A group on horseback passes through a remote Pasayten meadow. Photo © Curtis Edwards.

By Matt Rasmussen
Forest Magazine, May/June 2000

I stopped walking four miles into the Pasayten, when my legs wouldn’t work anymore. Six hours earlier and 5,000 feet lower, a fiberglass boat had deposited me and my fifty-pound pack on the east shore of Ross Lake, ten miles from the nearest road. The boat’s pilot—the last person I would see for three days—had waved to me as he departed and I had watched him speed southward and disappear around a point, leaving only a distant hum of his outboard in my ears and the quiet lapping of his wake, and then nothing at all.

In the evening, I sat alone outside my tent on the back of Devils Dome, watching the mass of 9,066-foot Jack Mountain fade in the gloaming across a deep cleft of valley until all I could see were the Rorschach splotches of the big mountain’s snow fields and the ragged outline of its summit drawn in reverse by an absence of stars. The soughing of far-below water filtered upward, broken by the hoot of an owl and then the brief whisper of invisible wings as the bird flew past me, close to me.

A lonely place. Lonelier, perhaps, than a person has a right to expect so close to the techopolis of Seattle.

In the morning, a creamy ground fog filled the valleys below, hanging low and thick around the ankles of massive mountains to the west. Those mountains are the giants of the North Cascades, serrated peaks with names like Terror and Redoubt and Terrible and Fury and Triumph and Despair. They shelter the Pasayten. They wrench moisture from storms that queue up in the Pacific in the winter months, dropping the world’s heaviest snowfalls but leaving only tatters of cloud to waft across the Pasayten. They thin the human hordes who stream into the Cascades from the Puget Sound lowlands in the summer months in a similar way; they soak up the professional ranks who settle for trailheads closer to the city on weekend getaways.

The Pasayten stands in quiet contrast to those bustling ice-clad mountains. More than twelve thousand years ago, a snout of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet ground across much of the area, smoothing the rough edges of the land, smudging cirques and erasing aretes. The topography is thus gentler than the sharp contours just a few miles to the west. The ceaseless chatter of streams and waterfalls that gives the Cascades their name is muted here. The landscape is more subtle. The meadows are wider, the vistas longer, the loneliness more tangible.

And the wildness is more profound. For the rare Cascade grizzly bear, the Pasayten is a final stronghold, if such a word can be used for a population that has dwindled to perhaps twenty animals. Other creatures that have disappeared from the Cascade Range hang on in the Pasayten, or at least wander in from Canada from time to time: lynx, wolves, wolverines and an occasional moose. I have never seen any of these in years of rambling through the Pasayten, but it is good to know they are there.

On my second day out I saw a black bear sitting patiently on its hindquarters next to a rubble of talus, head cocked, listening for the stirrings of pika in the rocks and looking for all the world like the RCA Victor dog. I startled a blue grouse that exploded away from me in a huff of feathers and wings. I circled a quarter of the way around Jack Mountain and set up camp in a silent meadow bruised by the foliage of ripe blueberries.

Then the sun dropped again behind the snowy peaks to the west, tinging the air with coolness and leaving the Pasayten quiet, peaceful, alone.

Matt Rasmussen is former editor of Forest Magazine.

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