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From America: On Mt. Hood's Palmer Glacier

by Sean Fagan

When you tire of all the noise, the dissonance, problems, the seeming intractable nature of the divides between people, head to a spot that - though only an hour’s drive from Downtown Portland, Oregon - hasn’t changed all that much in over a hundred thousand years. Glaciers, twelve of them, carpet the flanks of Mt. Hood (11,249 feet). One of them, the Palmer Glacier, is easily accessible from the statuesque Timberline Lodge, on the southern side of the mountain, built in the 1930’s as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) depression project. It sits at an elevation just short of 6,000 feet.

Get there early, before sunrise, on a day predicted to be clear. It will be cold then, and maybe windy, and that cold will sting your fingers as you prepare for the climb. To the east, underneath stars, the faintest of light will appear on the horizon, like afterglow, and you will have to look to it, again and again, over a matter of minutes, before you see the white turning a deeper color, pink, then more purple, and then the mountain which moments ago was all black - one had to imagine it there - appears above, muscular and resolute. Sunrises make you think about doing things.

Climbers will be up high on the mountain; little black dots on white, unmoving unless eyes fixate on them. In the altitude, and the cold, you will struggle at first. Stepping in others tracks, you’ll catch your breath and find a cadence to the climb. The experts say the glacier is retreating, but in late spring it is still snow-covered and glistening. The sun will poke through early morning clouds and soon you’re shedding a layer or two and drinking water and when you put on sunscreen, you put some underneath your nose because the sun will bake it, along with the inside of your nostrils as it reflects off the glacier. Suddenly, your heart and lungs, your thighs and calves, your arms, are all working as one and the pack on your back feels almost weightless; you wouldn’t want to be climbing without it.

Some sing, going up and down. You’ll hear them, usually on a rope team. Some sing in their heads. People will say hello to you. You’ll think about things differently on the glacier, because all of that dissonance, all that intractability, is fading. Problems can be dissected on a glacier, stories can take shape, and affronts can be diluted. You are going up, higher and higher, feeling stronger. You’ll pick out a marker, a rock, something in the distance, and you’ll say to yourself, ‘I’ll climb to there, and then I’ll have more water.’ Every once in a while you turn from the mountain and try to absorb what you see: other massifs, rising in the distance; tiny lakes, shimmering, like coins on the ground. ‘Who else is seeing this,’ you’ll ask out loud. Who else?

The ice is blue now, aqua blue, a sun-filtered blue, a haunting blue. It becomes steeper. If you tire you’ll be counting steps, and breaths. Over, and over. You are concentrating now, on the ice. These are some of the most careful, and memorable steps you will ever take. The blood is rushing through your body.

Later, resting in the lodge, you’ll see mother’s playing with their little children before the fireplace; kids playing ping-pong, guests scrutinizing the lodge’s check-out charges. People will again be talking on cell phones, some admonishing others. And the dullness, the vacuity of those conversations, can be irritating. But it will all be in the distance - for a while. Most haven’t been where you have. They didn’t see what you did; or feel what you felt.