So it’s been a stressful couple of weeks. Devon’s had more than just her hands full on Water Street. Having managed to survive the delicate dance between the City permitting office and the town’s Historical Preservation Committee, she’s been racing to orchestrate the fairly massive, complex and absolutely essential roof repair/replacement project on the 60 year old cinder block building that’s been awkwardly duck-taped onto the back of the 150 year old wooden building in which she’s got her apartment and glass studio. Before the rains come, which is now. Of course, the cinderblock building is home of the busiest and most popular coffee shop in town. And you know how we in the PNW love our coffee, so anything that might interrupt their service of the town’s caffeine-driven populace is fraught. Like, say, replacing the roof over their head on the cusp of rainy season.

As I said, stress. Fortunately, (and unsurprisingly) she’s assembled an excellent team to do the work, but still, stress.

And for my part, there’s the farm. ‘Nuff said? But also, amid the chaos of wrangling farmers, tending undertended pastures and fallen trees, negotiating leases and and persisting on our still lingering attempts to get building permits, I’m increasingly aware that I’m due in New Hampshire next month, where I’m supposed to give a half day tutorial on that software project of mine to pretty much the entire US shipboard research tech community. I probably ought to have more than just a few handwritten notes for that.

Because of my own stress, I’ve not been in a frame of mind where I can pop out my own swirl of anxiety to provide the appropriate amount of emotional support for that beloved of mine. And that, of course, pushes us both further down the spiral.

In situations like this, the easiest and surest mental health break I know of is to disappear into the woods forever. I mean, for a day. It would be better if I could drag Devon along, but since the rain is coming today, and – as of two days ago – there were still massive holes in the coffeehouse roof, even suggesting that she desert her post would not have gone down well.

So off I went, solo, abandoning my own responsibilities for a walk in the park.

Starting up the trail

By “park” here, I mean the Olympic National Park, the 1400 square mile accumulation of glaciers, rivers, dense rain forests, and the massive underpinnings of often-impassable granite peaks that create its unique collection of features. The northeast corner of the park is a bit over a half hour’s drive away from here, but getting all the way into it requires a bit more work. And as much as I’d like to disappear in the mountains for an extended time away, this was going to have to be a day hike, so I picked up my handy “Day Hikes on the Olympic Peninsula,” spun the figurative dial, and settled on the innocuous sounding “Heather Park loop.”

Spoiler alert: “the loop” clocks in at just under 13 miles for the day, crosses three passes and nets close to a mile in vertical, some of it on exposed shale chutes. I can barely walk this morning, but it was just what I needed.

The ascent up Heather Park was gorgeous, lush and utterly devoid of other human presence. Ripe salal and huckleberries for my morning snack, and mushrooms everywhere, everywhere everywhere on the way up. No, I have no idea what any of them were, except for the pretty danged obvious Do Not Even Think About It amanita muscaria. (Warning: there will be many mushroom pictures ahead.)

Did I mention the “up” part? Because Heather “Park” is all about up. You start at about 1800 feet, and just go steadily up. Up through stately Douglas fir, up through alpine meadows, up through rocky outcroppings. And when you get to the top, improbably, there’s more up. Somehow, on this trail, there always seemed to be more up. Olympian quantities of up. Mountains of it.

Up through the fir

Up through the meadows

The ‘up’ keeps coming

Good lord, there is a top, isn’t there?

Mind you, most of it was lovely and sheltered up, unlike my foray up Mt Baldy a couple of months ago in the heat of summer (note to self: I suppose it is reasonable to expect that a mountain called “Baldy” is unlikely to have much shelter from the elements as your ascend the higher reaches). And everywhere along the up, more and different mushrooms pushing out of the trailside duff.

Finally making it to the pass between the jagged and imaginatively-named peaks of “First Top” and “Second Top” revealed the fog-shrouded valley beyond. It was time for a break, because I’d only paused for a few minutes on the approximately 3600 foot ascent and, after a little bit of treacherous down along a shale chute, there was going to be more…up.

Hurricane Ridge Road on the other side

At this point I had actually crossed paths with a couple of fellows headed the other way – fellow 61 year olds Ed and Andrew. We congratulated ourselves on our energetic geezerhood, swapped trail condition reports and went on our respective ways. But just two people in almost four hours on a day hike in a national park?

After Heather Park was the sometimes lush, sometimes jagged traverse to get to Victor Pass, in the shadow of the imposing broken-sideways-layer-cake of Mt. Angeles. On the map it didn’t look so bad – I could drop down the switchback trail on the back of the pass and pop up to the summit to bag another peak. In reality, even if I hadn’t already put in seven miles of constant up, Mt. Angeles was clearly a rocky pile of nope today.

Mt Angeles: a big, rocky wall of “nope”

It was approaching Victor Pass that I heard, for the first time, voices in the distance, and saw up on the pass above at least a dozen hikers lounging around. The pass was the intersection of a few trails, most popularly the short-but-steep “Switchback” route up from the Hurricane Ridge Road in the valley below. I don’t think there was anyone actually in flip flops, but it was clear that reaching the pass from that side required a bit less in terms of effort than the route I’d taken. I caught – and managed to stifle – myself feeling haughty there for a minute. This place is a natural wonder for each to enjoy according to their ability and inclination.

East side of Klahhane Ridge shortly before being engulfed in rising clouds

But onward. The next “leg” of the hike was a traverse along Klahhane Ridge. Here again I had the trail to myself. It was already noon, and in the heat of the day, the coastal undercast was bubbling up from below to shroud the trail in a delightful patchwork of fog and sun. I stumbled on a covey of grouse who seemed almost entirely unperturbed by my presence, drumming and squeaking along. In the wetter areas, more mushrooms.

It was gorgeous, with peekaboo glimpses of Canada to the north, and Mount Olympus to the south, but by now my legs were feeling spent, and I still had another five or six miles to go. Fortunately, it was (almost) all downhill from here. Unfortunately, it was the steep kind of down that is almost as brutal as the steep kind of up, with the added thrill that, if you let yourself succumb to the tug of gravity even for a moment, you’ll quickly find yourself uncontrollably slipping, sliding and eventually tumbling down a twisty rocky path until you find something to break your fall. And probably a few bones.

So I took it slowly. I took rest breaks. I took a lot more mushroom photos. Scree slope turned back to woodland, turned back to broad, almost level forest trail, and – a bit more than eight hours after I left it – a parking lot where my car waited patiently to carry me home. For a shower. For a healthy dose of ibuprofen. And for a good, solid night’s sleep before diving back into whatever stressful chaos awaited my return.

Okay, one last mushroom picture.

What it felt like: Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, 1818