Lake Angeles Trail: A Rainy Forest Climb in Olympic NP

About a hundred feet from the lake, after more than four miles of climbing, a sign told me I probably shouldn’t be there alone. I laughed, mostly. The rest of the morning had been quieter than that: a low gray sky, a cold mix of rain and snow that couldn’t decide which it wanted to be, and a forest so close around me that I rarely saw past the next bend. The Lake Angeles Trail climbs about 2,500 feet from a trailhead off Hurricane Ridge Road to a lake tucked under the ridges south of Port Angeles, and it doesn’t spend much of that on flat ground. I had two things with me on the climb besides my pack: a new word from earlier in the week, and an old family puzzle I hadn’t thought about in a while.

Lake Angeles Trail

Some of what I carry up a trail doesn’t come from the trail at all. This came from a meeting earlier in the week, with a colleague who hadn’t even started yet. We were introduced the ordinary way, and I left with something I didn’t expect: a word in a language I don’t speak, for something I already believed in. I said it to myself a few times on the drive in, trying it out, the way you’d test a new pair of boots on the first hill. By the time I reached the trailhead, I was fairly sure it was going to stick.

The puzzle took longer to surface. For more than fifteen months, my heart and my mind had been working on the same loss and coming to different conclusions. Somewhere on the way up, I remembered a holiday puzzle our family kept bringing out long after we knew it could never be finished. By the time I reached the water, I understood a little better why we kept doing that.

The Journey…

The trailhead off Hurricane Ridge Road, near Lake Dawn, was still holding on to the last of the dark when I started up, just before sunrise. It was quiet in the way early mornings are before anything has decided to move. The sky was a low, even gray, the air sat somewhere between the upper thirties and low forties, and a mix of rain and snow came and went. I had sturdy boots and a rain jacket, and I was glad for both. The tall trees along the trail took most of the weather before it reached me, which I appreciated more with every mile. The trail didn’t take long to show me what kind of morning it had in mind. It went up right away, and it kept going.

The first mile was steep and steady, the kind of climb where my breathing found the rhythm of my steps and stayed there. The forest was thick around me, and the air smelled like damp earth and old trees. A few early birds called from somewhere overhead, and that was most of what I heard. I stopped for a minute on a bridge with a single handrail over Ennis Creek and watched the water run underneath, green on both banks. Then it was back to climbing. The trail rarely opened up for a view, and it didn’t need to. There were ferns everywhere, moss on nearly every trunk, mushrooms in colors I didn’t expect, and now and then a rustle off the trail from something I never saw. Somewhere in there, the week I’d left behind started to feel a long way off.

The last mile asked the most, with close to 1,000 feet of climbing packed into it. Just as I could feel the trees starting to give way, I came around a corner to a sign: “WARNING: Cougar Frequenting Area. Solo Hiking Not Advised.” I was maybe a hundred feet from the lake. Seriously? I kept going, cougar spray in hand and my finger closer to the trigger than I’d like to admit. Then the trees opened, and the clouds shifted enough to show the water, with rugged peaks above it dusted in fresh snow and a small island in the distance. I walked along both sides of the shore. The wind pushed whitecaps across the surface, and a small flock of birds followed me along the edge, landing on branches a couple of feet away, as if they’d been expecting company. I knew the way down would ask for its own kind of attention. For a while, I just stood there.

Gratitude…

It was still dark on the drive to the trailhead, and my mind kept drifting back to a meeting from earlier in the week. I’d been introduced to a new colleague who would soon be joining our team, the kind of first conversation that usually stays on résumés and accomplishments. This one went further, and quickly. I found myself talking with someone who had real warmth and an easy kindness, someone who clearly put people first. Conversations like that don’t happen every week, and when they do, I notice. Driving in the dark, I thought about how two paths can cross on an ordinary weekday, and how much can start from a single conversation. It was a good reminder that none of us really travels this road alone.

Somewhere in that conversation, she taught me a Filipino word: Kapwa. It describes a shared identity and a togetherness, the idea that my well-being and yours are tied up in each other. It fit our conversation so well it almost felt as if she’d named it on the spot. A lot of days, the world feels split into pieces, everyone in their own corner. Kapwa leans the other way. On the last stretch of road, I felt a kind of responsibility to look after connections like this one instead of assuming they’d take care of themselves, and to offer the same compassion I’d felt from her. This morning, I was grateful for that meeting, for a word that said what I’d been feeling, and for the people who teach me things without setting out to.

Reflections…

A puzzle came up the trail with me this morning, the one I’ve been working on for more than fifteen months now. Since Kelly passed, a lot of the pieces of my life have shifted, and some have found their places again, a moment of clarity here, a little acceptance there. One piece won’t ever come back, and that’s her being here. For a long time, my heart and my mind have been negotiating over that. My heart holds on to a small, stubborn hope that she might walk back in someday, like a character on a primetime soap making a dramatic return. My mind answers gently, every time, with what it knows. She’s gone, and I have to learn how to live without her.

Somewhere on the climb, I thought about the puzzles our family works on over the holidays. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, a box comes out onto the dining table, and everyone adds a few pieces whenever they can find the time. One year we finished a scenic puzzle, well, mostly. One piece was missing. I could see the whole picture without it, but the gap kept pulling my eye back, a small, steady reminder of what wasn’t there. The strange part is that we kept bringing that puzzle out for a couple more years, every one of us knowing it was short a piece. We put it together anyway, and we enjoyed it anyway. The missing piece came along every time.

There’s no schedule for grief, and I’ve stopped looking for one. Sometimes I can tell that people who love me are hoping I’ll move on, as if there were a formula for putting a life back together and I’d only misplaced the instructions. Grief doesn’t work that way. It’s less a straight line than a twisting trail, with turns and roots I don’t see until they’ve tripped me. I’m not writing this to pat myself on the back for how far I’ve come, or to sit in the sadness either. I’m trying to be honest about the gap between what my mind understands and what my heart still feels, every day. I’ve learned I can’t strategize my way through grief.

Like that missing piece, nothing I do will bring Kelly back, not self-improvement and not a search for purpose. Grieving isn’t about arriving at a neat answer. It’s about making room for two things at once: the loss, and the slow work of figuring out who I am now. That second question has started to feel more honest than trying to get back to who I was before. That person doesn’t exist anymore, at least not the way he did. So much of him was shared with her: our routines, our dreams, raising our kids together. Those pieces are still part of the picture. They just sit next to what’s missing now, and I’m learning to keep walking, knowing some spaces won’t ever be filled.

When I reached the lake, it wasn’t what I had pictured. I’d imagined still water, a mirror under the peaks. What I found was wind, whitecaps, birds in the branches, and clouds that wouldn’t hold still, a lake with a lot going on. It was beautiful anyway, maybe more so. That’s how I’ve started to think about the puzzle. A missing piece doesn’t make the picture wrong. It leaves room, for imagination, for new connections, for parts of me I haven’t met yet. I can still see the whole picture with the gap in it. My heart and my mind don’t have to settle their argument for both of them to be right. Grief and life can share the same table, and the puzzle can stay unfinished. The path continues.

-Ken