A few years before COVID struck, Russ and I took Mom on a glorious hike to Memaloose Lake in Clackamas County. It was a hidden treasure, less than two miles of trail, switch-backing through old growth forest, and an understory laden with bunchberry, vanilla leaf, rhododendron and huckleberry enroute to the lake. We felt more removed from civilization than a mere twenty miles outside of Estacada. It was Mom’s last hike to a lake that exuded solitude and wildness. After that, instead we spent her remaining years visiting local parks and nature reserves – Forest Park, Mary Young and other West Linn treasures, Oaks Bottom and Tryon Creek. All gorgeous and often quiet. Yet not the same.

The Memaloose hike was described by guidebook author William Sullivan as a “single isolated mile of ancient forest with the feeling of the High Cascades gathered in the cirque of a long vanished glacier.” This now distant hiking memory with Mom, especially as I near the release of my next memoir, makes me feel even more sentimental. I’ve been wanting to revisit it too, to savor the memories from before and make new ones. And then the devastating Riverside Fire of September 2020 hit Clackamas County. The same fire that brought more than a week of “the worst in the nation” air quality, preventing me from visiting Mom outside of her “locked-in” adult care home. The week apart that furthered my decision to move her into my home the next month, with predictions for rising COVID infections continuing lock-down with chilly days further reducing minutes I might get to spend with the mom I adore.

In 1981, fresh off my summer working as a Student Conservation Association “employee” in the back country of Mt. Rainier National Park, I enrolled in University of Montana’s Wilderness and Civilization Program for my junior college year. My classmates and I, separated into four hiking groups, loaded up packs to kick off the quarter with a two-week backpack from the Rocky Mountain Front into the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Our groups rendezvoused mid-trip at a large meadow where we were joined by our fall quarter professors – folks like Tom Birch (philosophy) and Dexter Roberts (literature), Tom Powers (economics) and Bob Ream (forestry and conservation). These classes designed to integrate the theme of wilderness and its connection to civilization. We created a ritual and sweat lodge, with a cold plunge, to bless our experience together and the land around us: taking care to leave no trace. We sweat ourselves hiking during glorious fall days as aspen fluttered, their leaves like larch needles changing from green to golden. We shivered at night as the first fall snows landed on our tents, occasionally wondering if we might meet the grizzly producers of bear scat we found on trail. One cold night we “let ourselves” into a hunting cabin and luxuriated in an evening sprawled on the floor and few bunks, with an almost roaring woodstove. I have distant memories of someone finding ingredients to produce a half-baked batch of chocolate chip cookies.

My hiking team included hiking leader Matthew Hansen, a beautiful and compassionate spirit, and prior year graduate of the program. Matt’s father was gifted poet Richard Hugo. Matt led us in sharing our writing, poetry and prose, each night. All about the beauty of nature, connection, fears for the future and things I’m certain I don’t remember today. Matt died only two later from cancer at the age of 23, and the world lost a bright and compassionate light who still lives on in the words he left behind, and in those of us who remember him. Matthew, both writer and wilderness advocate, left his own works: a set of audio tapes “An Oral History of Montanans at Work,” a book of poems, and the Matthew Endowment for Wilderness Studies within the UM Wilderness Institute.

Back on that trip in 1982, we returned to civilization, stinky and grimy, turning heads as some of us returned first to the Missoula ice cream shop before even a shower. We focused into our quarter of classes: all touching themes of wilderness and civilization. My first year as a freshman at UM it made sense to enroll in a course taught by Les Pengally through UM’s well known Forestry School, adding a biology course and one on creative writing taught by Bill Kittredge. I know there were more but those are the classes I most remember. But these two years later as I moved through my W&C classes, I furthered my learning about the role of fire in forests. We filled our weekends with hikes and short backpacks, often adventuring through areas once burned, nearly always – it seems to me now – caused by lightning. I learned not to feel so sad; I understood! It was part of the natural scheme. We’d examine what seedlings and plants were the first to peek out from the charred earth. We too learned about controlled burning and replanting. I understood it to be part of the life cycle of forests. I got how a smaller fire could enhance plant life, bringing immediate post fire plants like fireweed, and how lodgepole pine seedpods are sealed with resin to release after the heat of a fire. I came to recognize new growth by lodgepole pine, and how large, hot fires can wipe out acres of old growth. I understood the nutrients added back to earth post fire. And yet. Times feel different now. Hotter. Drier. People living in places they never did before, impacting spots previously untouched. And deliberately and accidentally setting off fires that become catastrophic.

Flash forward to a few weeks ago. Have you ever been on an adventure that begins to feel like a big mistake? Well, that was how our day began this late September day of 2023. Ironically, we selected Memaloose Lake at the last minute, rather than heading out to the Columbia Gorge: a shorter drive, certainly? Nope. For because of the fire, one can’t access the trailhead like before as a bridge crossing the Clackamas River was destroyed and not yet rebuilt. An updated Forest Service website identified an alternative route. We seemed to ignore the fact that there would be 22 miles of gravel – slow potholed gravel, some of it – adjacent to miles of burnt trees.

As firefighters attacked the 2020 Riverside Fire and residents of Clackamas County prepared to evacuate, I didn’t know what to do but to blog a tribute to these wild spaces, many now devastated by fire. We too met distant evacuation status yet felt confident the fire wouldn’t cross the Willamette, though worried for friends living in reach of the flames. Now, in 2023, this road felt haunted. My mind recreated visions I imagined while recently reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I too found a strange beauty driving through this, remembering those weeks we so worried about this crawling fire. Russ and I drove mile followed by mile of past charred trees, seeing only two cars in all those miles. Would I feel so sad if its cause were lightning? Might its behavior have been different if days weren’t so much hotter, debris less dry, rainy seasons what many of us remember instead of growing to 120,000 acres on fire within only 30 hours? Yes. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so sad if my brain was back in 1982. When I didn’t also know how climate change has really changed everything including forest fires.

Our trip worsened before we even set foot on the trail as we drove past that 22-mile marker and our sought after trailhead, both of us inaccurately remembering a more significant trailhead to Memaloose Lake than the true marker.

Yes, we kept driving onward to where the trailhead could be, beginning to bicker in disagreement about whether to turn around or not. (And silently hoping we didn’t pop a tire or have some other type of car problem in our old non-4WD. Nope, no cell service here.) Eventually, we turned ourselves around, and spotted the trailhead – still alone, no cars or hikers as clues. We began to hike. Me suddenly uplifted, naively certain old growth had been sparred.

But no. We climbed upward only to spy those once majestic trees reduced to char and ash. Branches already decomposing back into earth. We wondered if those still standing will live through this: how much surface burn kills a monster of a tree?

Then we spotted the seedlings. Wee little seedlings bursting out of the soil. Each new Douglas fir can grow up to two feet in a year and perhaps, yes perhaps, begin to advance toward the sky. Yet, not like before.

From habit, my heart excitedly raced as we neared the lake. I still remembered so clearly this hike with Mom, she in her early 80s. It was a joyous day, even after Dad died, even with her diminishing vision and slowing of gait. We did it! We rejoiced. Then. Now, this Memaloose Lake too harbors dead and charred trees. I had meant to bring some of her ashes to rest here but had forgotten. Perhaps I will save them to distribute in another special place, maybe one that is still green and lush and thriving.

Yes, it was appropriate for the rain to pelt down a bit harder as we continued to hike, upward past the lake and finally into wilderness untouched by fire. As the raindrops rolled down my cheeks I allowed myself to grieve. Grieve in so much lost. Old growth. Mom. Even some hope. And yet, as we hiked out those bitty seedlings sent reminder messages. There’s so much to save. So much to do. And to remember that it’s okay to acknowledge it feels hard to find hope. In this time of war, fire, unrest, incivility….hope feels further away. Yet, those little seedings and my wee grandson remind me it is there.

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