We are ancient, or think we are. Our tired knees and bruised heels tell us so as we climb from the valley floor to the lookout, the one perched high on the ridge above the valley. We spend an hour here before descending to the lake for camp. We make dinner and eat as the sun sets, as clouds move across the mountain. She’s going under, we say, and nod.

When we wake it is late, and white covers the ridge, and  valley, and mountain. The mist moves and reveals one surface or another – the flat dark of the lake, the soft green of the sedge’s, the deep blue of gentians. Everywhere are spider webs, hung like  ornaments in the branches of mountain hemlocks.

We think we are ancient. Old. We feel our bodies giving way,  youth ceding to age. With each step our heart races  to catch the next beat. One moment ceds to the next  then gives way to an hour, a day and so on.   It will occur to us that this cannot go on forever – this day in and out.  We cannot forever climb  mountains, carry heavy packs, sleep on hard ground. We cannot always expect our bodies to do  all that  we ask.

The sun comes later in the evening, after another dinner, after we wander all day in the fog. We are at the lake, hushed by white when the sun comes through a hole in a cloud,  angled so at a notch in the ridge as if to single us out, there by the shore.

We wake the next morning  to sunshine.  Above and below us –  the valley completely clear of clouds.  We can see the river. We think we can hear it even, far and distant – churning away.  Above the river and the valley is the mountain with its glaciers that  we name and point at and follow with our fingers on maps and in the air.  We follow the creeks that flow from the glaciers, carved as they are into the flanks of the mountain.  We say the names of these valleys and creeks and follow downward the flow to where they become river. We listen to the river.

We point where the trail must go, where a bridge was or where we think it must be. We point at the place where one flood or another tore through the forest. We see bare and bleached tree trunks. We see green growing into sand.

We know Douglas fir, cedar and hemlock populate the valley floor. We have walked among them. We have touched their bark, rested in the shade of their boughs, searched for their tops high over our heads.   There they have been.  Before this forest or wilderness was created, and named. Before this nation.  They stood for centuries before they were given names – growing young and easy as Mongols marched, as the plague raged.  Long before our cameras and tripods, and fading eyes and sore knees and sweaty brows,  long before we came to stand above the river and imagine ourselves ancient.