Sourdough Gap: A 7-Mile Sunrise Hike on the PCT

I have stopped being surprised by how often I go looking for one thing and come back with another. It happens on trails, and it happens off them. This one started before sunrise, driving toward Chinook Pass with the cold blue sky gathering light behind the mountains, the warm colors yet to arrive, and it ended with a morning I did not plan on. I reached the trailhead with a few minutes to spare. The Pacific Crest Trail follows the road heading east, and the first stretch toward Sourdough Gap put me face to face with the sunrise. Seven miles, a little over twelve hundred feet of climbing, and a trail that never once held still, right down to the air itself.

Sourdough Gap

What was riding along with me in the dark was Ireland. Soon I will stand inside a church in a small Irish town where my family was married before the famine pushed them onto a boat, and I took a DNA test this summer so I would know what I was walking into. I wanted a chart. Names, dates, a line to follow back. That is what a long dark drive is good for, working on something I do not need to finish. What came back was not a chart, and it was not Ireland either. It was closer to home than that, and it had been close the whole time.

The trail did its part. Something big came bounding through the timber and got my heart going. Sheep Lake sat perfectly still two miles in. Higher up, the air could not decide what temperature it wanted to be. But what I actually carried to the top started last week on a different trail, with a rattlesnake that had no interest in my plans and left me a question I keep coming back to. What sits inside and outside my control?

The Journey…

The trail would not let me settle into one thing for long, and it started before I was walking. I pulled into the lot at 6:06, fifty-six degrees, five minutes ahead of the sun, with the drive up past Mount Rainier still sitting with me. The first mile on this leg of the Pacific Crest Trail climbs east along the road, straight into the sunrise, along a ridge that ascends from the highway. I kept my hat brim down while birds filled the trees with overlapping songs. Small things moved through the brush beside me, always just out of sight. The air was pleasant, and the sun was doing its work on the morning. Then the trail turned north into the mountains, toward Sheep Lake and, above it, Sourdough Gap.

Farther on, something big came through the trees, a deer or an elk, and it was hopping, all four feet at once, the way a rabbit does. I am used to these animals moving slow, so the sound of it hitting the ground startled me even before I could see it. Then I stood and watched it glide off through the timber, wondering whether it was headed somewhere good or getting away from something not. Two miles in, Sheep Lake sat almost perfectly still, broken only by an occasional fish, with quiet voices of campers talking over breakfast. The real climb began there, and chipmunks kept appearing along the trail. It is nice to run into a critter that is enjoying the morning too.

The higher I climbed, the stranger the air became. I would step into a pocket of cold that felt like someone had pointed an air conditioner at the trail, then ten feet later walk into air ten degrees warmer. It happened enough times that I started to chuckle under my breath. The mountain seemed to have its own thermostat, and apparently I was not allowed to know where it was kept. At the gap, the range opened wide offering a clear view for miles despite recent fires in the area. Mount Rainier stood to the west, with Adams and St. Helens farther south. I went a little beyond Sourdough Gap onto the trail toward Crystal Lakes and sat for a while in the warmth of the morning sun. On the way back I passed friendly hikers heading up, and by then the flowers had filled with bees, thousands of them working the same stretch I had walked through earlier. Lower down, the cedars gave off the sweetest smell, almost like sugar. The trail never did settle down, right to the end. I was glad I got the early version of it.

Gratitude…

The drive started in the dark, following Highway 410 toward Chinook Pass and a sunrise I could see developing as the silhouette of mountains slowly gained definition. What was riding along was Ireland, which is not usually what occupies me at five in the morning. Soon I will stand in a small church in a little Irish town, in the same building where my ancestors were married before the famine sent them across the water. That trip is the whole reason I took a DNA test this summer. I wanted a chart. Names, dates, a line I could follow back, and maybe a few leads worth chasing while I am over there. I sent it off with the stories in the back of my mind, the ones everyone has heard about what these tests turn up. Mostly, though, I just wanted the paperwork.

There is a piece of my father’s history that sealed shut long before I was born. He grew up not knowing there had been a father before the one who raised him. He learned this in his youth. That first father was killed in the Second World War. The family moved on into a new life. I never fully understood the story because it was never told. With my grandparents gone and my father gone a few years now, there was nobody left to ask, and I finally had the courage to. So the test was partly that, too. What came back was not Ireland. Within days of the results, a few people I had never heard of reached out. Relatives. Not distant ones in another country either. Family who have lived right around me for as long as I have been alive.

They welcomed me. They shared what they had, and one of the things they had was a photograph of my grandfather, a young man in uniform who could have been standing in any of my own family pictures. That is when the boxes on a family tree stopped being boxes and became a person who had stood somewhere, on a particular day. I had gone looking for something centuries away, in a town across an ocean, and the door that opened was right here in my own backyard. Those relatives had no reason to answer me, and no obligation to make room. They did both, within days. I am grateful for that, and for what came with it. A history I thought belonged to a church in Ireland runs right through the place I have lived all along. I expect there is more of it still to open. When I began this journey I had originally sent away for answers. What came back was family.

Reflections…

My trail-thought this morning started on another trail, though I did not know it at the time. It happened last week when I faced off with a rattlesnake on Coyote Wall Loop. The rattler was not interested in my plans, and I was not going to change its mind. I stood there for about ten minutes doing the math, then turned around and backtracked to find another way down. What stayed with me was not the snake. It was the question it handed me. Who, or what, was in my control? This time, the answer seemed obvious. The snake was not mine to manage. The only thing I could decide was what I was going to do to get myself down the mountain and on my way home.

The Stoics have been saying some version of this for a very long time. Know what is yours to control and what is not, and the only part I get to own is what I do next. They call it the dichotomy of control, and I have leaned on it in my writing more than once. What I have never settled is what comes after the sorting, once I have separated what I can control from what I cannot. The version I usually hear says that when it is out of my control, I should let it go. Stay steady. Keep moving. That worked with the snake. But life has a way of presenting things that are harder to walk away from. Not everything difficult is a threat, and not everything beyond my control is something I want to keep at a distance.

The hours on the trail gave me plenty of time to consider that distinction. Parenting does not end when our children grow up. We remain parents, and lately I had found myself in one of those stretches where I could not tell whether I was helping or making things worse. My instinct was predictable. I wanted to solve, support, fix, or at least find the right thing to say. About then, a silent voice arrived the way it does now, as a feeling before anything else. Kelly and I had different approaches on this. There were plenty of times she looked at my supportive response and called it enabling. Calling things as she saw them, evidence or not, and she was almost always right. Almost. We argued our sides and neither of us won, as it was never a zero-sum game. The tension sat in the middle, which gave it balance, and we learned to appreciate that.

So I asked myself the question I had asked many times before. What would Kelly do? The answer surprised me because it was not an answer at all. I let the feeling stay instead of dismissing it. What I wanted was not her opinion or her judgment. It was her presence. She was not here, and I was going to carry this one without being able to share the weight with her. That kind of alone was new for me. For years, I had counted on the things that Kelly gave me. Her opinions. Her nerve. Her willingness to tell me when I was getting it wrong. I had counted on the arguments too, though I would not have called them gifts at the time. Simply being in the room was not on that list. It should have been near the top.

By the time I returned to the car my trail-thought was not settled, and I have stopped expecting it to be. The old idea still holds. The snake was not mine to control. Choosing my way home was. But I had been treating every difficult feeling as though it belonged with the snake, something to manage, contain, or move past. Some things are not meant to be sorted off the list. When someone I love is in a hard stretch, I will probably always want to do something. That is how I am built. But maybe being there is sometimes the doing itself. I had spent years thinking I needed to do something. Kelly reminded me, without saying a word, that sometimes you do not need to do anything, and that’s something, sometimes everything. Just being there was enough. The path continues.

-Ken