Pika are lagomorphs. You will not be surprised that the native pika on Hokkaido is ridiculously cute. North American pika, however, are also ridiculously cute. Like, the bestest. Pika like higher altitudes and a mix of broken rock and meadow. They make their homes in various formations in covered gaps under scree and piles of talus, somewhere they can take shelter and can store their hay. Pika make hay in the summer, the same as we do. They dry it out on slabs and boulders, saving the heartier bits for winter. Apochyphally, anyway, they store any plants that might be toxic behind or underneath vegetation that is easier and safer to digest. The going theory is the toxins can leach out over fall and winter and be safe to eat by spring.
Pika are not endemic to any month of the year. In point of fact, they are one of the few alpine mammals that do not hibernate in any way. They prepare for winter, the same as skiers, seemingly frenetic in late summer when the light begins to change and daylight starts to noticeably shorten.
This is Silly Season, time of prognostication, although this summer it got off to an early splosion of a start with the promise of a Super El Niño and all of the ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that that brings. Y'know, confusing the thing you expect, climate, with the thing you get, which is weather.
Those long August afternoons, sunsets when you can feel the climatic corner being slowly turned, those aching State Fair sorta days when you realise just how much of a redneck you really are when you tear up just a little at the smell of a horse barn and the waft of fried onions you never even liked as a kid. The tractor club across from the hot tub seller, you know, the one with the single-piston demonstration engine. Sooner or later it'll be September, and then it may as well start snowing because October, also known as The Best Month, is about a week long and that goes by so quickly you hardly have time to enjoy it.
I could rarely make it through August as a kid without pulling out my ski pants "just to see if they fit", or buckling the boots and clomping around our small living room in front of the dormant wood stove. I'd make some excuse about how Ski Bonkers was in a couple weeks, and maybe we'd hafta go see what was left after all the folks more well-off than we were had picked through the end-of-season clearances back in March and April. It was never very comfortable in the heat, never satisfying, but that never stopped me. It's not about being satisfied.
I don't remember it ever being as smoky as it is this summer across the PNW. It certainly could have been. I didn't really know about fires. I do remember one, or at least the plume above it in the evening light from town. I don't even remember smoke on the Wet Side, for that matter. The Cascades kept it all at bay, or I've simply forgotten. August when we moved to Ashland was new and different, and sometimes meant standing on our little porch and trying to decide if that street lamp, conspicuously on in the daylight, was three or four blocks away. It was probably three.
In three years there we didn't weather a fire near town, but the Rogue Valley is fairly deep and narrow and smoke from fires west of GP and any that snuck over Siskiyou Summit from California would get stuck. Ash drifted out of the smoke-stratus, some twisted version of cloud seeding in an inversion regime. Some days you just had to stay inside.
I spent the summer of '99 running 3 and 10 and 11 at Crystal. A couple friends from school, Peter and Dustin, carpooled with me. Dustin and I would throw rocks at each other across Midway and then head home and maybe have band practice, or whatever else we could get into with what little time we had before bed and doing it all again. Crystal is 40 miles from where we grew up, and though neither of us was good at staying below the speed limit, it was a long drive. Tall trees, ten or more conifer species with some vine maple and devil's club and salal for good measure. The White wandering this way and that all the way up the valley to the Park boundary. Six miles of steepish, true mountain road and then the quiet base area, long before the instacrowd and all the tourists that seem to be everywhere. I practiced driving my old '81 Tercel without the clutch, cos it occurred to me that my clutch might go out, and what then? What if I didn't know how to match revs? When I wasn't grinding gears, I'd turn the engine off to "save gas". I claimed the power steering made the car's handling to jerky in the mountains, and that I was fine heading home from work with just my wits until I compression-started heading into the last corner at Silver Springs.
In August that year we had a surprising number of thunderstorms. One afternoon I got booted from the top of Rex when a big cell snuck in from the south. I was in the shack and didn't really watch it build, and once I was down in the base area all I could see was rain, which that year was like seeing grass on a golf course. Another evening in the same cycle I sat down at the fairgrounds and watched two slow-moving cells light up the sky. I lost count after over a hundred lightning strikes in a minute. Continuous thunder rolling across the Plateau.
The light shifts, especially if you're north of the 45th. Slowly at first. The sun sits so high in July, the shadows are crisp and feel harsh. The subalpine rocks act as something of a microscope. Everything, time especially, feels slow. As the light shifts, it softens. Some of that is the now-inevitable smoke of the Western summer. It feels like whatever's out in the trees is getting impatient. You catch glimpses, maybe just a Douglas squirrel, or maybe some cousin of the skunk ape. Bugs that haven't died off with the drying of the land get pissed, start acting erratically. Or maybe I do.
On the wet side, bear grass is the definitive in years it chooses to bloom. Some years it just shrugs and you don't see it. Late July, early August, somewhere along the trail you'll see those goofy fuzzballs and think, wait, I haven't seen you since the last time I felt this way. The last baseball game of my short season had passed, I'd finally got my driver's license, I'd got used to working a job, things changed, or colleges started letting the freshman class move in and start developing those incredible and incredibly unearned superiority complexes. The bear grass, and the pika making hay.
Here in the desert, it's the rabbitbrush. It starts blooming up high, first, 6 or 7 grand, little tufts of yellow and then an explosion. Sunflowers, numerous buckwheat, globemallow, all are still flowering, but rabbitbrush is the last big wave. For some, it's an allergenic nightmare, for others, a gentle wave across the foothills and a reminder that the burdensome heat will wane. Once the wave descends toward town, the mornings have already begun cooling, and the sun just isn't as brutal.
Fremont is the highest peak in a seemingly endless ridgeline draped with northeast-facing bowls that would make for some righteous turns were they not behind a locked gate. The west face is bare shale along the ridge, utterly exposed to the westerly zonal flow that pummels the upper White every winter. Sluiskin is the only peak near Fremont's elevation, and it's a spiky tower that falls off dramatically to the north, leaving nothing but thin air between the coast and this unforgiving alpine zone. It is stark and somehow welcoming at the same time. The valleys below shimmer in the heat late in the day. The shadows start to play, and that mid-July focus loses out to what is already advancing autumn. The sun still burns, and the ptarmigan chicks aren't big enough to leave the hen behind. Everything feels fragile, tired. Stuck between stations.
I can sit at the lookout for hours, shivering, my sweaty hiking clothes slowly drying in the wind. I always lay my pack down with the back pad pointed toward the sun, hoping it'll be dry by the time I need to head to town. Mid-August on the Wet Side is no longer hot like the 29th of July almost always is. The trail back to Sunrise isn't steep, mostly a false-flat traverse over moderate exposure high above the West Fork. Little puffs of duff erupt from each footfall. My shoes will be dirty. If you are looking, you'll probly see a pika or two up this high. There's a lot of loose rock amongst the heather and fading lupine in which they can build their caches, hide from the November Pineapples and the late February snow. There is krumholz fir and spruce and pine to anchor the snowpack somewhat.
Tahoma looms over everything, as you well know, even Fremont. The upper White is 12,000 feet below Columbia Crest. By mid-August, the glaciers are into their angry era. Most of the winter snow has melted off, especially in this waning-snow epoch. Some years, 1999, say, the glaciers will keep their blankets, but this year, 2026, they won't. Booming cracks at the toes of these old giants echo across the valleys they carved. The tumble of rock confuses the air even further. On the windward side below Sunset Amphitheatre, the Puyallup and Tahoma Glaciers regularly kick out debris flows and glacial outbursts. The rock is anything but solid. It is baked and rotted from the inside, temporary.
Usually, the flow is moderate, a danger if you're along Tahoma Creek. Sometimes, it buries the whole Puyallup Valley. Most folks don't really think about it on a daily basis; a thing that only happens once in a few thousand years. For the cities down along Puget Sound, Tahoma is sometimes little more than a disappearing poster on the wall and an unearned identity marker.
Up close, Tahoma is everything. The sky, the ground, the weather, life, death, music, spirit, Maker and Destroyer. The rough edges; rocks and till and sometimes trees covering the lower reaches of bigger glaciers like the Nisqually and Carbon and Emmons and Winthrop. It is imperfect, constantly destroying itself.
From Fremont, or Burroughs, or Tolmie, or Bearhead, or Summit Lake, anywhere you are close enough to get a good whiff, Tahoma is bleak this time of year. The Elkhead is vanishing, some years almost completely. Glacial dust whipped up in afternoon convection, collected over the years, melting out, rocks and trees ripped from the upper reaches of glacial valleys, the ice looks both tired and wizened. This mountain has seen some stuff. The volcanoes up and down the Cascade Arc all start to gather insect debris, loess, juniper pollen, anything that a strong easterly can carry up from the desert. Local Abies needles and bark dust. Ghostly gray.
When I was younger, and to be honest, still today, mid-August was the corner around which the entire year turned. The last two weeks always flow quickly. I keep checking climatology for the last day it's possible to hit 100 here in the desert, even though after 10 years I know it's still a month out. I start reading football prognostications, although that, too, is losing its luster with all the realignment and massive payouts. Dr J says it's time to watch Div III instead of FBS, which I guess makes sense. FBS is the Vail of football, now.
Autumn starts peeking out from behind the curtains in the high country. It's sneaky, the colour appearing at the edges of shrub and forb leaves as early as the first week of the month, at least in the hot and smoky summers like this one. Autumn is already here by the time September comes. Time feels like it accelerates again, the days rapidly shortening, the mornings becoming cooler and the afternoon heat letting go sooner. Everything is dry. Fire season is months old now, not barely starting like it used to. Most years we're lucky and the burning happens somewhere else, some years you can still smell the fire in the Doug fir down on 410 at Deep Creek. The wind picks up, rustles the dried leaves and fading buckwheat.
