The demons and angels of Desolation Peak.......

He had traveled with companion’s south on Ross Lake from the Canadian side by canoe. After a few nights on a small island in the middle of the fjord-like lake, right at the base of Desolation Peak, they decided it was time to climb.

He had a mission of course. He had read the tales from his beat author hero Kerouac about the summer spent in the fire tower at the top. The words still haunted him, and this could only be resolved by seeing the cabin himself.

Jack Kerouac spent 63 days during the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, in North Cascades National Park. He wrote about his experiences in the book "Desolation Angels".

The trail to the lookout is 7 miles one way from the water’s edge at Ross Lake. On the way up he considered the words Kerouac later wrote to describe his initial reactions upon reaching the remote cabin…..

I gulped. It was too dark and dismal to like it. "This will be my home and resting place all summer?"

When I get to the top of Desolation Peak and everybody leaves on mules and I'm alone I will come face to face with God or Tathagata and find once and for all what is the meaning of all this existence and suffering and going to and fro in vain" but instead I'd come face to face with myself....

The book is essential when exploring the individual demons that rest dormant in our psyches, only to surface when distractions are distant. Again Kerouac writes…..

Those afternoons, those lazy afternoons, when I used to sit, or lie down, on Desolation Peak, sometimes on the alpine grass, hundreds of miles of snowcovered rock all around, looming Mount Hozomeen on my north, vast snowy Jack to the south, the encharmed picture of the lake below to the west and the snowy hump of Mt. Baker beyond, and to the east the rilled and ridged monstrosities humping to the Cascade Ridge, and after that first time suddenly realizing "It's me that's changed and done all this and come and gone and complained and hurt and joyed and yelled, not the Void" ...

The hike, nearly straight up for miles above the lake was exhausting, but ultimately rewarding, as he was able to see the views Kerouac described so eloquently. The demons and the angels, still present, were left undisturbed. Or perhaps they were his.

A summer in high elevation, in the clouds, one can only wonder. Or read the book.