Conrad Kain: Letters from a Wandering Mountain Guide, 1906-1933. University of Alberta Press and
Recently I met a black bear along the High Divide in Washington’s Olympic Mountains. Late summer brought furry critters in
Conrad Kain: Letters from a Wandering Mountain Guide, 1906-1933. University of Alberta Press and
Recently I met a black bear along the High Divide in Washington’s Olympic Mountains. Late summer brought furry critters in search of food into the vicinity of popular campsites that even in September were as full as regulations permit. Habituated to human presence, what rangers euphemistically call “problem bears” lack the good manners that keep us and them comfortably apart. This resolute bear, unbudgeable, blocked the trail. In a favourite and topical poem, “Meeting a Bear,” David Wagoner offers wise counsel: “There’s no use singing / National anthems or battle hymns or alma maters / Or any other charming or beastly music.” Soft, plain speech is required. But I had scarcely a thought for puns or poetry as I scampered toward safer ground.
Like my bear, the iconic volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest are threatened by the visitors who revere them. In Exceptional Mountains, O. Alan Weltzien examines the troublesome popularity of the great peaks, Baker and Rainier, Hood and St. Helens, Lassen and Shasta, and others. “Mount Hood has been represented as a volcano for the masses since July 19, 1894,” he writes, “when a crowd gathered on its summit with the express purpose of founding the Mazamas,” a climbing club. A notorious photograph depicts the ascent: dressed in what today would pass as formal attire, “with a single rope and plenty of alpenstocks,” some two dozen men and women queue for the summit. Weltzien’s study is premised on the view that “[i]n the Pacific Northwest, the volcanoes form... one strand of regional identity”; they “distill the regional imaginary as no other feature except the Columbia River, the Northwest’s primary river”—perhaps the Fraser runs second—“and powerful symbol of its heritage.” Literary works by John Keeble, Denise Levertov, Jim Lynch, and Marianne Moore, the most celebrated of Rainier’s poets, attest to the volcanoes’ sway. Veneration, however, has a sinister edge: the mountains are essence and emblem of Pacific exceptionalism, “the notion that we’re something special, given our landscapes”—a perspective that obscures the indignities to which the landscapes themselves are subjected.
Weltzien surveys the many ways in which the volcanoes have been commodified by the “industrial tourism” allowed by highways and, in particular, by the “status tourism” of climbers and skiers. A perpetually growing number of volcano visitors corresponds to a broad demographic change in the Northwest—the “regional population has escalated sharply since the 1960s, Washington’s having more than doubled”—and to consequent cultural transformations. The region, he observes, “has tilted from wet (or dry) boondocks to mecca”; Starbucks and Amazon have permanently changed Seattle, a city that in the mid-twentieth century was perceived by more than one transplanted writer as an empty backwater. Now nothing escapes the grasp of commerce, not even the “career and aura” of Gary Snyder, the storied author who “marries alpinism with poetry and Zen Buddhism”: the erstwhile dharma bum was famously enlisted to appear in the catalogue of the apparel company Patagonia. “Green buying shadows green climbing,” Weltzien contends: “Environmentalism and environmental consumerism dance together like longtime partners, and the snowpeaks prove one sturdy setting for their dance.” At times polemical, he laments both the aesthetic consequences of overuse and the ecological repercussions. And he dwells on “the most personal, embarrassing trace of our passage” through the mountains: “Feces, like bodies, do not decompose in extreme cold or snow conditions, and increasing traffic leaves increasing deposits for subsequent traffic to encounter.” Leave no trace? The hiker’s creed is mere fantasy, and Weltzien’s sceptical investigation is imbued with sadness: “As beacons,” the volcanoes “forever lure and enhance visitors but while footprints fade away, leavings—trash—remains.”
Its resistance to the pastoral, ecotopian myth of the Northwest allows Exceptional Mountains to be compared to works as different from each other as Carsten Lien’s Olympic Battleground (1991)—a denunciation of the inept National Park Service, the all-powerful logging industry, and its unfailing ally, the US Forest Service—and Bruce Braun’s The Intemperate Rainforest (2002), a political analysis of western Canadian forests. Weltzien is sensitive to the displacement and exclusion of Indigenous peoples caused by the creation of legally protected wildernesses; the mountains’ familiar names reflect an imperial history. Yet Exceptional Mountains also celebrates (cautiously) the luminous mountains that for decades