Elf Sternberg

I woke around 3:30 Saturday to discover that the campground is now completely full, and cars are still driving in to look for open spots. That's madness. I went back to bed and woke again around 8:30, this time to a more quiet and sedate campsite. Every site is still ridiculously overstuffed, and our two-person site seems spare and empty compared to these people with friends and family.

We had Omaha's breakfast muffins. Coffee is still a gift of the gods.

Our goal today was Elliot Creek and Goat Lake. We drove out a little ways to the trailhead, and discovered that it was incredibly popular, with almost thirty cars in the lot and along the road leading there. By the time we got back, we would wonder why.


Our longest hiking day so far encompassed only about 4.7 miles. Today's designated trail was over 10.4 miles, and it was rated as a "3" difficulty, meaning it was technically as hard as the rough hike we did getting to Barlow Point. The trail was broken into segments: From the carpark to the first fork, which would let you choose the Upper Elliot or Lower Elliot trails, then the second fork, where the two trails met up again, then into the Henry M. Jackson Wilderness and up McIntosh Falls to Goat Lake proper.

Each segment fell appreciably longer than it looked on the map. We walked and we walked. At one point, on the trail we were taking, we were supposed to encounter another trail heading into the Chookwich Wilderness, but we never saw it. The trail was never harder than a "2" at this point, so Omaha and I wondered when it was going to get tough.

We passed a lot of people. So many people. Families, a guy with five dogs and a t-shirt that read "I like it ruff!" More people with tiny little dogs, older folks who shamed Omaha and I by being more fit than I've ever been. A big group of excessively beautiful bros and their ladies, including one girl with a t-shirt that read "Pretty Squad" and exceptionally skillful eyeliner (for a day-long hike?), followed by a shirtless man who was so crazy blond and buff he looked like someone out of a Charles Atlas ad from the 1950s.

Omaha and I had started late. We didn't actually reach the trailhead until almost noon, and it took us until almost 3:30 to reach the sign reading "Henry M. Jackson Wilderness: Goat Lake." And next to the sign, we found someone's cell phone. Still charged, so it must have been dropped that day. We asked everyone we met, going each way, if they'd lost a phone, and nobody said they had.

The book we had encouraged us to go on, and we reached the McIntosh Falls. They were gorgeous, and we stopped there for a break and to take in the cool breeze before we tried to head up.

That... was a mistake. Climbing up from McIntosh Falls was literally a climb, and the grade was more vertical than horizontal, real handgrip stuff. The ground was soft and spongy, and there were plenty of logs and roots on which to get footing, but neither Omaha or I were in the right shape. About halfway up, though, a woman appeared at the top of the slope shouted something at us. "WHAT!?" I shouted back.

"DID YOU FIND A PHONE?" she shouted back, miming holding a phone to her head.

"YES!" I shouted back, nodding with both my head and my right hand.

She whooped and cheered and jumped up and down and started leaping down the trail like a mountain goat, and when we caught up to her she described the wallpaper, said her name was "Kylie." Omaha fished it out of her backpack. Kylie was so happy to have it back. It was a pretty nice LG model, too.


Omaha and I continued up the path. We passed more dogs on the trail, so many dogs. We finally reached Goat Lake and settled for a break. The lake was pretty and very still, which gave me a chance to get a gorgeous reflective image. We sat by the lake and listened to three couples talking, one of whom gave a very strange story about how her now-husband asked her father for permission to marry her. The story concluded with "My father decided he wasn't perfect. This is why you don't encourage your parents to take couples counselling." I'm like, hey, I've been married 30 years and your partner is never perfect; it's the willingness to build a life together that matters.


We headed back around 5:00pm, which was pretty late. It had taken us almost four-and-a-half hours to get there, and we had only three hours to get back to the lot. The woodsmoke haze of California's forest fires had started to move in again, and the sun was a bloody red circle in the sky as it waned. The march back was easier. We found that we'd taken the hard way up; there was a dry riverbed that switchbacked down the northwest side of the slope and was much easier than the McIntosh Falls slope. When we reached the place where it reunited with the trail we saw the very (very) faint scratches on the rocks telling us to "go that way." If only we'd seen them the first time. As we were heading down, we passed a very pretty dude coming up with a tiny dog, and we warned him that dark was coming. "Oh, I know. It only took me an hour to get here."

Pfft. Young people.


We walked, and it was a long walk. There were long stretches of fifty-year-old alder that leaned over the path and made it look like a long hallway leading to a faery land. Down, down we walked until we finally reached the car park. There were only ten cars left, six of them Subarus.

We drove back. There are "unimproved campsites" all along the river; they're basically just flat spaces with tiny outhouses and no fire rings. In dry season you're allowed only propane stoves. At one, children have put up a large sign reading "Platform 9¾," and they drew the typeface nicely. At our camp, Omaha made a tiny fire. We boiled water and had freeze-dried Beef Stroganoff, and it was surprisingly tasty. I'm amazed at how far that particular technology has come. We roasted mashmallows over the dying embers and went to bed early.

My attention span is still shot. Right now I have two books open, I'm writing in my journal, and I'm carefully pacing the coffee so that its warmth lasts against the chill of a morning in the mountains. I don't need the national weather service to tell me it's 58℉ and partly cloudy, with the smoke of distant wildfires making the air "unhealthy for sensitive persons" at 85ppm. It's hard to stay reliably warm, especially my hands, under these conditions. And I've concluded, looking at these notes, that I'll never have a beautiful pen hand.

I'm having a morning of nostalgia and melancholy. As I look over at the grilling grid, now pressed into service to dry our dishes overnight, I realized that the four cups, bowls and plates used to be "Me, Omaha, Kouryou-chan and Yamaraashi-chan." Now they're "Me and Omaha, dinner and breakfast." It's little things like that that touch me these days, the realization that the "turn helpless infants into full-blown human beings" phase of my life is in the past and, barring some miracle, will never come again.

It's beautiful at Clear Creek. The toneless white roar of the river, low and rocky now in the latter days of summer. I feel a bin manic this morning; maybe without my ADHD meds in the morning and a glass of wine at night, this is who I am, and the hypergraphia has returned. I've read that the mere presence of a cell phone reduces your cognitive capacity due to its ability to stoke and then relieve FOMO in a nasty dopamine cycle.

The latrine at Clear Lake is worth noting, because it's actually clean and the people using it actually honor the protocol. I swear the next time I go camping I'm bringing a fat black magic marker and writing on the inside of every toilet lid "Close the lid to reduce smell and flies!" And I'm going to learn how to write it in Spanish and German, as I've heard both on the trails this week. (That's another thing about the current administration: these forests bring in millions in tourists dollars, but for some reason our political masters servants have decided to make it hard to come to America, cut down the forests, and then point to the effect of both and say, "See? Tourists aren't coming to America, so our forests should be used for other things," and "See? Our forests are better used for other things, so why do we need to relax security and let dirty foreigners in?") I can't help but wonder if a little glow-in-the-dark paint might help the stumbling male at 3am find his way to the loo.

I'd like to talk about the stars I saw last night, but I can't; the woodsmoke from the wildfires makes the sky a uniform hazy reddish-brown. I made the ultimate sacrifice this morning: drank my coffee black to make sure Omaha has enough milk for cereal when she rises. Everything is sticky, and everything will have to be washed when we get home. It's circumstances like these that make you grateful for clean underclothes, shirts, and socks every morning!

Omaha and I broke camp and went for a walk along the Sauk River, where we skipped stones and admired a bird that seemed impossible to drown, and we talked about our aging bodies and being in love and the melancholy of seeing the last child head out into the world.

We drove into the town of Darrington, where Omaha talked to the ranger while I guiltily checked my cell phone. There was only one critical issue to deal with— a co-worker who had left shorty before I did hadn't received her paperwork, and wanted to know if I had. I replied that I had. We then bought milk and ice and drove back up Mountain Loop, which past Clear Creek was a gravel road capable of safely sustaining only 20MPH at best.

At one point we were stopped by a construction team fixing a culvert. Three men operated machinery: a digger, a dump truck, and a roller. The protocol was as familiar as it is anywhere else, only without a flagger. There were two guys observing the work for the machine operators, and I would frankly have been terrified to be standing there with my back to the roller while observing the digger's maw clawing at the dirt. It took a while until the dump truck pulled away and we were free to go through. Those men work in a place with no Internet and no phone; unlike you and I they can't call their loved ones anytime they like. It felt... odd... despite knowing that even twenty years ago that was the way we all lived.

The road was never better than gravel for the easternmost part of the loop, and often just packed dirt. We stopped at Omaha's desired campground, Bedal, only to be warned of a "problem bear" in the area. We made it out of the pass and down the southern slope and onto asphalt again, and the campsites were terrible: all too civilized, with lots of RVs, loud families, and yappy little dogs. We ate a lovely lunch at a picnic site, and Omaha convinced me to head back to Bedal.

Bedal is one of the highest campsites in that area, and the alpine afternoon weather was brutal. We made a new campsite and I napped again. What is with me and all the napping? It was 93℉. And much buggier. We went to the river and used that fabulous gravity filter to fill up our water bucket (I can't tell you how amazing that filter is; for years we were restricted to campsites with running water, and now we're not).

Then it was Omaha's turn to nap.

For dinner we roasted hot dogs on sticks, and had store-bought macaroni salad, and ate marshmallows, and played more Boss Monster. I finished a fun little space opera erotica novel by Jo Graham titled Cythera. It was a fun story but the worldbuilding needed a lot of help; the religions were generic syncretisms and the space travel a bit of borrowed furniture with some terrible features to it (like: these are ship-to-ship combat battleships, yet they waste megatons of cubage on landing gear. Because shuttlecraft aren't a thing?). Anyway, good sex and okay characters all trying to do the right thing, so a simple pleasure without too much pain.

For that, I'm diving back into Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War next. (Why do people love Winter's Tale so much? Soldier is so much a better book.)

Omaha scattered the fire and put it out and we were in bed by ten again. A good habit to keep.

I awoke around 8:00am. I've been struggling with a difficult melancholy for the past couple of weeks, a combination of the job I had had for five years and the burnout that had come with it, the neverending onslaught of political shennanigans that paralyzed my country, the smoke from wildfires that has blanketed my state with a lung-endangering haze of particulate matter that colors the sun and moon orange and blood. It's easy to see why ancient peoples were so terrified of eclipses; this unbreathable reddish cloud seems to harbor apocalyptic doom at every moment.

Toward the end of the job, I was drinking nightly. One drink a night, a beer or a glass of wine, but it was more than I had ever done before, and it was a bit worrying. I was developing the adult habit of coffee in the morning to turn my brain on, and sedatives at night to turn it off, and I think that sort of punishing routine also contributed. Time in the woods where the strongest chemicals available to me were ibuprofen and ceterizine (an allergy medication), I hoped, would do me good.

On the other hand, our here I have the attention span of a flea, flickering back and forth between writing my journal (this thing), reading from my e-reader, and checking out the illustrations in a drawing book I brought with me that, unfortunately, turned out to be two levels higher than I'd planned.


Omaha awoke half an hour later than I did. We had oatmeal fro breakfast, which was truly lovely, and then headed out for our first hike: Beaver Lake. We saw beaver hutches, true, but no beavers. The largest wildlife we saw the entire trip was a rabbit. The trail was only two miles long and had no elevation of note, but it definitely let us stretch our legs and gave Omaha a chance to calibrate how much walking stressed her bad knee.

On the way back, we both brushed against something that felt to me like a shallow knife across my calf. I suspect it was poison sumac. The burn faded away after about an hour, but it was a painful reminder that the woods are not always to be taken lightly.

We drove to the next trail, the Old Sauk, stopped at the picnic table at the trailhead for lunch (tuna fish sandwiches), and then headed in.

This walk was harder. It wasn't her knee, but her ankle that really started to bother her. We were almost to the end of the trail when she said that there was no way she was going to be able to make it back. Fortunately, the end of the trail wound up near a road, so I hiked back to the car then drove up to the trail point where I could meet her, and she had made it to the end without a problem.


Back at the camp, I took another nap. This is becoming a thing with me.

When I awoke, we drove into town for more wood. Another thing we had forgotten: potato chips. Back at the camp, we made Pizza Loaf, which is basically french bread stuffed with butter, garlic, marinara sauce and mozarella cheese wrapped in foil and warmed to melting over the campfire. We played Give Me The Brain, and concluded that we needed more two-person games; GMtB is best played with three or more people. We were in bed by ten.