiking western and northern sections of the Wonderland Trail, sizing up the mountain from Plummer Peak or Gobblers Knob or Burroughs Mountain. For the past two decades my family has returned to my first geography from our home in southwestern Montana, and as I-90 tops out at Ryegrass Summit after a twelve-mile pull up from the Columbia River, if there is high pressure and high cloud cover (or none), Rainier’s upper half bulges just south of west, beckoning. It’s just too big, too much, and some of us spend our lives trying to absorb it, or at least understand our relationship to it.
Mount Rainier is not my only sacred mountain, though it remains the primary one.
Mount Baker has been my summer volcano since early childhood, when my folks bought waterfront property on Camano Island’s east side. Many in northern Puget Sound and southwestern British Columbia count on Mount Baker morning, noon, and night during the year’s longest days when its perennial snow cover lights the summer sky. Some among them imagine closing the distance with both Rainier and Baker; though a chubby kid, I wanted these volcanoes close up, under boot, and eventually I climbed.
Mount Baker dominates British Columbia’s lower Fraser River valley, where most of the province’s population lives. John Keeble’s novel Yellowfish defines Baker in a way that captures its place in the lives of thousands on both sides of the border. Keeble’s portrait of Baker defines the domineering presence of volcanoes in the regional imagination: “Its size and light were utterly dominating. Without it the elements of the landscape—the lesser mountains, the river, the bottom land, and increasingly now, the rock outcroppings—would be changed. . . . The mountain cast its net, its white, colorless shadow, over everything in sight.”1
This virtuosic rhetoric with its animist metaphors defines the volcanoes’ place in the Northwest’s self-portraiture. Keeble’s sentences mimetically strain to evoke and approximate a geographical domination that is a fact of life and wellspring of privilege. His Mount Baker poses only one among myriad artistic examples in modern history that have endeavored to size up and salute this geography.
Of course, watching the Northwest’s volcanoes requires steady patience, at least from the west side, as seasonal cloud cover drops like a thick gray rug down to a thousand or two thousand feet, and days or weeks pass before a new weather system and rising air pressure lifts it. Residents speak familiarly about whether a particular volcano is out, but when it is “in,” hiding behind thick swaths of clouds, residents think sober thoughts knowing that sooner or later their volcano will be restored to its rightful place, and their souls recharged. Puget Sounders used to grow up believing low cloud cover was the norm for nine or ten months of the year. When “the mountain”—take your pick—is out, they shake their heads in wonder and feel sorry for residents of not only Kansas but Massachusetts or Georgia or even Colorado or California.
These exceptional mountains form a geographic core of Pacific Northwest identity both past and present.
The volcanoes distill the regional imaginary as no other feature except the Columbia River, the Northwest’s primary river and powerful symbol of its heritage. They symbolize a Northwest privilege. In modern history the region’s most exceptional mountains have always played a central role in the formation and refinement of regional identity. They function as a complex set of mirrors in which some of us indulgently size ourselves up. Through this sustained gaze, we look real good: As mirrors, they reflect generations of regional history during which the Northwest has tilted from wet (or dry) boondocks to mecca. The accelerating in-migration in the twentieth century’s second half confirms the region’s status as arrived and attractive. The mountains pose as a special optic through which to assess changing attitudes and behavior near and on themselves. Many kinds of people lay all kinds of claims upon the volcanoes, a species of vertical tabula rasa upon which we write our stories. Now that hiking and mountaineering have become mass sports, some of those claims have created problems at the volcanoes’ most popular locations.
In the twentieth century’s second half people come to the volcanoes in far greater numbers, engaging in more diverse activities than ever before, and at some sites our love affair with them creates practical, visible problems. That love affair sometimes obscures, to our peril, the fundamental differences between these arctic islands, as they’ve often been described, and the primary topographies of our lives. We must see beyond them as inevitably distorting mirrors even as we figuratively hold them in our embrace. To read the volcanoes is to read ourselves, and we need a fresh look.
The volcanoes inspire testimony of many sorts. There is little doubt about their visual benefits. Those describing them cannot resist using words like “float” or “majestic” (or adding “gorgeous” in the next paragraph). A common Puget Sound mantra, one that pinpoints a spiritual and emotional dependency, goes “Have you seen the mountain today?” The asking and answering that question—whether it’s Rainier or another volcano—confers a sense of solidarity and privilege. Seeing “the mountain” gives the viewer a lift. We rely on volcano sightlines to confirm facets of our identity and status: without them, we’d be far less than we are. It’s an old and unavoidable gesture, taking our measure, since their height and shape ground us.
California claims Mount Lassen and gorgeous Mount Shasta, second-highest volcano in the range and beacon in the northern third of that state. But excepting those two peaks, the lower forty-eight states’ volcanoes cluster in Oregon and Washington. Volcanoes appeal to the imagination of childhood and remain centers of delight and potential terror (the latter tincturing the former). It’s no accident that Oregon’s Willamette Valley, terminus of the Oregon Trail, was frequently described in paradisal terms, and that almost 75 percent of Oregon’s population lives there. The valley’s beauty is framed by the forested coastal range to the west and the Cascades to the east, capped by at least a dozen volcanoes or volcanic fragments (depending on the count).
The valley’s identity, and central Oregon’s, derives in part from that bead of volcanoes. For the nineteenth-century westering America, this Garden of Eden was bordered on one side by virtually unique, potentially fiery mountains. While other states or regions also boast mountains close by, none except Hawaii lay claim to volcanoes that crown both the range and, arguably, the regional ego. Outside Alaska, Hawaii, and northern California, only Washington and Oregon divide their territory by a line of volcanoes. Some inhabitants of both the green west and brown east stand taller because of the volcanoes that divide yet unite them.
Jokes about Puget Sound’s and Willamette Valley’s endless rainfall dissipate once the skies clear and residents lift their heads to the Cascades, which prove a special case beyond the Rockies. According to one scholar of American tourism, the U.S. western landscapes have long claimed precedence on the world stage, since “the myth of exceptionalism has a life of its own as the Rockies rise in front of westward-bound travelers.”2 The language given Rainier and the other volcanoes, puffed up yet inevitably falling short of the thing itself, explains a great deal about human behavior, particularly in groups, around or on the snowpeaks. Certainly it reflects the region’s vaunting pride in its crowning natural endowment and helps explain its steady rise in status over the twentieth century.
In my youth, when the mountains came back out I sensed I lived in the best possible place. This brand of local chauvinism is as common as it is potent, and American notions of optimal landscape, descended from the European credo of the sublime, confirm the Northwest brand. In Gary Snyder’s “The Climb,” he speaks for all who have fallen under the spell of Northwest volcanoes: “West coast snowpeaks are too much! They are too far above the surrounding lands. They are in a different world.”3
That “different world” continually impinges upon the human world—particularly, it could be argued, for natives and long-time inhabitants. Or climbers. Climbers enter that “different world” en masse, trying to close the eternal gap between it and their own variable everyday worlds. Both towering fact and symbol, the volcanoes record a rich and changing cultural history as increasing numbers come close for similar and sometimes novel reasons. The most popular, Mounts Hood and Rainier, have been subject to a disarming array of uses over the past century and a half, from lightshows to cemeteries. These provide one measure of a matured regional identity and reveal a series of contentious pressure points as contrary values—preservation and access—clash.
Accustomed to seeing few people in mountainous southwest Montana, and feeling both a native and a visitor in the Cascades, the crowd scenes on these standard routes disturb me. I take our Aussie shepherd dog with me on easy day climbs in the nearby Rockies, but not to volcanoes. Access remains a cherished value, but a black Lab suggests not only a certain human density but also a set of assumptions and practices that are out of balance on volcanoes. Skiing or hiking or climbing a volcano does not resemble a vigorous stroll in the park, of course, and this study analyzes those assumptions and practices that document the differences as well as the ostensible similarities between those two domains.
I realized I began skiing and hiking in the Cascades of the 1960s, at precisely the moment legions of baby boomers took to the mountains. Thousands grew up planning daytrips and backpack trips based on the Mountaineers’ 100 Hikes series. Those books changed the game and changed the regional mountainscapes forever.
Many pushed higher, and the scale of the sport changed. Like most new or amateur climbers, I (a mediocre technical climber) was destined for the standard routes. But as the sport grew, those with high natural talent or skillsets took on all possible routes, particularly those posing the greatest technical challenges or dangers, in far greater numbers.
In the Cascades, the volcanoes have always been the biggest tourist magnets. In addition, regional population has escalated sharply since the 1960s, Washington’s having more than doubled, and many more folks referenced the snowpeaks in their lives. Ever greater numbers wanted to draw close, even quit their cars and don a backpack or strap on a climbing harness and crampons. This study takes the pulse of the snowpeaks in the early twenty-first century, assesses what is old and what is new as people gather, in increasing numbers, near and on them. The country’s most exceptional mountains provide a unique lens through which to study the region’s accelerating development over the past century and a half. Through that lens, the place of the volcanoes in the regional psyche grows as apparent as the need to revise some of our policies and practices on them.