Rattlesnake Mountain Part 1

                    I ran every day of January 2024. Ken Rideout, an endurance athlete that I first heard of on Rich Roll’s podcast, posed a challenge to run three to ten miles every day for the entire month. The challenge was called #rideoutstrong. I’m not really one of those militant types that dominate the endurance community. I’d like to see more outcasts and freaks, real destitutes, take an interest in the sport. But feeding on the feats that these athletic juggernauts are accomplishing has really taken my obsessive personality captive.

            On one of those frigid Puget days, I did 13 miles through a blizzard on Rattlesnake Mountain in Washington’s Snoqualmie Valley. The weather was menacing and brutal and mean. At times I was so scared of never reemerging, the wind yelling at me with all of the fury of the forest, a nauseating roar with generations worth of anguish and hatred for the ingrates who have overtaken it being lashed at me like a great master punishing his ilk. The trail was so blown over with snow that I had to guess where it was by following gaps between small growths of budding evergreens, their tops barely visible over the rising snowbanks.

            Prowling cougars and bears stocked the shadowy corridors of my imagination. A few years prior while my good friend Dave was visiting, we saw a black bear cub tumble over the trail not too far from where I was in the storm. I knew that they had to be lurking around, only feigning hibernation. They must have peered at me from somewhere nearby, but I could not see them. I envisioned myself being pounced upon and fighting to tear open my water pack where I kept bear spray and a knife. Resistance would have been futile, but I like to entertain myself with these scenarios of my own death as I trot through the forest.

            Several months prior in August of 2023, I attempted a 100-mile footrace near Mt. Rainier. The race is called The Dark Divide. Taking my friend and coworker up on an absolute whim, three of us set out to shake this thing out with little training in the elements after a seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier. Most of the running we did while leading up to the race was done quite literally at sea level on treadmills in the poorly ventilated caverns of the atomic steel can. Following the deployment and prior to the race, I squeezed in a maximum of a half-dozen runs in the mountains, with one overnight run of marathon length with the two goons who would do the Dark Divide with me.

            To say I was unprepared is a laughable understatement. It was just plain fucking stupid. I had no clue what I was doing. I was so stupid that seconds before the race began, I was hiding in the latrine from my racemates while I sucked in shameful rapid hits from a vape, like some buzzard crone on oxygen smoking through their laryngectomy hole. As the gun went off and I took my first few steps toward defeat, I clandestinely handed the vape to my friend who was there to crew for me.

            After 64 grueling miles by my Garmin, 51 according to the course map, I threw in the towel as I hobbled into the “mid-way” aid station and surrendered to the mountains twenty-three hours after setting out on the bastard endeavor. The ship had sunk before it even set sail. My first ultra ever will be forever recorded in the niche running recesses of the internet with a bald, ugly DNF. DID NOT FINISH! The words scream out at me in ghoulish taunts, like ghosts of the lobotomized in a long-abandoned asylum.

            But quitting the Dark Divide became a blessing in disguise. It has served as a constant reminder to not quit anything that I begin. Quitting is the ultimate excuse to not believe in yourself. The decision to walk away from the race when I could have trotted my way to the finish line before being eliminated by the cut-off 25 hours later has haunted me ever since and remains a constant source of motivation to not give up on any current hurdles that I am facing.

            If I hadn’t dropped out of the Dark Divide, then I probably would have tapped out on Rattlesnake when I lost sight of the trail. There is a mile or two stretch where the trail is completely open from routine deforestation by some hack lumber company. Wind and snow battered me like a tenement slum drunkard angry at his wife for inexplicable reasons. Visibility was non-existent beyond twenty feet in front of me. All I wore were trail running shoes, a flimsy wind breaker, and thin On running gloves and headband. The Swiss clothing is stylish, but no match for the Pacific Northwest.

            Widening and opening up to a slope, the trail led to an electrical tower. I peered around the tower from both sides and walked into the forest behind it, but this led nowhere. In any direction there was only a sharp drop-off from the mountain into the foggy, white abyss, like the entrance to some unchartered world of which there is no returning from.

            I retraced my steps a few times, going back and forth from the top of the slope to the electrical tower hoping some offshoot of the trail had been overlooked, but no such path materialized. Looking down toward the base of the slope I saw an ice-covered sign demarking the trail that must have escaped me when first passing it. Maybe it points toward the continuation of Rattlesnake, I thought.

            Excited to not be climbing up hill by carving my way through the snow, I began running back down, aiming to land into the holes I had already created. None of them were hit as my feet became tangled in a dense blanket of snow thick like a rotten bog. I spiraled through the air like a drunken circus artist unable to contain their liquor. Cackling in the snow, I thought the bears must be in fits watching this brazen idiot.

            Snow fell onto my face like some open-air sex scene. I felt elated, comfortable, relaxed, but got up for fear of the snow soaking through my clothes more than it already had. I made my way to that frozen plastic sign. There was no indication of the trail.

            It occurred to me to check the AllTrails app on my phone. I did not download the map, something I have never done because it requires a paid subscription to do so and I avoid giving any of these companies my money whenever I can. We already surrender our data; there is no stopping that at this late date. How we spend our money is where we can really get these bastards by the balls. They won’t get much out of me.

             Within the app, you can follow yourself as the little blue dot on the map if you have reception. Luckily, I still had some connectivity. Google Maps is absolute garbage in any situation and often has you spinning in circles while you try to orient yourself. AllTrails seems to have better geolocation.

            I watched myself while I walked aimlessly back toward the electrical tower. Doing that deviated me slightly to the left of the trail. Walking back into the center of the green line that indicated the trail, I pointed myself in the direction of the arrow at the head of the blue dot that was my digital self. Vaguely I could make out what must be the trail buried under two feet of snow.

           With no indication at the start of the trail that this much snow would encapsulate the summit, I trudged on into the thick mess of growing white haze, like Tony Montana. Light dustings laced the prehistoric foliage at the foot of the mountain, but no other indicator gave notice of the impending blizzard above. A simple glance at the forecast in this area could have given me this pertinent information, but I am never one to make too deep of a plan. Doing so ruins the adventure and I simply have no patience for it. I might look at the expected temperature and the little precipitation icon with its correlation percentage of likelihood, but there is never any thorough research into the elements that I might encounter. Who has the time for such forethought? This precarious approach could lead me to danger someday, but I’ll keep hedging my bet on serendipity and plain dumb luck.

            For the first few miles of the ascent, I followed visible trail signs, others’ footprints and a general loose memory of having traversed this trail several years prior, having gone to its peak two previous times. The first time was from its front side, going beyond the tourists’ haven of Rattlesnake Ledge. Thinking back on it, that is the very first trail that I ever hiked in the Pacific Northwest. In a sense, doing that trail in the spring of 2019 was a rite of passage for me, an introduction to the hundreds of miles I would eventually claim over the ensuing five years.

            The first time I went to the peak of Rattlesnake Mountain, my friend Dave was visiting from our hometown Pittsburgh at the beginning of the fall. At the time I was still smoking and drinking, both of which I have since tossed to the wayside. Dave and I, along with my dog Lucian, an incorrigible Klee-Kai mix, hiked to the tourists’ ledge, got the customary photographs overlooking the teal lake thousands of feet below and went back to the crossroads of the trail.

            What to do. Our options were to go back down in a quick, anticlimactic trot, or upward into an overgrown unknown. In my three or four times going to this point in the trail I have never seen anybody continue upward. It is not apparent that the trail goes up several more miles and I do not think anybody generally gives a fuck that it does. There are many routes to take in the Pacific Northwest and the purpose of this particular trail is to get the necessary Instagram photograph on that famed ledge. Maybe get the kids away from their tablets and prove to your spouse that you’ve still got some gumption in you. Going beyond the ledge is hardly a realized option, though.

            Dave and I decided on the cliche “when in Rome” approach and trudged on into the unknown. This was before I got into running, let alone had heard of trail running. We walked at a leisurely pace along an unkept path overgrown with what I remember as being Japanese knot weed, but was more than likely something else. Presenting tough conditions to get through, the difficult weeds reminded me of running flamboyant and out of my head as a youth springing through the litter-strewn woods that surrounded my childhood neighborhood. My gang of friends and I would tear these same plants from the earth, their bases matted with roots and dirt and broken glass from generations of Lawrenceville rascals who made use of the woods to party and play as they deemed necessary much the same as we did. We chased each other and hid behind the trees, stalking and clubbing and lancing each other with the rude, rooted implements until we all simultaneously gave in to exhaustion and went home in separate directions, like a dismantled fellowship returning from some great undocumented battle.

             We drank and smoked as we climbed. Prior to enlisting in the military, I thought that after I got through basic training all of my degenerate traits that I’d possessed all of my adolescent life and beyond would no longer plague me, as if the ugly beast would be conquered by some fastidious maturity contained deep in the annals of my being. But the idiot will always lurk.

            We weaved through the overgrowth as it grabbed at our faces and ankles. Our feet slid in the mud. A thin gap between the vegetation kept us on the narrow path filled with abrupt turns and twists, like the obnoxious, nonsensical network of naval ship pipes that loom above its decks. Nobody had been on this portion of the trail in what seemed like the entire summer, maybe not since the year prior. Chain-smoking, we passed back and forth overpriced locally brewed IPAs as we journeyed upward. Lucian kept his snout to the ground and led the way.

           I had no expectations for what was up there, but what sits at the mountain’s peak is not what I could have guessed. An old fire lookout tower made of chipped, warped wood painted red and covered in wilted heat bubbles, like the burst sores of lepers, was constructed beside a transmission tower. Long power lines like the arms of a threatened spider ran through the trees into the forest below, opposite the side of the mountain we had just climbed. Looking closer at the power lines, they terminate into the ground, either having been buried for lack of any use or leading deep into the mountain traveling miles back into the towns below. Perhaps they are just anchors and there are no power lines at all. They must have served some purpose at some point. A quick Google might tell me, but I would rather live with the suspense and unknowing. Not everything needs to be resolved. General mystery is something that is dying in today’s world when the answers to everything are at our fingertips. Some of the beauty of humanity is our ignorance, our belief in the unknown. It’s nice to preserve that on occasion. The depths of the forest seem an appropriate place to oblige that fading innocence.

            A small tool shack the same ruddy color of the tower stood in dilapidation nearby. We had stumbled into the Twilight Zone and exited somewhere in the 1950s or earlier. Splinters littered the ground, torn from the door frame and various weak points around their perimeters where passersby attempted to gain entry. No door secured the shed and inside lay strewn a loose splay of hard plastic bound cable, rusting shovel heads and an unhinged door. I could imagine the once burly men that monitored this station, huddled inside smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and embracing the crisp air that can only be felt during a rainfall in that particular region of the world. Now vacant and in a much more depressed decade, the construct reflected the time I viewed it in.

            Stairs to climb the tower ran up its center to the top. The bottom few rungs had been removed so forest ninnies like myself could not scramble up stoned, drunk or on otherwise sober, wobbly knees only to stumble and fall fifty feet to their deaths or some gruesome, protuberant injury. Safety nets of the modern age ruin what could otherwise be a real chance at risk and an opportunity to prove to one’s self the extent of their limits, an abstruse moment capable of inalterably correcting the direction of their life.

            There was more beer to be drank, so we drank it. Propping my phone against a rock or tree trunk I set the camera timer to ten seconds and we took several pictures. I remember concealing the cigarette in my hand behind Dave’s back because I did not want my wife-at-the-time or mother to give me any flack for smoking when I nervously showed them the joys of my adventure with Dave. What was I hiding?

            In hindsight, my ex-wife frequently berated and criticized me. I was constantly cast in a shadow of gaslight. It was not a fun time together. Anxiety was always with me and I was never comfortable in my own home. I dreaded the drive from work every day and cherished every moment away from her, loathing the day’s end when I would eventually need to return back to her domineering scowl. We laughed together and enjoyed each other’s company in between the daily insults and arguments, but that was more often than not dismally short lived.

            Dave and I relaxed at this phantom Wrong Turn outtake for a while before beginning our trek back down the mountain. Each with a beer in hand, we took turns holding Lucian on his leash, lighting cigarette after cigarette and feeling the booze bounce uncomfortably in our bellies, like hose water in overstuffed balloons.

            Lucian rammed his snout to the ground somewhere halfway to the crowded lookout point. He frantically pulled the leash taut until no more would feed out of the handle, zagging across the narrow trail like a brain-sick thing. On a typical day, the dog was wily and misbehaved so this behavior did not surprise me, but something about it was even more erratic than usual. He sensed something amiss. Continuing like this for a few minutes while winding down the trail, hastening us at a faster pace than our beer-heavy bellies would have liked, Lucian began to bark into the brush. His head swiveled this way and that, apparently honed in on something that Dave and I could not see.

            Suddenly, with all of the surprise of a Vietcong ambush, a black bear cub the size of a cartoonishly rotund child came tumbling through the overgrowth, over the trail and continued its clumsy careening into the verdant abyss. We paused, motionless and breathless. Even the dog dared not move. When a cub is seen, the mother is not far behind and she would be in hot pursuit of her whimsical offspring. A few silent moments passed. All three of us in silent tandem decided that it was time to split, safe or not.

            Without realizing it, this must have been my first trail run in the Pacific Northwest. For two miles we did not stop until we reached the tourists’ lookout point, a feat of mammoth proportions given that we were half drunk and had been smoking like bar flies all afternoon. About a mile into the sprint, I passed a hovel dug further into a hole created by an uprooted tree. Tree branches and bristles and bark laid on top of the floor of the little den like a forest lounge. While journeying upward I thought nothing of it, most likely because I had not noticed it. I wasn’t looking. No bear had entered into my world yet. Barreling past it frightened and more alert on the way back, I noticed the ground canape. The thought went through my mind that it looked like the perfect spot for a bear to catch an afternoon nap or dodge the heat. Not deep or hidden enough for a winter den, but just right for a mother and its cub to relax while keeping their eyes open for any passersby. It was hidden in plain sight and we had walked right past it. This could also have just been an ordinary hole in the forest that my inebriated brain concocted into a mammalian bunker.

            A tall, unassuming Asian man was walking toward the lookout when we emerged off of the upper trail. I exclaimed in a babble to him that there was a bear behind us and we had just run down the entire mountain. He was unfazed and walked toward the gray boulders that lead to the overlook of the overviewed lake. Few other stragglers that late in the day milled about at the cliff’s edge. No others heard us, or if they did, they did not give any recognition of the warning we just exclaimed. Nobody cared.

            We caught our breaths, sucked warm water from the shared hydration pack I carried and proceeded down the well-trafficked bottom half of the Rattlesnake Ridge trail. Nothing more exciting happened and little was said between us. Lucian took the lead. At the bottom I hastily lit a cigarette. While a degenerate, I was considerate enough to not pollute the winding, steep trail canopied by prodigious evergreens with my carcinogens. I knew others cared about their health, even though I still despised my own. Dave did not wish to smoke. I wanted to get one more in before we picked up my bummer of a spouse.

            On occasion the incident of the bear has been brought up between Dave and I. We speak less than we used to, but the option to confide in one another is always there. Our conversation is great and the interactions greater when we do have the time or choose to reach out to one another. The escape from the cub and its never-seen mother bonded us deeper than we had already been. Now when wandering the trails, I am always hyper alert for my next run-in with the lumbering appearance of one of nature’s most intimidating creatures. Another encounter has yet to occur.