Points of Light

Looking back over Willow Lake on the way to Lake Angeline 

This is the first installment in my adventure to the summit of Mather Peak in the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming

  Through the pre-evening dimness and far, far below, the city of Buffalo twinkles like a lonesome outpost amidst the miles of semi-desert plains.

  Are you having a nice Saturday night down there?

  I see your lights clustered together, drawn to one another much as the lights in the darkening sky are part of their own galactic cliques. 

  And you twinkle in those rows of orange halogen street lamps, lighting the way to bars and whatever other amusements the evening has to offer.

  Do not mistake these words for condescension. I like your town plenty. You’ve got some pretty good beer on tap and some nice bluegrass musicians that I wish we had where I live 70 miles east of you in Gillette.

  But on this stony ridge thousands of feet above you, I can see how small you really are compared to the darkness that surrounds — the dim grazing land, the strange buttes, the latticework of canyons. The darkness stretches up to these proud mountains that had exulted in the last rays of the sinking sun as they put you in their shadow.

  Now I see that you are not entirely alone down there. Amidst the empty plain, I can make out the blip of a radio tower, the odd natural gas rig or a ranch. A pair of headlights crawls out from your outskirts, climbing the Powder River Pass toward Tensleep and Worland on the western side

  For myself, I have a cheap LED flashlight that I bought earlier in the day, but I won’t turn it on until I absolutely need it. The orange glow in the west still affords me enough illumination to pick my way around the loose boulders. A glance at my compass indicates that I am still heading in more or less the same trajectory that I had set for myself when I left Willow Lake two hours ago. The way that I have been winding around the boulders, and through the trees earlier, it wouldn’t surprise me if I were off by a few degrees. As for the distance I have left to travel, your guess is as good as mine. It couldn’t have been more than three miles on the map, but I’ll be the first to admit that it’s been slow going over these boulders.

  And even though I have my flashlight, even though I’m heading for Lake Angeline, which is pretty big and should be hard to miss, the fact that it is getting dark now is starting to worry me just a bit.

  Maybe I should have stayed at Willow Lake after all. The sun was still up when I cooked dinner there, and that’s when I decided that I would rather push on then camp there for the night.

  Obviously, I reasoned, what I really wanted to do was hike up another 1,000 feet and get to Lake Angeline so that I could climb the distant Mather Peak the next day.

  The distance I would need to cover  hadn’t seemed so long when I was looking at it on the map. Now the darkness is closing in, and I find myself looking for a place to lay up for the night. My eye scans the boulders for a patch of meadow, at least a flat rock where I could pitch the tent. 

  I put these thoughts aside. First, let me get to the top of this ridge and maybe I’ll be able to see the lake. In 15 more minutes of scrambling I’m at the top.

Here's how I cooked up some tasty pasta at Willow Lake

  There it is! Way beneath my feet in the valley, maybe 500 feet down that steep, rocky slope. I can see the wind pushing waves across the dark waters.

  An almost-vertical glacier plunges down from the mountains to the western shore. Where there are glaciers, boulders invariably follow, meaning that it will be tough finding a spot to pitch tent — if there is anywhere to pitch a tent. I’ll be damned if I can tell by looking down at the dark landscape from up here.

  It will take at least another half an hour for me to reach the water and then I will have to find a tent-spot by flashlight.

   I guess I kind of fucked up with this whole navigation thing. If I had paid more attention to the topo lines, I would have known to hike the distance in a big L shape instead of a straight line. That way I could have steered around the ridge. That way I wouldn’t have needed to climb way the hell up here, and then climb way the hell back down there.

  The first stars have come out now. Like the lights of Buffalo, they are far away. Comparing those distances is just a matter of scale really.

  And for whatever small progress I’ve made, this may be about as close as I will get to those far-flung worlds above. Get too close and there will be no turning back.

Even as I think this, the city lights disappear behind the ridge and I begin the descent into the glacier-carved bowl.

  “Ow! Goddamnit!”

   I just twisted my ankle on a boulder. It must be time to turn that light on. I’ll need it to get down without killing myself.

  I unclip the light from my pack and swing the beam through the dark to scramble Gollum-like after it.   

  The illumination is only bright enough to show me one part of the jumbled chaos at a time. There’s enough light for me to guess where I should plant my foot, but to make the next step, I must swing the light away again; and so I move forward only by surrendering the path behind me back to the mystery.

The last light of the day cuts over Darton Peak. I had originally planned to climb Darton and possibly Bighorn Peak, but ultimately decided to go for Mather, which is a farther-flung summit.

  At last I have reached bottom.

  It takes a while, but eventually I find a patch of grass that is free of boulders. It’s a little tilted, but it’s good enough to sleep on. I disembowel my backpack and start to snap the tent-poles together to make my shelter. It is already cold, probably down in the forties. A chill breeze blows down off the glacier as I fumble with the different components.

  These stars…you may never have seen stars like the ones I see as I stand here 10,500 feet up in the dry Wyoming air. They overwhelm everything, filling up the bowl where I gaze gape-mouthed upward. Here is the Big Dipper for you, offered in high def tonight. Then there’s the Milky Way, which spans the heavens like a lattice of shining dust.

  Against the tapestry overhead, my limited mind is as the flashlight beam bouncing among the boulders — able to perceive small parts of it but never close to comprehending the whole. But I try anyway, vainly trying to expand my consciousness out into the infinite recesses of the universe above.

  It is like tossing a sugar cube into the ocean. One dissolves utterly; the other is utterly unchanged.

It occurs to me that for most nights in my life I will be in some kind of town or city, lucky to make out the brightest celestial bodies, while halogen bulbs and neon signs are everywhere to see. Yet just a century ago, this cosmic panoply I see now had held rein over every clear night on earth. Wouldn’t it have changed human perspective to see that kind of display nightly, when no one needed to make a special trip into remote places to see it?

  I can’t help but think of the Isaac Asimov story “Nightfall” in which a civilized planet with multiple suns never experiences darkness. But then a rare total eclipse reveals the stars and it plunges their society into chaos.

  No doubt Asimov was on to something when he wrote about the power that stars have on the human psyche.

  My take on the matter is slightly more optimistic. A starry sky like this one is a vaccination against myopia. Those of us who take the far-off stare into the heavenly spheres step outside the dull trappings of everyday existence. I would rather lose my mind to the stars then shut it up within the narrow walls of sober institutions.

  It pleases me to climb mountains and see far. So it pleases me to see these farthest, celestial realms. They are better understood today than when we first stepped out of caves to gape at them; but they remain largely unwritten – a blank page for the imagination’s possibility.

  It is ironic that science has made leaps and bounds in broadening our intellectual understanding of the cosmic realm, yet at the same time, we are cut away from that primal experience of being in it, of looking directly across the passages of space to the worlds beyond. We are more likely to see the workings of this universe as a telescope image or a computer model on the LCD screen; a brief diversion from our otherwise bland workaday lives.

  And even if these lives shrink and seem meaningless compared to the far-out reaches of the universe, I say it’s far more depressing to go through life with eyes cast down, intentionally ignorant to the fact that we are but one pixel on that vast canvas.

  Being one motif in the baffling image, we can look at the other parts and try to see where we fit into the grand puzzle, thus we learn something of our own shape.

  Alone again, above the city, nearer to the stars, my mind is forced to consider itself as one entity. I am distanced temporarily from the connections to people and other responsibilities that I use to define myself on other days; in their place I have space forever.

  At least it’s that way until I find myself standing in a patch of light.

  I blink in surprise. Everything including the tent and the boulders behind me is completely lit up.

Not angels or aliens that I can tell. It’s someone else camping out here on the other side of the lake. They must have seen me getting the tent set up.

  “Hey!” I call out.

  “Hey.”

  “How you doing tonight?”

  No reply.

  Okay, I guess I can live with that. The light goes out. It was super bright. Did they bring a set of headlights up here or what?

  I’m slightly unnerved, but at least I know I have a can of bear spray if they are planning to go all Blair Witch on me.

  Studies have shown that as few as one third of the people you’ll meet in the wilderness are psychotic axe-murderers, so I’ll probably be OK.

  Now that the other light is gone, I use my own to finish putting up the tent.

When I finish the work, I take a minute to lie on the grass nearby and gaze upon the firmament. The beauty and mystery of it moves me, but I am also getting kind of cold out here. Once I get inside the tent, that will be it for the view. It will be lost behind the rain fly that I have put over the tent to deflect night’s winds.

  Starlight is very pretty, but unless you happen to be handy with a sextant it’s not very practical. Unlike our good old Sol, it won’t even you warm.

  Warmth was gone from the sky now, but I had it in my sleeping bag. And there was my universe, slightly larger than a nutshell. Here I could cower from the infinite from behind walls of nylon and close myself off for the sake of comfort.

Looking down to Lake Angeline