Following Thoreau:

The Adventures of the Under the Hill Gang

11/21/2000

It was a cold, clear Tuesday morning in mid-November, and the sky was a preternaturally deep shade of blue. We drove east on Highway 2, three miles beyond Marias Pass, and stopped at the unmarked Autumn Creek trailhead, on the southeast border of Glacier National Park. This trailhead is difficult to find unless you know exactly where it is, but once you know its location, it's rather obvious.

There were no vehicles other than ours in the parking area. There was a registration box at the beginning of the trail, which I walked right by. My friend Marc paused and said, "Shouldn't we register? I mean it looks like weÕre the only ones out here."

"I suppose that would be the sensible thing to do," I said, looking around at the desolate landscape.

Marc flipped open the registration box and started filling in the form with the pencil the National Forest Service had provided. "Let's see, name of party...," he read and turned to the rest of us for a suggestion.

"Name of party? We don't have a name," I said.

"Well I need to put something down," Marc said.

Thinking fast, I said, "Okay, how about The Under the Hill Gang?"

Patrick laughed. "Well, George Ostrom has his Over the Hill Gang, and weÕre definitely not over the hill yet!"

"The Under the Hill Gang...I like it!" said Marc, writing it on the registration form. "Destination?" he asked.

"Under the Hill!" we all said in unison.

And thus our hiking group was named. We started hiking together last month. It was a casual thing at first, born of tourist season cabin fever. I was visiting Brett Thuma at his Bigfork gallery last month, and we were looking at slides of the places he had hiked. "I don't get out enough," he said wistfully, "but summer is my busiest season, and I have to be here."

After leaving Brett's gallery, I walked around the corner to Bay Books to pick up some books I had ordered from Patrick Jones, and he had the same complaint. Since Brett and Patrick are now observing shortened winter hours at their establishments, I suggested we hike on Tuesdays. My husband Steve and I work at home (I am a writer and he writes software), and homeschool our kids, so we are available on weekdays. I invited a few more friends to join us, and soon we had ourselves a hiking group. Some of us are motivated to participate in these hikes by health issues. Steve has a strong family history of heart disease and his cardiologist wants him to do regular cardiovascular exercise. I have diabetes, and my doctor, too, has prescribed cardiovascular exercise, for it is the ideal way to keep my blood sugars down. But hiking is as good for the soul as it is for the body.

My favorite Henry David Thoreau essay is called "Walking." In this essay Thoreau posits that most of society's ills would be cured if everyone took a break from work and spent part of each day walking, free from all engagements, with no specific destination, just for the pure pleasure of being outdoors. He advocates walking until one finds a landscape of sufficient fairness and wildness, in effect, letting wildness be your compass. To lose oneself in wildness, if only for half an hour, is balm for the soul. Thoreau took this a step further when he wrote, "In wildness is the preservation of the world." This essay is one hundred and fifty years old, but Thoreau's words still ring with wisdom, and are perhaps more pertinent today than when they were written.

Due to hunting season, the Under the Hill Gang's first hikes have been limited to Glacier National Park. On election day we got up early, voted, then hiked the Avalanche Lake Trail, a trail so heavily used in summer that it resembles a freeway, but it is very different this time of year, when the summer crowds are gone. It felt as though we had the entire park to ourselves.

The day was overcast, and the temperature was in the teens to lower twenties. The trail was steep, and I kept us fueled with my homemade cinnamon rolls and cranberry white chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, just out of the oven that morning. Every time someone would start lagging, I'd pull another cookie out of my pack.

On our way up to the lake we passed through a primeval seral old growth forest. A flock of approximately two hundred migrating pine siskins converged in the crown of an old hemlock, garrulously eating pine nuts. There appeared to be some finches mixed in with this flock, but the light wasn't good enough for us to be able to identify them as Cassin's, purple, or rosy finches. We also saw two woodpeckers, a hairy and a Williamson's sapsucker.

As we walked, we talked about conservation politics, birding, cooking, and about the place where science and metaphysics intersect. My friend Marc teaches Tantric meditation, and Patrick has a master's degree in divinity, and this combination often leads to fascinating discussions. My daughters are always part of these hikes, and I feel good about exposing them to such fine minds.

We spent a couple of hours at the lake, taking pictures, looking at birds, eating lunch, having a snowball fight. We circumambulated the lake and saw a pair of BarrowÕs goldeneyes (which are not really uncommon, but are far less common than common goldeneyes and therefore can be tricky to spot in this area), some mergansers, a bufflehead, and a dipper. The lake was half frozen, and the waterfowl were making the most of the remaining open water. On the way back down the trail snow began to feather down, making the forest seem even more enchanted.

There was considerably more snow on the Autumn Creek Trail, where we hiked last week. Not enough for snowshoes or cross-country skis, but enough to require snow boots and create sufficient resistance to give us a good workout. The snow slowed us down and made us more aware of the profound silence of the aspen and lodgepole forest we were passing through. It also made for excellent tracking conditions. We spotted the tracks of red fox, coyote, snowshoe hare, moose, elk, white-tail deer, and about a mile up the trail there were even a few relatively fresh black bear and grizzly tracks. I had left my pepper spray at home, thinking there wouldn't be any bears out this late in the season, and was very happy that Patrick had brought a huge, if somewhat leaky, canister of the stuff along. When I last hiked this trail, five weeks previously, there had been grizzly tracks everywhere. Most of these bears are no longer around now, and it probably wonÕt be long before the stragglers den up.

The heat of the sun reflected off the snow-covered landscape, and soon we were shedding layers of clothes. We stopped at the first meadow we came to and ate lunch. Patrick helped the girls build an igloo with thick slabs of crusty snow, and Marc and I relaxed in the warm sun. Even at its zenith, the November sun hung low over the mountains and cast long shadows on the snow--a reminder that the winter solstice is but a month away. After lunch the temperature dropped sharply, so we gathered our things and made our way back down the trail to the Thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate that awaited us at the car.

So whatÕs next? The Inside North Fork Road and the Camas Road are still open, and they provide access to a wonderful network of trails. After hunting season weÕll be able to hike outside of Glacier National Park and may try the trails in the Tally Lake Ranger District. And later in the season, when the snow gets deep, weÕll switch to snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. Whatever the season, the Under the Hill Gang will be out enjoying wildness.

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