After slogging through essays and exams and more essays, the academic year ended with the usual, oddly anti-climactic euphoria. To celebrate-and punctuate-this annual change of pace, summer's official arrival, we trekked up to Mt. Baker. It was a return to winter, the rains clinging stubbornly to the foothills and the snow still firmly in command at higher elevations. With warmer temperatures in the forecast, the word on the street was that things would be changing quickly.
But for the moment, though, things were as they had been. The fog hid the views of the river below, and the salal and cedars crowded the trail. Spring appeared only in traces, the bright orange columbine growing alongside a small cascade fed by the nascent spring melt, and lupine, smaller and less exuberant than that in town, rising in delicate purple spikes among the undergrowth. As we climbed higher, the brush ceded to old-growth forest, massive Douglas firs and hemlocks along steep slopes. At the snow line, the trees gave way to an expansive bowl. The clouds sucked in, so that all was grayish white above and below, with only smudges of exposed rock at the rim and the darker, crumpled snow marking our path.
And then, improbably, the clouds parted, revealing patches of genuine blue. The sky lightened in that way that it does here, in which the clouds lessen and the sun casts shadows without revealing itself. We watched the cloud bank moving back along the trail we had ascended, and then, shivering in the cold wind moving down off the snow, turned to follow it.
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