Voices in the Wilderness: Amy Pearson

I pull over at the intersection of Lightning and Mosquito Creek Roads to check my map.  Sure enough, I am en route to find the trailhead to a noted peak in the Idaho Cabinets, and namesake for 88,000 acres of proposed Wilderness: Scotchman, 7,009 feet.

I’d asked the locals about it.  Someone had never been.  Someone said it would take at least eight hours.  Someone said I had to go.

My jeep is hugging the edges of FR2294A and I give thanks that Dad insisted I purchase an all-terrain vehicle; these are forest roads meant for hardy people who don’t mind going slow or getting lost sometimes.  

I slow down, appreciate the sense of the unknown.  It feels wild and that’s somehow comforting.

*

The first mile is steep with switchbacks, and I wonder if I might have had one less glass of wine the night before.  I am encased by tall pines.  I note the ghost-like silhouettes of bear grass coming to terms with the end of season. 

It’s a hot day in late August.  I’m sweating hard and focused on my boots moving up the trail.

“Have you been up here before?”  A woman’s voice breaks me from my reverie.

“No,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “you’re in for a treat.  Pretty soon you’ll get some views.”

“Thanks,” I say, not wholly convinced in my heart that Idaho will have the views I’m looking for.

*

I come around a long switchback and see people gathered ahead.  I wonder what the commotion is and then start to see patches of blue water to the south and a massive expanse of sky, Lake Pend Oreille.

My heartbeat quickens with a surge of adrenaline and I hike without stopping to what looks like a summit.

“Is this the top?” I ask a couple settled in for lunch on a massive piece of greenish-gray rock.  

“You’ve got about half a mile to go,” they say.  

I look up to where they’re pointing.  It looks like a climb, and I’m in climbing mode.

*

“Scotchman, Scotchman,” I hum under my breath as I heave my body up argillite to quartz, “who are you?”

The ruins of an old fire lookout sit on a crest.  I scurry up to the left of it.  Then, nothing.  

I have reached a plateau of silence.  My body eludes me.  Vastness down the drainages.  Vastness across the mountains stretching miles and miles across the Panhandle into Montana.  It’s astonishing.

“Wilderness,” I whisper.

I sit down to try to take in the enormity of the landscape.  I feel the sun on my back.  A sense of wonder compels me to trace the ridgelines with my finger.  

You could spend your life learning this country.

*

I take my time going down.  I give thanks to the mountain for being here.  I give thanks for natural beauty and the sense of awe it inspires.  I give thanks that wilderness is wild, and we can go there and remember who we are.