Trios of Renewal in the Three Sisters Wilderness
On an overnight backpack in the Three Sisters Wilderness, I am musing over trios, triplets, and tryptychs. I’ve come as part of a trio–Rob, Wes, and me. Rob is my younger brother. I grew up the middle child of three. Wilderness has three syllables. So does renewal.
As sunrise paints North Sister in pastels, I write in my journal above a subalpine lake. (Trio of North Sister, Journal, and Lake):
East-flowing light lassos my pen tip hovering kingfisher-like above the still white surface of a blank page. I’ve climbed above our camp to catch first light here on a sidehill of loose sand and russet lava rocks airy as coral. Bracken ferns like new feathers sprout from stones.
North Sister roughens a forget-me-not sky as she pinnacles to her highest tip at 10,085 feet . I imagine her inscribing sky stories over the 55,000 years since her last eruption.
As the eldest of three glaciated stratovolcanoes, North Sister sleeps and maybe also dreams of her periodic episodes of explosive power since forming some 145,000 years ago. A stratovolcano is defined as: “steep, conical volcanoes built by the eruption of viscous lava flows, tephra, and pyroclastic flows.” (Trio of viscous, tephra, and pyroclastic).
Worn by snow, storm, and the erosive forces of time, North Sister exposes her internal cone and the tracks of molten rock. How is it to be standing in a long yet restless companionship with Middle and South Sisters? Three witnesses to the heat of our present undoing. Renewal across Deep Time.
Gravity pulls. Sunlight commands. Do not stare or you will go blind. Only the flirtatious sideways glance at the rising brilliance. A gust of red crossbills. A lone Clark’s Nutcracker, a seeker of whitebark pine seeds. A yellow warbler wraps the cool day in rolling song.
Bird triptych of the high country. Everywhere is evidence of three-syllable words at work. Persistence. Endurance. Survivor.
Endangered ancient whitebark pine leans uphill close by the Pacific Crest Trail north of North Sister. This tree is a rare survivor, escaping deadly blister rust that has decimated so many. Keystone. Entwined. Headwaters.
Hiking the high country south of our camp on the Pacific Crest Trail is to enter a series of Haikus–each of three lines chiseled and honed–nothing extra here. Every syllable counts in an exuberant summer bookended by snows of spring and the blizzards of fall.
Western pasqueflower
waves feathery silk seedhead
Longhorn beetle rests
Melting snowfield cools
once molten lava. Hemlocks
tendril finite sky
Phoenix from ashes
Whitebark pine seedlings cradled
in ancestral arms
A trio of haikus. The way of Wilderness is to weave patterns we have yet to decipher. Within a three-beat waltz circling my heart, I listen for a melody of returning, renewing, and reviving.
Back at my sunrise perch in the grace of North Sister above a lake pooling tears, I breathe in the spiraling way of subalpine wilds–lifting me into the grace of a new day.
