China Cap in the Autumn

What is your favourite summit?  When is your favourite time to go there?  How often do you make it to that summit?

True, a favourite peak may be a one time adventure.  That favourite summit may only be a memory that is as vivid today as it was when it happened.  It may be a favourite due to the company you were with.

But then there are the peaks, mountains, hills, and buttes that lure you back, time and again.

Such is China Cap.

For me, China Cap is an "easy" stroll to the top.  The record, from trailhead to the summit, made by a now anonymous person, was one hour and thirty-nine minutes.  At least that is what is written on the cover of the summit register.  My own personal best is unknown.  I record how fast, but I haven't paid attention to what the fastest time was--perhaps three hours and change.

On a brisk November day, I left the trailhead and immediately was hiking on snow.  I had tried five days earlier and was overwhelmed by the situation.  This day was about twenty degrees warmer with a temperature hovering at thirty degrees F, and I was starting an hour earlier.

Left to Right:  China Cap, Burger Butte, Granite Butte and Mule Peak, from near Thief Valley.

It was the middle of rifle male elk hunting season, but nobody was at the trailhead and nobody was seen the entire hike.  The snow on the trail had been packed down, most likely by the first season elk hunters a week before, and there had been no new snow.  Off trail the snow was deeper, and usually with a breakable crust.

The view of the 'Cap from La Grande.

The trail goes through a mixed conifer stand of Douglas-fir, grand fir, Engelmann spruce, lodgepole and western larch.  In the summer the usual complement of understory plants are visible:  snowberry, chimaphilla, twin flower, rattlesnake plantain and the occasional grass-like plants.

Shortly after entering the wilderness you start walking on the north side of Burger Butte and enter an avalanche path.  This provides good views of both the north side of Burger, and the approach side of China Cap.  For example:

The north side of Burger Butte and the avalanche path.

China Cap from the avalanche track.

Re-entering the forest after the avalanche track one notices a change in species composition, with a majority of the trees Engelmann spruce, lodgepole pine, and sub-alpine fir.  A couple minor stream crossings, although in the early summer they can be problematic, and then one comes to the trail fork.  From an unsigned junction the prong to the right heads up to Burger Pass while the left traverses slightly up across the side of China Cap.

There are a couple ways to summit the mountain but on this day I angled up to the left of a prominent rock outcrop.  There were fresh footprints that went up about one hundred meters then turned around.  Mark had been up here, attemptiing the summit two days earlier, but must not have had any traction devices with him.  I stopped and installed micro-spikes on my boots and proceeded upward.

I seem to be slowing down, for it took much longer then previous trips, to reach the summit.  Maybe it was steeper, or snowier, or slicker, or higher, than before.  But after zig-zagging up the chute, walking a short distance across mostly gravelly ground for the wind had blown off the snow, picking my way through the elfin forest, I was on the apex of China Cap.

From the summit with Burger Butte in the upper right.

From the summit you can, in clear weather, see to the Cascade Mountains (Mount Adams has been seen as the sun set earlier this year), Elkhorn and Strawberry Mountains, into Idaho to the east, and north to the Washington State Blue Mountains.  Nearly every peak in the wild Wallowa Mountains is visible:  Twin Peak, Sacajawea, Matterhorn, Aneroid, Pete's Point, Eagle Cap, Cusick Mountain, Needle Point, Red Mountain and all the peaks in between.

The hike back was uneventful.  A little faster than going up, but care had to be taken not to start sliding too much, nor too fast.  And the pull of the mountain was there--taunting, luring me back, each time I turned around to look at where I had been.

Snow has a tendency to slow down the travel time.

It's one of my favouritest summits.  I hope it isn't your favourite, or the place may become too crowded.  But what is yours?  Where do you like to hang out and ponder the big questions of the day?

Hey Doug

Hey Doug,

It's been quite a while since we talked.  Like about two additional lifetimes for you, but I thought I should update you on this amazing life.

Forty years is really only half of an average American's lifetime, but that's about the time since you were last around.  Looking back on the past forty years is really illuminating. Gosh, a lot has happened.

Take calculators, for example.  When we were in college they were just hitting the scene. You could buy a simple math calculator for a hefty chunk of change, and you could go out and spend a lot more on a scientific calculator.  Guess what.  Calculators are all over the place, either stand alone models, or they are incorporated into watches and telephones. Pretty amazing, yeah?

With each month, and each year I think there's really not much new on the planet.  But then I look back on the past forty years and there is an amazing amount of new things, things that would just boggle your mind if they happened all at once.

I remember you driving around in the Ford Mustang.  That was a smart looking car.  But now there are cars that run on electricity, and cars that run on gas AND electricity.  The motor vehicles are starting to become slightly more energy efficient, but you know that I would have wanted that forty years ago.  Sometimes it takes a while for things to go your way.

And how is everyone doing you might ask?  Julie and Eric got married, had a couple fine young boys, got divorced, and both have since remarried, Eric going on to have two more kids.  Eric pursued  his dream of becoming a journalist, and has worked for the Register-Guard and the Oregonian. Julie recently retired from the State of Oregon, having worked in the employment department in Eugene.

JB never married, and works as a teacher in Longview, Washington.  Jim, last I heard, was a buyer for a department store, Nieman-Marcus, in Houston, Texas.  Harve married a couple times, we went to his second wedding, and he had a passel of kids, six or eight, and then decided he wasn't cut out to be a heterosexual.  He lives, and I think is retired now, in Nampa, Idaho.

Flash worked as a photographer for a couple different newspapers, no surprise there.  Liz married George and they worked in Germany, and are now retired in Arizona.

It's interesting how life just keeps going for some of us.  I should be much more appreciative, waking up every day with a joy and happiness at being alive in anticipation of a brand new day.  But it is almost as if a person grows tired of it, or not tired so much as complacent.

Could you imagine, forty years ago, thinking that the United States would ever, or could ever have a black man as President?  Yeah, it would be hard to imagine something so preposterous.  It hadn't been too long after race riots across the US, and not too long after the integration of Boston public schools.  Yet, Americans did elect, in 2008, an African-American by the name of Barack Obama.  Not a name you could possibly have dreamed up in the mid 1970's.  And the US was on the verge of electing it's first female President last year.

October first was the first day I could sign up for Medicare.  Did we ever think we'd be old enough to be on Medicare in the 1970's?  That was sooo far away, we never dreamed of it.  And Social Security is coming up soon.  Jeepers.

I married Cilla, somebody who wasn't around when you were, and we've had a great life together.  She is soon to retire from the Fish and Wildlife Department, and I'm continuing to work for the Forest Service.  We became Peace Corps Volunteers in the late 1980's and served in one of those obscure countries on the continent of Africa:  Botswana.  It was truly an amazing experience.  I should write up some of the details from our journals, but will save it for a later time.  We had a child, Miriam, and feel that she is the best kid in the world, although it's getting hard to call her a kid for she is twenty-five, a college graduate and working in Portland.

Remember when Harve bought a telephone answering machine?  It had a tape so he could record a greeting and take incoming calls if he wasn't within answering distance. The phone was plugged into the wall and had a dial with numbers.  Those were the days.

Remember going to the library to do research for a class, and looking in encyclopedias?

Remember putting long playing vinyl record albums on the turntable to hear such classic songs as Jerry Jeff Walker's "Up against the wall, red-neck mothers" or Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album?

Remember going downtown to shop for shoes?  Once Jim and I went into a local shoe store and were unable to buy anything because the store didn't stock anything as wide as Jim's feet, nor did it stock anything as long as my feet.

It can all be done on a phone in your pocket now!

Think about this.  People can take their phones anywhere, and they use them to take pictures, to look up facts (or cute cat videos), play music, buy things, play games, and to do calculations. They can do that even out in the woods.

It is becoming increasingly common, while I'm at work in the out-of-doors, to have a question that can only be answered by somebody in the office.  In the good ol' days, that usually meant waiting until that night, or the next day, to get an answer.  Now, people take a phone out of their pocket, and call the person.  Immediate answer!

There are phones in cars!  There are computers in cars!  These things were unthinkable forty years ago.

I sometimes drive by what you used to call "the perfect place".  It overlooks the valley, there's some neglected apple trees, and aspen trees, and you can look across the valley to the Elkhorns.  Below, in the valley, is a farm house that Jackie lives in with her husband. She became a first grade teacher, and by the way, was one of my daughter Miriam's best teachers, married a fish biologist, and now they are both retired, raising produce for some of the restaurants in the area.

I've gone on way too long.

It's been an amazing ride.  And I'm hoping it goes on for quite a while longer, although last year, Cilla and I were hiking up the Falls Creek Trail in the Wallowas, realizing that forty-one years earlier we had gone on our first hike together on that very trail.  Then we started philosophizing, and realizing that forty-one years from now we would both be in our hundreds.  We probably won't make it.  Which means we need to maximize our enjoyment of this life, to make the most of it, to cherish every single day.  It can sometimes be hard.

I mentioned that we almost elected a female President.  The person we collectively chose as our President seems to be a small minded, hateful, bully.  He has called nearly everyone, including his own staff and members of his own party, derogatory names.  He seems very capable of inciting hatred from even America's allies such as Britain and Australia.  He doesn't seem to care about diplomatic issues, and just blurts out his negative opinions of others with ease.

It's not the kind of place that I think you would have cared for.

Comments on the end of a Forest Service Career

"There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you."  -- Maya Angelou

The trees were twenty to thirty feet tall and starting to be high enough to block the view of the valley.  We drove past the old cutting unit and I was thinking, I helped plant those trees.  There are other places around the forest where I was instrumental in reforesting a cutting unit, either from actually planting the seedlings, or as an inspector or contracting officers representative administering a planting contract.

And there are thinned areas that I had helped create, again, either by wielding a chainsaw and thinning out the dense conifer growth, or through administering a contract to thin the forest. 

Time to say goodbye, Starkey Experimental Forest and Range.

Trees are located around the forest that I personally selected to become part of the genetics program for the region.  Timber sale units had been identified and marked on the ground, and trees were marked for harvest, or for leave trees, usually by following a prescription written by a silviculturist, by me.  There are stumps with my stump mark on them.  The first time I marked trees, the prescription was to mark every ponderosa pine larger than 14 inches diameter to cut.  Now, most of the timber prescriptions call for cutting trees with diameters smaller than 21 inches.  How’s that for a change?  Before it was to cut all the yellowbellies, as the larger ponderosa pines were known, now the call is for cutting trees that are of a smaller size class.

There are scientific papers that I helped produce, mostly in the collecting of data for stand conditions, fire return intervals, martens, pileated woodpeckers, western toads and black bear diets.  Who can say they had a job to sort through bear scat to identify the berries and insects?

Basking in the good weather in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area.

There are biological assesments, environmental assesments, environmental impact statements and allotment management plans that I have had a role in writing.

There are wildfires that I helped suppress, although I really suspect the weather had more to putting out the fires than my little pulaski ever did.  And there were the wildfires I helped mop-up, carrying a bladder bag of water on my back and hosing down every hot spot we'd see.

It has been a great experience working for the Forest Service.  I want to stress that most of the people I have worked with have been stellar.  Fabulous.  Nice.  Pleasant.  Kind.  Understanding of my quirks and incompetencies.  Yes, you would have to be a great person to put up with me.   And the work has been awesome, in some of the best country on earth!

The first year I worked for the Forest Service was the last year that Jerry Ford was President.  There has been some history developed between the agency and me.  And yet, I feel that most of that relationship has been, how do I say this, not necessarily one sided, but certainly less than equal treatment compared to others in the agency.

In a cheap motel in some small town, after work, working on keying the plants found that day.

You see, I’m a second class employee.  You may not have heard of anything called a second class employee, and in fact we are frequently characterized as being temporary employees, seasonal employees, 1039 hires, summer help, et cetera.

But the bottom line is we are not treated the same as the permanent employees.  No matter how well a second class employee does the job they will never receive a step increase.  No matter how long a second class employee works, they will never receive a length of service award.  No matter how many times they try to put money into their Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) account, they will be told they can’t do it.

I was with a group of FS employees a while back and noticed every one of them had a fleece vest or jacket, or hat, or other garment with their forest, or ranger district, or lab stitched, stenciled, or embroidered on the garment.  Everybody except for us second class employees.

It was an absolute pleasure and awesome responsibility representing the United States as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Here I'm shaking hands with the future leaders of the world, Botswana, 1989.

A couple years ago I was starting work on a new project and was told I could set my own schedule.  So I decided to continue my usual schedule of the past thirty years and told my supervisor I’d stay on 4-10 hour days.  Word got back to me that I could select my schedule so long as it was 8-ten hour days, with 6 days off.  So I was very pleased that I was allowed to select my own schedule, as long as it was 8-ten hour days!

Second class Forest Service employees can code up to two weeks of their time to training.  This means that they can work two weeks beyond their limit of 1039 hours.  It does not mean they actually are sent to any training, workshops, seminars or conventions.  What it means is they get to work two more weeks.  That is all fine and well, and I suspect somewhere in the bureaucracy is a bean counter who claims the agency provides X amount of hours of training for their temporary employees.  I once asked a supervisor, when I was coding my two weeks to training time, what training I had actually received.  She said, with no irony in her voice, that it was on-the-job training. This is when I was mainly working by myself, doing a job I had been doing for the previous ten years.

Flowers seemed abundant everywhere, at times.  Grindelia nana and Dianthus armeria in the beard of somebody.

One supervisor sat me down and told I had to remove from a public website, a privately made video that was showing the Forest Service in a poor light.  You see, I noticed a wet meadow that some employees of the Forest Service were using to muddy up the atv’s that they were using at work.  They were driving back and forth across a wet meadow, I was told, literally hundreds of times to build a fence.  Yet the NEPA documentation specifically said the FS would stay out of wet areas.  I was a little torqued off.  So, on my own time I videoed the damage, made the video, and posted it on Youtube.

Which for a second class employee is a no-no.

So, for those of you who haven't seen it, and realize that it is an amateur job, but was rather cathartic for all the frustrations I was experiencing, I've posted the link at the bottom.

Another supervisor sat me down at her desk and told me, "You are too chatty." This was somewhat comical to me, for it seems that most of my life people have told me I need to speak up more; I need to tell people what's on my mind.  But I did change my behavior to avoid the supervisor.  And  afterwards realized that that was a form of bullying.

See you on the trail, out in the woods, wandering the desert, or on top of a summit, such as Mt. Hood.

And then there is the blatant discrimination that is so rampant in the Forest Service.  You may be unaware of the discrimination, but it is there.  I see it a lot in the job announcements that I've seen over the past 25 years.  It tears at the heart every time I would be looking for a more permanent position and there in the small print the announcement would say you can only apply for the job if you are younger than thirty-seven years old.  That statement was usually within a paragraph or two of the statement that says the agency does not discriminate on the basis of age, among other things.

Sometimes the chutzpah exhibited by the agency, and people in the agency, was amazing.  For example, I once applied for a term position that was the job I was doing as a 1039 employee.  I did not get the position because all of my education and experience was not enough.  The agency hired a person from South Carolina, who had no knowledge of the trees.  He did have experience killing people overseas in the US military.  So the agency hired him (maybe because they discriminate against pacifists), and I was asked to train him on the differences in Douglas-firs and grand firs.  Essentially, I was asked to teach him to do the job I had been doing for the previous ten or so years.

Up close and personal with some of the finer vertebrates I've worked with.

Hey, I seem to be complaining too much.  That wasn't my intention when I decided to quit the Forest Service.  But if this is the only complaining I've done in over forty years of working, then maybe I should be writing a book!  If anything can be learned from my second class status, to help those that follow, then perhaps it was worth it.

Overall it was a great trip.  Not, you will note, was it a great career.  But I did manage to get through being a second class employee.  

As for you:  make the most of your life.  It's the only one you may have, ever. Do good.  Be nice.  Respect the land.  And maybe I'll see you on the trails of the world.

Here's the infamous video:
Meadow Creek Destruction

"Ain't it funny how an old broken bottle,

Looks just like a diamond ring."

                           --John Prine