We crossed over into Montana yesterday and I’m typing this along the North Fork of the Flathead river’s banks. It’s suffocatingly hot by late afternoon, but the dry air and cold river water helps take the summer edge off. Rafters drift by - lounging, fly fishing, paddling - and the dirt road we came in on hums with truck traffic. It’s the last day of July and the end of our Pacific Northwest travels.
I’ve struggled on how to summarize my travels on this blog.
How to I capture so many experiences onto an online blog?
How much detail is too much? Too little?
For whom am I writing this all out and to what end?
A month of traveling has past and here I am at the end of those weeks figuring out how to put it all in words. I type some out, find it cheesy, delete, repeat. Then I question why I’m even writing it out in the first place. This usually marks the start of an unnecessary internal dialogue with myself as to why I’m overthinking something so trivial as words on a screen. Everything that feels like a creative outlet to me has to feel perfect before being shared with “the world”. I use that term loosely here since I’m not convinced that these words have much of an audience to speak of.
Balance. Balance has always been hard for me, as I think it is for many of us. In retrospect, balance was an apt mantra for July considering how opposite the two states we visited felt.
On one hand you had the welcoming forests and whimsical waterscapes of Oregon.
On the other hand there was the wild, more severe Washington.
Those weeks in Oregon make me think of serene lakes of the deepest blue, shades I had never before seen in nature. I got to go cherry picking for the first time in my life (might have gone overboard with 3 pounds, but no regrets). We drank delicious wine on sunny patios and ate maple donuts the size of our heads. I saw waterfall after beautiful waterfall tucked into endless forests. I remember at first feeling unsettled by their uniformity, uninterrupted stretches of spaced out pine. It was beautiful, but hauntingly so. At the right time of day the dust in the air from the gravel roads would do such wonderful things with the light coming in through the branches. One one of these gravel roads on our way up to a biking trail we ran into mushroom foragers. There was something about being out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by towering trees and every once in a while catching a glimpse of a person hunched over and plopping big mushrooms into buckets that made me feel like I was in some storybook. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how fun that subsequent downhill trail was given how whimsically wonderful the name was - Tiddlywinks.
We discovered sno-parks, designated camping and staging areas for winter adventuring like snow mobiling or backcountry skiing. They were connected to one another by these tucked away gravel roads and had wood stoves in rustic lodges for shelter from the snowy winds outside. It was so easy to imagine the landscape blanketed in snow, exploring the quiet, cold woods on a snow mobile and enjoying the gathered warmth in these sno-parks. There were roadside canopies of wild sweet pea so extensive you could smell the perfume in the air. Snow capped giants like Mt. Hood felt ever-present, almost like they were lovingly watching over you as you explored their peaceful valleys below.
Oregon was comforting. It felt like a warm hug on a cold night.
Washington felt more like the energy you have waking up on the morning of a long awaited adventure. It felt full of undiscovered opportunity and exceptionally wild.
Our first few days we ended up lost in seemingly endless miles of pothole filled gravel roads somewhere in the space between Mount St. Helens and Mt. Adams. We had to squeeze our van through tight tunnels of evergreen and battled clouds of bloodthirsty mosquitos (thank goodness for our door screens). When we finally emerged from the gravel wilderness, I saw my first big mountain, Rainer. From the top of the hike we did you could see all the volcanic giants of Oregon we had just left behind and we heard the distant cracking of ice along the mountainside, the sound deep and slow. The rivers were raging and the most beautiful blue-green from the glacial flour carried in their waters. Roads could only get you so far as it seemed most parks and forests we visited skirted around rather than through. Every hike felt like a trailer to a movie being shown in the backcountry. We pushed our legs as far and as hard as we may have ever pushed them trying to get to whatever peaks we could within the endless cascades. There was one day I could barely hobble up and out of the van door.
We also had some quieter days though along the rocky coastline exploring cobbled beaches and colorful tide pools. Eating sourdough toast at dawn watching seals play in the bay out of the van. I had never seen a starfish before Oregon, at the tide pools along Rialto beach in Olympic National Park in Washington I saw them in droves and in different colors, bright orange and deep maroon. There were barnacles of all shapes and sizes, mussels, little colorful crabs hiding among the shells, and scrounging hermit crabs among the green tentacles of the various anemones. Shades of green, pink, and red I have never seen before in oceans. The pools almost seemed as if someone had spilled a bunch of paint on the rocks beneath the water. In short, they were so beautiful.
// B A L A N C E //
Steep, treacherous terrain // rolling forests, quiet coastline.
Doing it all // contented rest
I thought having agency over almost every waking hour of this trip would finally get me out of the perpetual cycle of “I’m doing too much” or “I’m doing too little”. Turns out balance is hard to get right even without a job getting in the way. I can do whatever I want on this trip, but I don’t always seem to know what I want. What these months have offered though is glorious space for me to be able to figure that out. Freedom. Untethered exploration of these beautifully wild places and myself. How does one find balance on a trip like this when time seeming limitless is itself a limit. Maybe Montana can shed some light…