Thompson Peak, Sawtooth Mountains

Voices. I hear voices.

Roll over…Tussle about…Sleep.

Voices. Wandering into my resting conscious. Forcing aching muscles to move.

Roll over…Fuss with the cuff of the sleeping bag…Sleep.

Voices. Still going. Really? Still going? What on God’s green earth could they be talking about at this hour?

I succumb to the inevitable, roll over and gaze from the open tailgate of my truck, which is carefully positioned with a grand view of the vertical granite scarp of Central Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains.

Jaw agape.

There’s a grid of carefully positioned chairs in neat rows and columns on the grass about fifty feet away. There are people, too. And they’re talking. Standing and talking. And they’re wearing starched-collar shirts. They’re wearing blazers. They’re wearing dresses.

I look to the left, toward the rising sun, and discover a steeple atop a building.

Shit. How the hell am I going to get my naked body into some clothes without flashing a Sunday-morning congregation? I poke my head around the corner of the truck to look at the patch of ground where Dan threw his sleeping bag last night. He’s dressed and moving, a group of church goers closing in on his position from the parking lot.

“I’m getting out of here, dude. See you in town at the bakery,” he says.

Right.

The truth is, I don’t entirely mind waking up like this. It’s just random enough to consider donning some long underwear, walking over and joining the fellowship. I’ve become, after all, more spiritual than I ever was, and part of me welcomes the unexpected opportunity to explore some form of ethereal embrace.

But today is not the day. I haven’t been to church regularly in 15 years, and crashing a service after flashing the congregation doesn’t seem the right thing to do.

I shuffle in my sleeping bag, working to expose little skin as I do, and slither into a pair of pants. Climbing out of the truck, I pull a sweatshirt over my shoulders and make haste in tossing my scattered gear into the bed of the truck. Within minutes I am driving into Stanley, where the sweet smell of eggs and bread and coffee await.

Our ascent of Thompson Peak yesterday was something of a religious experience, but for now I’m going to cap it at that. Church services as an outgrowth of my budding sense of spirituality are, at least for the time being, going to have to wait.

Saturday

I wake early. Really early. That’s because my alarm goes off in Boise, and I’m meeting friends at the Iron Creek Trailhead west of Stanley at 7 a.m. It’s a three-hour drive.

After snaking along the South Fork of the Payette River and cresting Banner Summit, the slanted shadows and faint mists of early morning paint the northern, snow-streaked face of the Sawtooth Mountains in the windshield. A man tries to get me to slow down by giving me a thumbs-down through his windshield on the road to Iron Creek, where I find Dan and Jessica chatting, and chattering, in the morning chill. We leave a car and load into Jessica’s station wagon, driving to Stanley and then turning south and west again, arriving at the Redfish Lake Trailhead, which accesses several trails ascending some of the highest elevation basins and spires in the aptly named Sawtooth Mountains.

It’s kind of a big day for me. I used to climb the giant peaks of Colorado and Idaho with regularity, but I haven’t stood at the summit of a mountain for three years. There are reasons for that, strange metaphorical reasons that stemmed from a desire to climb something of significance with a woman I once knew, but the time has long passed. It’s time to climb again, and we’ve chosen the tallest spire in the Sawtooth Mountains, 10,751-foot Thompson Peak, as our quest.

Jessica has climbed Thompson Peak three times already, and she leads us up the Fishhook Creek Trail, and then up onto a high moraine where our trail glides gradually and gracefully upward and westward toward towering granite ramparts comprised of some of the youngest exposed rock in Idaho.

The Sawtooths

Idaho is a state with a sturdy skeletal structure, and its backbone is the Sawtooth mountain range. There are at least 40 peaks in this glaciated landscape towering 10,000 feet or taller, and the headwaters of some of the West’s most storied rivers—Salmon, Middle Fork of the Salmon, Payette and Boise—are located here. In a state full of mountains, the Sawtooth Mountains stand out. They are big, steep, beautiful and wild.

In 1972, Congress established the 756,000 acre Sawtooth National Recreation Area to showcase Central Idaho’s scenic and pastoral attributes as a multiple-use paradigm. The enabling legislation also established the inherent 217,664-acre Sawtooth Wilderness Area. The mountains don’t tower like the Tetons, but Wyoming’s most famous range is an easy comparison. They’re both steep and made of granite, but the Sawtooths are less crowded with climbers and gawking tourists. There are deep creases in the Sawtooths, and hikers can get lost for weeks if they want.

The Sawtooth Mountains are also the place where a groundbreaking innovation in federal land wildfire management was implemented.

David O. Lee is a man for whom a scenic peak in the White Cloud Mountains, the next range to the east, was named. He was a 1960s and 1970s ranger with the Sawtooth National Forest. Born in the rural ranching and mining town of Challis, Lee was a respected ranger and even more revered man, a real western mountain man, someone of strong character and deep rural lineage. Though he was born in the mountains of Central Idaho, David O. was, like his forebears, a pioneer. Not long after the Sawtooth Wilderness Area was established, David O. Lee conceived of an idea.

Since wilderness areas, made possible with passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, are wild and pristine, “untrammeled by the hand of man” in the words of the legislation, why should the Forest Service spend time and resources fighting naturally-occurring fires that ignite within their borders? Rather, Lee argued, they should be left to their own devices as Mother Nature intended. Species like lodgepole pine depend on fire to reproduce, and fires clear old, decrepit trees making way for new, more vigorous growth, creating improved deer and elk habitat and places on the fringes of forests called ecotones, where raptors have an easier time hunting prey.

The science is pretty clear. Nearly a century of fire suppression and tinkering have limited the number of fires across the West, and in some cases eliminated them. Wilderness areas, by virtue of their designation, are places where fires don’t threaten housing subdivisions or isolated cabins and can be left to smolder the way they did before people began tinkering with natural devices.

Fire is something easy to demonize, and so it’s the opposite of what we thought was right, but it was David O. Lee who suggested fire might actually be good for wild ecosystems, that the landscape is worthy of its own destruction, that health might be achieved, not by suppressing fire, but by letting it run its course. Natural fires would be more regular, less intense and less destructive, he argued. They would burn, and the land would heal in its own time, in its own way, in fact invigorated by its own destruction.

At David O. Lee’s initiation, the United States’ first let-burn policy was created in Central Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness Area. It’s a policy that’s been applied in other sparsely-populated portions of the West in the ensuing decades. Like the Wilderness Act itself, it is a sign of innovation and enlightenment for a culture that has otherwise worked to subdue and control everything in its path.

Blisters

I haven’t worn a pair of hiking boots in three years, and within a couple miles, before we’ve gained tree line, I can feel the skin on my heels warming from friction that will undoubtedly give way to annoying blisters.

Where a small path breaks away from the main trail and ascends toward Thompson, we sit and drink water while I slap strips of duct tape to my heels. A butterfly is apparently fond of me and returns time and again to perch atop my head.

As we ascend past tree line and the range’s impressive outer ramparts, my mind returns to the significance of this day. It was three years ago, while climbing a peak in the White Cloud Mountains to the east, that I preached life is like climbing a mountain: one step in front of the other with faith there’s a summit up there somewhere. Today I’m reliving those lessons, though in different company. With each step, one of hundreds of thousands of steps that lead to Thompson Peak’s summit, perspective changes. The landscape’s various features—valley rivers and neighboring ranges, the town of Stanley far below—the story they collectively tell gradually makes more sense as we climb.

The curious part about this metaphor is that the entire story doesn’t ever make sense until one actually stands at the summit of a peak. Until that moment, achieved with a final few steps, there are always parts of the landscape hidden from view by the mass of rock and dirt being climbed. With those final steps, another whole side of reality is revealed. To get there, preparations like food and water are, of course, essential. But they don’t actually help one make sense of the story. That is only possible by attaining a proud and lofty summit.

Summit Dance

(Yada yada yada … I’m still not done. Will work this back around to falling asleep in Stanley in a strange parking lot during the Sawtooth Folk Festival. It’s worth noting for now, though, that the Goat Creek drainage is among the most beautiful I’ve been to in the Rocky Mountain West. It’s not for the faint of heart, though. It’s steep, rugged, and there is no trail. There is one 1,000-vertical-foot snow field that lists at 30 to 40 degrees, and it is genuinely dangerous. A fall in the wrong place could be seriously injurious and might kill you. We had one fall, but that person was able to self-arrest using a ski pole he was carrying. Others in the party navigated a steep cliff band, which was no safer–and perhaps more dangerous still. Crampons and ice axes (or skis) are recommended. As with all backcountry travel, plan well and go at your own risk. The Sawtooth Mountains are big and remote. A very experienced outdoorsman was killed in the range three summers ago, and his remains were discovered a year later, scattered throughout a field of scree. If you don’t know what you’re dong, stick to established trails).