Coyote Wall Loop: A 6 AM Sunrise Hike, WA Gorge

Some weeks give us plenty to carry. But every so often, a trail asks us to set all of it down. I drove south last night with a full week still riding along, four hours of highway between me and The Dalles, and thirty minutes of dark road saved for this morning. I almost did not go. Then the road bent east, and for the first time in days nothing needed anything from me. By sunrise I was starting the Coyote Wall Loop through the Labyrinth, a climb in the Columbia River Gorge that spends its first hour tucked inside a maze of rock before it breaks onto the open edge of a cliff, with the river valley below. It’s the kind of trail that hides where it is taking you until you are already there.

Coyote Wall Loop

The long cliff of Coyote Wall and its rockslide slope above a forested valley, Columbia River Gorge, Washington.

I climbed the first stretch with my eyes on the ground, the trail switching back through the rock and giving up only a step or two at a time. The world shrinks to your next step on a morning like this, the birds just waking up. Then the walls fell away, and the Gorge opened all at once, the river far below and the distant views lost to wildfire haze. I have hiked enough of these mornings to know the good ones change something in you. I did not yet know what this one was working on.

By the time the trail brought me back down, I was pondering an old question, one about purpose, and whether I had spent much of my life pointed at the wrong thing. I did not need an answer, and I’m not sure the Coyote Wall Loop would have handed me one if I did. Some trails give you a view. This one gave me something more.

The Journey…

There were hikes that kept my eyes on my boots, and hikes that finally made me look up. This one did both, though not in the tidy order I had imagined. I set out just before six into a morning already warm, no chill to it at all, and dropped into the Labyrinth, a maze of black rock and hidden pockets. The creek that threads through it had gone dry, and I crossed the single wooden plank without a sound of water beneath it. First light came slowly and then all at once, landing on the dark stone and turning the river below from dull sheet metal to gold. I was minding my footing on the loose rock when a clear rattle went off in the grass at the edge of the trail, close enough to stop me where I stood. It was the first rattlesnake I had ever come across, a small one moving through the dry grass, and the sound of it reached me before I even saw it. I gave it space and got past, with a little jump in my heart rate.

The maze let me out on top of the wall, the ledge running along its rim with the whole Gorge dropping away below. On a clear day the far peaks would have been the reward, but wildfire smoke had hazed distant views to a pale, soft nothing, and the mountains I had expected to see never showed. What did show were the hawks. They hung right off the ledge on the wind rising up the rock, floating without moving a wing, like kites let loose without a string. The breeze was warm and the heat was already climbing. That first rattle had left me on alert, so I read the trail more closely than I had planned, and I took the view in pieces, a few seconds at a time, whenever the ground let me lift my head.

Coming back down along the ledge, a second rattlesnake stopped me cold, bigger than the first and stretched across the trail like it owned it. I waited. I gave it room and time, about ten long minutes of it, and the snake answered by inching toward me instead of away. So I did the humbling thing and turned around, backtracking nearly half a mile until I found another way down. By then the sky had changed. A warm thunderstorm was moving in from the north, at my back as I descended, the wind going from breeze to gusts, and the first drops caught me as I came off the last of the rock, warm and welcome after the climb. I had come here to look up, and the morning had spent itself telling me to look down. Maybe that was the point. Some mornings the view is not yours to keep, only to catch, a glance at a time, before the trail asks for your attention back.

Gratitude…

I pulled out of town Friday evening with more on my mind than I wanted to carry. The people who depended on me, the projects still open, and the familiar list of things around the house that never seemed to get any shorter. The first miles moved slowly through old towns and stoplights before I finally reached I-5 south. The freeway was busy with other people making their own Friday escape, everyone pointed toward somewhere else. I was headed toward a trail, but the week was still riding along with me. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I had any business leaving at all.

Then I-5 handed me off to I-84, and the road turned east, away from the setting sun. Nothing dramatic happened, but somewhere in those miles something loosened. The highway was still full of taillights, but for the first time all week, nothing was asking anything of me. No decision needed to be made, and no one needed a fix or an answer. There was nowhere I had to be until morning, when the trail would be waiting. I lowered the volume on the playlist and let the miles run along the dark river. I was detached, in the best sense, focused on not much at all. And somewhere on that stretch it came to me that not much is something. This week, it was almost everything.

I reached my destination with enough evening left for the small ritual I save for the hikes that require travel the night before. This time nearly everything had closed, and the one place still open was a little dive bar with karaoke going. No one in that room was headed for The Voice, but you would not have known it from the fun they were having. I ordered a quick meal and something to drink and let the off-key singing carry the room. Nobody there needed a thing from me. I was just a face in the crowd, glad to watch a few strangers enjoy an ordinary Friday night. I did not stay long, with thirty minutes of dark road still between me and the trailhead come morning. It wasn’t much of a night, and after a week that had asked so much of me, that was exactly the gift. Maybe gratitude doesn’t always arrive as something big enough to notice. Sometimes it is just a loud little room where nobody needs you, and the relief of having nothing to fix.

Reflections…

For much of my life, I thought a goal and a purpose were interlocked. I never thought to separate them. I set a goal, reached for it, and described that as my purpose. My days were organized around objectives, one after another, each one a destination I was pushing toward, and I measured a good week by how much closer I had gotten to wherever I was headed. If you had asked me, I would have told you that a road without a destination felt like wandering, and wandering seemed to belong to people who had not yet figured out where they were going. I thought about all of that this morning as I made my way through the Labyrinth.

Somewhere along the way, my weeks began to change, and I only noticed how different when I tried to put it into words. I would reach the end of the week and pull out a blank canvas, not knowing which trail I would hike, what the drive would hand me to be grateful for, or which thought from my week would follow me up the mountain. I have stopped needing to know. What I came to trust was simpler. The day would be worth something, even if I could not yet say how. Sometimes it was the climb itself. Sometimes it was gratitude found in the dark before sunrise. Sometimes it was a thought I did not know I was carrying until the trail shook it loose. And sometimes it was something I could never have planned, a place that pulled me in or a stranger who happened to say exactly what I needed to hear.

I could hear the argument forming in my own head. I still came home and journaled about my hikes. Wasn’t that another goal, another destination, another thing to accomplish? Maybe. But the order mattered. I do not hike so I can fill a page. The page filled because I had hiked. The journal is not the reason I go. It is where I keep how the day felt, once the day is already mine. If every journal entry disappeared tomorrow, I would still lace up my boots next week. What I was looking for had never been on the page. It was somewhere out there, one step after another.

It took me a long time to see what I had confused. Positive psychology, the study of what makes a life feel meaningful, breaks meaning into three parts: coherence, whether your life hangs together; significance, whether it matters; and purpose. The destination was only a point on the map, and I had let the point stand in for the thing itself. Some of what the research says makes sense. I still believed a life needed direction. I still wanted something worth walking toward. But here is where I step off: I began to wonder if the purpose was less about where I arrived and more about why I kept moving. I had thought about this question once before, on a misty morning at Annette Lake, reflecting on the difference between the journey and the destination. The summit mattered, but so did the reasons I had chosen that trail, the willingness to keep going when the path got hard, and the person the trail was shaping.

By the time I left the Labyrinth behind and walked onto the ledge of the wall, my mind had returned to that blank canvas I had started the weekend with. I’ve always enjoyed that uncertainty, that flexibility, but I had thought of it mostly as room to create something new. Now I think I had underestimated it. It was never only an open space to fill. Maybe the blank canvas was trust. Maybe it was the practice of setting out without knowing exactly where the day would take me and believing I would recognize something worth keeping when I found it. The destinations still come. I still enjoy reaching a summit knowing the climb was worth every step. But they are not why I lace up my boots. The reason is the wandering, and the person I’m becoming along the way. The path continues.

-Ken