I summited Washington’s five volcanoes and two of Oregon’s many more in the 1990s. Those climbs became crucial markers in my life and identity. I climbed the Washington Five one per summer from highest to lowest, though I had not planned that order. Three friends from southwest Montana and I climbed Rainier a few days after the summer solstice in 1993 on the Emmons-Winthrop route: the second, standard route on Rainier’s northeast side, which sees less than one fifth of the annual traffic.1 Our quartet formed part of a packed tent community at Camp Schurman (9400 feet), though parties were dispersed before dawn. On the midday descent down Rainier’s small Inter Glacier the following day, we passed a veritable stream of climbers fanned across the glacier, in all colors and group sizes, chunking upwards. It was a migration, a small village on the move. A few solo climbers—alpha males—stood out because of their Day-Glo colors and quicker pace. One loud guy, a stud who stomped big steps and blew forcefully, left an impression.
The transitory scene epitomizes mass climbing, and the image of that soloist has endured: an image defining one version of current mountaineer. A year later, on the summit of Mount Baker, he sprung back to mind as I contemplated the meaning of that black Labrador retreating with his owner. Both man and dog attest to the contemporary relationship between Northwest volcanoes and people. Part of that relationship has volcanoes serving as park playgrounds and sites for competition. Such behavior presumes a dominance and familiarity in the mental maps of some residents and visitors.
The prominent place of the Northwest’s two most prominent volcanoes has been confirmed anew, in recent years, by a novel and a U.S. Mint quarter.
In the climax of Jim Lynch’s third novel, Truth Like the Sun (2012), hard-hitting journalist Helen Gulanos, a recent arrival from Ohio, has come to terms with her new city and region. She has fallen in love with Seattle: “She took lunch breaks at the Pike Place Market and heard herself asking strangers, ‘Have you seen the mountain today?’ It was creeping into her, this cheery notion that something exceptional was going on here” (251). Lynch captures the regional ethos and flattering rhetoric.2 Gulanos’s appropriation of one regional mantra—and it’s not just Rainier—marks her conversion as an insider and aligns her with elder statesman Dan Evans and myriad other residents. To voice the question is not only to claim residency. The question signifies the relation between the volcanoes and regional chauvinism, at least for some. To ask it is to accept Rainier’s—and other volcanoes’—special place in regional, municipal, or individual identity.
The influence of the Northwest’s most exceptional mountains in the national imaginary was confirmed in 2010 by the U.S. Mint, when the “Mount Hood National Forest Quarter” was chosen as the fifth and final quarter in the mint’s “America the Beautiful” series. This quarter is the only one in the series featuring a volcano, and the design chosen by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner closely resembles the iconic view from Lost Lake long painted, sketched, and photographed. It is also the only National Forest Quarter (three of the earlier four celebrating National Parks unsurprisingly featuring the biggies, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Grand Canyon). Stamped on a new quarter, this quintessential Northwest scene underlines the big role played by the volcanoes in monumental American landscapes—and identity. This foreshortened view—volcano, sloping conifer forest, rippling lake, bereft of human presence—excludes Portland and vicinity but the eyes of Oregon, especially Portland, claim it.
The view can center on Mount McLoughlin or Mount Washington or Mount Jefferson or Glacier Peak from any number of perspectives, west slope or east, not just Rainier or Hood. “Something exceptional” has been unfolding for generations according to this preferred narrative. In myriad forms many residents and visitors, in increasing masses, have imaginatively or literally crossed the sightlines in making various claims upon the snowpeaks: objects of love, obsession, and cultural ownership. The ongoing habit of taking their measure bears a range of consequences, some of them unfortunate.
Insofar as the national imaginary remains a westering one, the Northwest has come to occupy a privileged position. In fact, the association of the volcanoes with this growing self-esteem threads through the region’s history. From his Rainier communion Theodore Winthrop (1862) claimed that this “new and grander New England of the West” would nurture a “fuller growth of the American Idea”: that a “strong race” would “achieve a destiny” here. Maybe Winthrop, a Boston Brahmin, would have climbed Rainier or Hood if presented the opportunity, but his vision for the Northwest described citizens at a contemplative distance, not on the glaciers. One kindred spirit, Swedish-American violinist Olof O. Bull, climbed with his violin on July 28, 1896 and on Rainier’s summit played several tunes including “Nearer My God, To Thee.”3 Bull’s offering defined volcano climbing as an act of pilgrimage and captured the deepest spiritual impulse behind summiting.
In John R. Williams’s two early mountain books, he described the Northwest as the final act in the great drama of nation building: a drama symbolized by The Mountain That Was “God” (1910: Rainier) and the three Guardians of the Columbia (1912: St. Helens, Adams, Hood). In this script, northwesterners can’t look better and the closer they come, the better they look. In the early twenty-first century, poet Gary Snyder likened the snowpeaks to the Himalayas, with images from Tibetan Buddhism of high stone shrines and prayer wheels, which broadens the appeal by association with the world’s highest range—ultimate lodestar of mountaineering status. This Eastern appeal only firms up the Rainier-Himalayas linkage present since the 1960s.
Habits of veneration come, in specific locations, at an increasing cost. What’s next for the volcanoes?
Human activities on the volcanoes reveal both consistent patterns and new variations. The volcanoes’ lure is stronger now than a century ago. Occasionally a community (e.g., Sisters OR, 1888) takes its name and identity directly from nearly volcanoes. Snowpeaks have long served as marketing brands and extensions of a given city’s parks or open spaces. In the late-nineteenth century, volcanoes (e.g., Mount Hood) sometimes figured as backdrops in larger-than-life theatrical spectacles.4 Painters, poets, composers, and others have used volcanoes in their work without setting foot on them.
Volcanoes also figure as geothermal energy sources. An AP story by Jeff Barnard, “Project to pour water into volcano to make power,” describes a huge pilot project at Oregon’s Newberry Volcano for the summer of 2012. At least $43 million is being invested in the project to pump twenty-four million gallons of water via enhanced geothermal systems and hydroshearing into its side, down a well over one mile long. In theory the dispersed, heated water is captured and pumped to the surface as steam, where it will generate electricity through turbines.5 In practical and philosophical ways, volcanoes play across the arcs of many lives, urban or rural, those vaunted sightlines bonding the viewer to their shape and mass. Residents and occasionally visitors feel as though they belong to one or several snowpeaks.
Unsurprisingly, the human footprint near or on the volcanoes has changed dramatically in the past century and a half, standard routes in summer season imitating in miniature the west slope’s urban centers. Folks from all walks of life come to the volcanoes to hike, ski, or climb. They seek to script an active role in the preferred narrative of exceptionality: the flattering story they tell about themselves. The opportunity for adventure and potential for personal transformation, in the ostensibly more secular present, remain as high as that recorded in the testimony of first generation of climbers.
Yet the goals of volcano climbing have diversified, particularly as mountaineering has morphed into a mass sport. In the past generation, as baby boomers reached their maximum income-earning years, the surging ecotourism trade and widening acceptance of “risk recreation” both boosted the status of climbing. The snowpeaks still promise a chance for self-transcendence but have also become a site for management training. Or charity fundraising: since 1986 the American Lung Association has sponsored a “Climb For Clean Air Program,” and in 2011, for example, their “Reach The Summit” fundraiser included Mounts Hood, Adams, and Rainier climbs requiring individual “fundraising commitments” of $3000 or more.6 In this vein, volcano climbs have joined common cause with distance bike races or marathons.
With typical macho flourish, Ernest Hemingway once quipped that only three true sports exist—auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing—because only these flirt with possible death; all other sports are only games. His boast, however inaccurate, helps explain the industrial scale of mountaineering in the Northwest and other regions in the past two generations. Of course, many other activities (e.g., skiing, hiking, backpacking, mountain biking) take place on or just below the volcanoes, but climbing holds a special status, a shining lure. In the sociology of mountaineering, self-styled pros often hold little patience with amateurs. And there are far more amateurs, many of them guided. The number of guides and guiding services has sharply increased in the past two generations, in keeping with the sport’s huge growth. Most guides, male and female, tend to be in their twenties and thirties and are exceptionally fit and smart about that volcano’s particular routes and risks. They’re also good at assessing clients’ fitness levels and personalities. Guiding provides many with full-time if seasonal work.
Given mountaineering’s narrowed focus, its relentless pushing the envelope through ever-harder routes and faster speeds, a wide gap exists between climbing rationales and styles. That gap is measured by a telltale comment from British climber-writer Chris Jones, author of Climbing in North America. On a 1972 visit to Tacoma with longtime climber-guide-artist-writer Dee Molenaar, he considered the definition of mountaineers as those who, seeing Rainier, are so “bugged by the peak” that “they had to go for it.”7 Jones was both right and wrong. He does not understand the myriad dependencies implicit in the more common, physically distant relation of many residents to volcanoes. And by the time he published his definition, his claim about the (small) number of “modern-day counterparts” was anachronistic, as the tide was ineluctably changing.
Particularly since the 1960s, interacting with the snowpeaks from a distance has proven insufficient to increasing numbers. Instead of background, the snowpeaks loom in the foreground for the “bugged” masses who, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, step through the looking glass. They follow in the footsteps of the proselytizing early climbers (not exactly “unknown”) and club enthusiasts who have always proclaimed the John Muir gospel: “Go for it!” And when they go for it, they bring increasing amounts of fancy gear they like to be noticed. Increasing numbers expect instant communications (and potentially quick rescue) at all altitudes, as though mountain camps or “bivi” sites imitate Wi-Fi Internet cafes. In sheer numbers and shifting expectations, the fundamental differences between volcanoes and the rest of their lives lessen—or seem to lessen. That dangerous illusion sometimes leads to injury or death.
By the twentieth century’s final two decades, the culture of climbing had changed as dramatically as the scale of the mountain gear industry. By the 1970s the majority of the American population increasingly embraced the tenets of mainstream environmentalism even as increasing hordes, “bugged by the [snow]peaks,” decided to “go for it.” Agency personnel were and are charged with protecting wildlife and habitat resources, above all the human-driven resource of wilderness experience.
By the 1980s and 1990s, these divergent streams and contrary agendas collided with increasing frequency. Crowds of skiers (e.g., at Mounts Baker and Hood, and at Bachelor Butte above Bend) adjacent to wilderness boundaries are one thing; crowds of hikers or climbers above them are another. People want their cars and Internet. They uphold equal opportunity and access yet also want—well, some want—“wilderness experience.” In particular on-the-ground conditions in particular locations, resource degradation exists and “wilderness experience” appears a pipedream, an invalid and unattainable category. For the vast majority on most volcanoes, it just isn’t happening.
The restoration and ongoing validation of wilderness experience on the volcanoes’ most popular routes seems to be the primary management challenge of the near future. How can the legal mandates of approximately the past half century best be revised and modified to accommodate ground realities while preserving natural resources? The concept of “recreational carrying capacity” seems endlessly researched and crudely applied—if applied at all. Answers to the question of how many is too many prove annoyingly variable and elusive.
It’s not that the volcanoes are being loved to death. Most who love them do so from a distance. But more and more insist on stepping up. Almost all of a given volcano’s mass remains untrammeled, but over three quarters of those climbing it follow the same approaches and routes and in those thin corridors, it’s no wilderness experience. Because of their level of ability or experience, and for other reasons, hikers and climbers stay on the beaten path, as they should.
Wilderness area legal mandates and management practices can be modified such that the aesthetic dimensions of “recreational carrying capacity” are not badly compromised or lost. If everyone accepted wilderness education, packed everything (including feces) out, and worked harder to minimize visual impacts, those climbing on these exceptional mountains would likely have experiences closer to those envisioned by the Bob Marshalls and Howard Zahnisers. Given human nature, this expectation is too high. To realign standard routes with some measure of wilderness experience, permit systems should be adopted as they’re used in the backcountry of certain California national parks and on Wild and Scenic Rivers. That is, on any given day—weekend day—during high season, the number and flow of climbing parties should be restricted and regulated. Such a system creates greater risk for applicants who cannot predict weather or climbing conditions months in advance. Similarly variable conditions govern rivers (e.g., the Smith River in Montana) when applicants put in for a launch date many months earlier.
A system of modified access would lessen and distribute crowds. Certainly climbers should not face the lines visible on Mount Adams and South Sister. Human activities at the volcanoes will only increase in number and mass during the twenty-first century.
Five years after Mount Rainier, I climbed Mount St. Helens in early August. The campground (3600 feet) was crowded but I started early and reached the yawning crater rim by 8:30. Solo, I savored the quiet and sun. On my descent, I greeted the occasional other parties. Maybe I was just lucky, but I felt as though I had wilderness experience on St. Helens’ crowded Monitor Ridge, the standard route. My quiet climb contrasted with the village-on-the-move on Rainier’s Inter Glacier. Plenty of others climbed St. Helens that day but I felt part of a wilderness, not a crowd. That is what I wish for others.
Many go to the snowpeaks and other peaks to sense, in composer Alan Hovhaness’s words about Mount St. Helens, “the volcanic energy, renewing the vitality of our peaceful planet, the living earth, the life-giving force building the majestic Cascade Mountains rising, piercing the clouds of heaven.”8 For all our human longings and for all our “traces,” though, the snowpeaks loom far above and beyond human traffic past and present. Human desires are never reciprocated and visitation, even at today’s industrial scale, remains only fleeting. As beacons they forever lure and enhance visitors but while footprints fade away, leavings—trash—remains.