When Rob Lyon and his buddy Steve take to Washington’s Ross Lake in their canoe (read part 1 here), strange and wondrous experiences await them – some expected, others not. Following in the path of writer Jack Kerouac, who spent a summer on Desolation Peak high above this North Cascades jewel, their story takes on some of the same poetry and discovery as his.

We had a little fire in our wooded camp that night and cooked the trout and the mushrooms over a little Coleman stove. We figured we were probably the only people encamped on the lake, excepting the guys back at Cougar. This late in the season most visitors kept to the comfort of the cabins at the dam. At one point we heard twigs snapping and watched a large black bear prowl past the edge of our headlamp beams. I yelled out it might find some easy pickins’ at Cougar Island. We stashed our food in a heavy metal food locker that the Park Service provided before going to bed. I kept my headlamp close at hand.

The next three days were like Indian summer, a last hurrah of warmth for the mountain country. We could smell it in the forest in the cones and needles. Even the off-gassing of the canoe seemed a pleasant thing.

Tom was right about the wind; it kicked up right about noon. We got on the water early each morning. The bitch with that was that our camps were all on the east side of the lake and slow to get that morning sun, which we dearly loved. Ah well, at least we’d have it at the end of the day. Hell, it could be raining.

We steadily paddled north, seeing only the odd motor boat buzzing down the center of the lake – rangers or border patrol, we figured, or someone from the resort. It was fine going early in the day. We hugged the east bank and probed deeply into the clefts in the mountain at Devil and Lightening Creeks where it was cool and still and ferns grew on weeping rock walls.

On the afternoon of the fifth day we decided to hold over a second night at a small camp at the base of the Devil’s Junction trailhead. The East Bank Trail runs right past this camp. We split up and hiked different directions along it hoping to find grouse. The trail winds through different micro ecosystems, crossing cold water creeks on planked logs or stepping stones. The woods are exquisite this time of year, the trail carpeted with yellow maple leaves the size of punctured basketballs. Then it swings toward the water, hugging a narrow ledge along the face of the mountain.

We were fortunate to flush enough ruffed grouse in the alder draws at low elevation bordering the lake to keep us in meat for several days. Hiking back to camp with a warm bird in the game vest bulging against our backs was a good feeling, and it occurred to me that it was largely from reading Hemingway and Ruark, that I first learned of of hunting, if not fishing, for game, while it was Kerouac that brought us here to this mountain lake in the first place. Goes to show how influential our literary icons are.

We hugged the east bank and probed deeply into the clefts in the mountain at Devil and Lightening Creeks where it was cool and still and ferns grew on weeping rock walls.

On the second day out of camp we took the entire day to hike up to snowline in the alpine near Devil’s Junction to hunt blues. Blue grouse live high up on the mountain, and hunting them in the snow above tree line is an extraordinary experience.

In fact, the daily drill of hunting grouse or trolling for rainbow, then hunting up mushrooms and gathering and filtering fresh water, were rituals that gave texture to our time on the lake. I was thinking that if fishing and hunting are to the acts of shooting and catching as driving to the supermarket is to picking out a plasticized piece of flesh, it is a sad comparison indeed.

Steve is a whiz with a Dutch oven, and he braised the game with olive oil, onions, garlic and a dash of Randy Waugh’s legendary (in it’s time) Chicaoji sauce (made by a friend on the island). We cut up some potatoes and threw in a can of roasted tomatoes. It was a cachatorie, really, a hunter’s stew, and Steve put the blueberries from the crops of the birds we shot in with it. Grouse are some of the finest eating wild game I know of as mild as most quail, with a subtle flavor. Compared to commercially raised chicken, bred to incite gluttony, eating wild bird and fish feels more like a sacrament.

Our sunny days were steadily marching along toward winter and we decided to take the full measure of the lake before climbing Desolation.

We paddled past Silver Creek the next morning, poking our nose across the international border near Hozomeen, trip apogee. Holding out in the middle of the lake, we had lunch and watched the BC shore-side, but detected no signs of life. Even Winnebago Flats, an RV area there, was devoid of life.

I was reminded of the desperate small-boat flight to freedom of Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley down a long mountain lake, crossing to safety into Switzerland, in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Ross is a popular smuggling route for pot, or was at least, until we legalized it here in Washington State. I’ve often wondered if any of the smugglers might have read that Hem piece. Years ago I pitched Outside Magazine about a story about that smuggling conduit, with me running a trash can full of BC parsley down lake in my kayak, paddling at night, in winter too, feeling what it might be like to stand in a smuggler’s shoes. That story is yet unwritten, and now I’d have to reverse the direction.

Silver Creek was a letdown. Low and almost marshy, the entire flat was like an effluvial plain created from what Silver Creek had carried out of the mountains, which was considerable silt and rock. It was boney, wet and rooty country. We nevertheless caught two trout at the mouth of the creek. We cleaned them and put them right in the fry pan. They were smaller than the fish we had caught, but this time we found a big patch of white chantrelles to go with them and had an exquisite Rafanelli zin along in support.

We paddled leisurely south the next morning, heading for the trailhead at the base of Desolation. Hugging the steep west bank, we crossed at the point opposite Boundary Bay. By this time into the trip the muscles in our backs and shoulders and arms were in game form, and we fairly flew along. We scoped Desolation as we passed by, getting out the topo and guessing on the lay of the trail up.

From the level of the lake, Desolation was an uninspiring, rounded knob of a mountain and nothing like jagged Hozomeen peering over its shoulder. Jack sketched Hozomeen in a nine word ditty: “Hozomeen, Hozomeen, the most mournful mountain I ever seen . . . .” Well, it was equally mournful camped right below the trailhead that night in a field of exposed tree stumps on a shingly, dry, mud-caked shore.

The stumps were mournful enough, but the shadows they made when the sun went down were downright weird. They flickered more like ghouls, less like wraiths, as the wind batted our flames around. We set lanterns on a couple of stumps thinking that might help, but it only exaggerated the eeriness. We grilled a trout apiece on a wire grill over the open fire, salted them up and dove in. Shut up to eat, we could hear the sounds surround.

They may have added to the eerie mood, but I was keen on them, nevertheless. They were wild and lonely sounds, a lullaby for my soul. We heard the loon again, this time voicing a crystal tremolo. A north wind soughed hard through the steep-ranged timber behind camp. A steady crash of waves swooshed up the shallow bank and had me getting up to make sure they wouldn’t bother the canoe. And the dull roar of Artic Falls across the lake waxed and waned with the whim of the wind. Only the crackle of the night fire had a friendly tone to it. We stayed pretty much quiet after dinner too; it was hard to want to talk and break the spell.

Whitecaps stretched across the lake the next morning. A bright early sun vanquished the ghosts and mournfullness of the night before to the netherworld.

“Good thing we’re not going anywhere,” I shouted over to Steve.

“Except up.”

“You bringing a tent?” I asked.

He looked around at the sky. “I’d rather not. It’s going to be a haul going up. I think it’ll stay dry. I might bring my rain fly though, just in case.”

“Shotgun?”

“Nope, not with the pack and camera and everything else. We’ve got those freeze-dried meals you know.”

“That’s right.”

We packed up and secured our things under the overturned the canoe. We took our time and were on the trail by noon.

At lower elevation, the Desolation trail reminded me of the mossy-rocked islands where I live. Mossy rocks and bouldery outcrops mixed with stands of fir and maple, the leaves winking yellow and gold. We took plenty of breaks along the 5,000 vertical foot ascent. We ate Clif Bars for lunch and made it to the campsite on the southern end of the ridge by late afternoon.

According to the topo, the cabin was a mile further north. We scouted around the knob, ate some blueberries and looked for bear, spotting a yearling in the distance. It seemed as if the wind had picked up, but nary a cloud could be seen, and we could see forever, it seemed like. The lake was a distant ribbon of steel, and an eagle gyred far, far down below where we stood, watching.

The trail to the cabin had been guttered to bedrock by snow and rain runoff, and there wasn’t much soil to begin with. It wound through a forest of twisted, fairy-tale sub-alpine fir. Bear scat was thick around the berries and I was fully expecting to bump into a bruin; we took up hooting on blind corners. Then, finally, late that afternoon we hove in sight of the cabin, perched like a pale blue hat atop the peak.

As we got closer, we heard a cooing sound from the tower. Suddenly two blue grouse busted out from under it. They were enormous up close and I actually thought they were eagles at first! The birds glided over the edge and down the east side of the mountain out of sight.

“I couldn’t have shot them anyway,” I said.

“Odd how they’ve habituated with the structure here, you know. They reverse the typical migration pattern, breeding lower in the valley in the spring, then the males hustle right back up into the alpine.”

“I like it that they’re up here in the mountains:” I said.

“Edgy birds, like chukar living at fourteen thousand feet in the Himalyas – I read that in Mathiesen’s The Snow Leopard.”

“Make those ruffies look like slackers.”

“Exactly.”

There wasn’t much poking around to be had on the tiny knob of a peak. We tucked in close to the lee side of the tower, out of a powerful cold wind, shucking out of our wet tees and throwing on fleece and down. To get a jump on the impending darkness, we decided to cook up our freeze-dried spaghetti immediately and button up early. This night would be one cold hombre, we figured. It was still blowing like a bellows, whipping raggedly over the brow of the peak, but we managed to measure out the water, heat it up and pour it into the bags. Then we sat on the front steps of the tower, heads tucked in down hoodies, eating out of our Mylar nose bags and watching the sun set.

We could see well out across the Canadian border and over to the Pickets in the west, all white-tipped and blue tinted in the gloaming, and south to Ruby Peak behind the dam.

“How cool would it be to live up here for a couple of months?” I said to Steve.

“It might get old,” he said.

“I bet, but I’d chance it. I’d take the job in a heartbeat.”

The mercury was dropping as fast as the sun. It was easily below freezing already, and that was out of the wind. We had scouted out the tower for a spot that might be a little sheltered and didn’t come up with much. We scuttled under the structure and set up our packs as wind breaks, but they weren’t worth a shit. We were spanked from the hike and would sleep like rocks if we had half a chance, but any dropping off we might have done was countered by cold fingers slipping into our bags as the wind rose to a shriek, whistling through the guy lines and rattling the shutters, and it was obvious we should have taken shelter in the campground.

After about ten minutes I called over to Steve.

“You awake?”

“You kidding?”

I laughed.

“I am FREEZING over here.”

It was quiet for a minute.

“What do you think?” I said.

“I think we fucked up.”