A tongue of fog flanks the mountain at its midriff, rising slightly to stream over the knob where the mountain tapers into the flats. It is flowing like a river suspended in midair; air currents made visible. The sun rises and paints it yellow, briefly. It’s going to be a good day for mountains.
We ascend through narrow trails cut into the jungle-like undergrowth: stunted spruce, birch, cottonwood. Mountain cranberry, frosty and bright orange; get you one; tart and spiny to the tongue. Ferns, devil’s club tinged with first frost.
Youngsters, all of them. They lean into their packs and shoot off into the trail. We gain a thousand feet of elevation in the first mile, and I relieve them of their packs, but not much. I catch one standing on a footbridge, silent for once, mesmerized by the flow of water under the bridge. He is stopping by each trickle of water we encounter. “What do you see?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Water.” And he’s off again, talking and making things up.
A red squirrel trapezes into the limbs of a cottonwood, and they forget fatigue and run below it and watch it chattering away.
We’re moving. We gain the valley floor. The sun appears in a notch in the mountains like the bead of a gunsight and floods the alpine valley floor with light.
One lad is wearing a frame pack that covers him up. It’s not so heavy, ten, fifteen pounds, maybe, but an adult’s frame pack on a ten-year-old isn’t going to deal kindly with his structure. It’s 3.2 miles to the destination, 6.4 total. Ten and twelve and eleven year olds with packs. Doesn’t bother them a bit.
Blueberries! We stoop to pick the wild fruit growing almost hidden in the moss. Pea-sized, mountain blueberries, sweet to the taste and light to the touch. One of the little humans claims the blueberries have a banana flavor, but nobody agrees. I surmise that the ptarmigan love these, and the twelve-year-old confirms my hunch. Between us, we have reached what others call a scientific conclusion.
We near a small rise topped with a copse of spruce. Here the park service, in its infinite wisdom, has placed a bear-proof locker and a designated campsite. One of the youngsters, who is in the lead, steps aside as we approach it. I catch only the words bear spray, and the second youngster, who has a canister of the potion on his hip, wordlessly takes the lead. Ursus has a foothold in their consciousness.
There’s a spot here where a feeder creek enters the lake where I want to fish for Grayling. I set them at a gravel bar and push my way through willow and alder, all of it dripping with condensation. It’s not long before I’m soaked from the waist down and have nothing to show for it. Besides, a wind has kicked up, whipping the lake into whitecaps. Fly casting in this gale is futility in the flesh. And there’s a cloud forming at the peak of the ridge, stretching shut the sky like a venetian blind. A Kingfisher swoops in, high, circles once and is gone. They see a small animal and call it a weasel, but I do not see it and can neither confirm nor deny. A Common loon circles us in a half-arc, diving and popping up here and there like good luck.
I strain into my binoculars for a bear, moose, sheep, goat, anything, but come away every time with another eyeful of Your Basic Mountain. Why is this: I am always looking for some elusive animal on the mountain, but they are the first to see the moose track in the mud or the weasel on the edge of the lake?
We kick up a fire, which consumes only dead spruce fronds and refuses catch on the branches we feed it. We huddle around the pathetic fire and get smoked like sausage on a rack. We spoon feed the fire and fight the wind. We laugh and eat ham sandwiches instead of roast Grayling, which had been on the itinerary. They discover that a strategically placed rock will warm through, hold heat, and thus make a hand warmer. This is high excitement and a publish-worthy discovery.
We douse the fire and turn for home. Grayling-less, but happy. I hear the distant bugling of Sandhill cranes. Tilting back, you can see them circling at the belly of the clouds, drifting into view, drifting out; blown together, blown apart. The clouds are sawing themselves across the jagged tops of the mountains and the vapor is streaming though the mountain pass. What do birds do when they encounter socked-in migration routes and wind? Do they have IFR? We can only guess. The cranes are in the clouds, and that is more than a poetic line.
But the boys are not ones to ponder the plights of some Crane at flight level three hundred. They like immediacy, tactility. One reaches into the spongy moss along the trail and plucks out a double handful. He squeezes water from it and laughs. When we stop to eat a granola bar and soak up the sun that has broken through clouds, he climbs a tree.
It comes to me then that we have spent all day walking away from what the people have been selling us about children and their needs, or at least implying to us. Boys can have more fun with a hill and a stream than any amount plastic or silicone, digital or otherwise. These boys have been walking out good, almost manly, physical exercise without a whimper of complaint. It was colder in the wind than we expected or dressed for, steeper than they signed up for, and farther than anyone told them of. But they are happy, and you can’t argue with that.