It’s raining as I write this, the kind of soft, all-day Northwest rain that makes everything so unbelievably green. If we had stuck with our weekend plan for a Sunday-Monday climb of Mt. Adams, we’d be sitting in a wet tent at 8, 500 feet. Instead I’m warm and dry and enjoying hot tea without having to melt snow on a backpacker stove, and I can sneak to the kitchen to see if that Dove Bar is still in the freezer.Life indoors can be so comfortable.
It’s never easy to call off a planned and eagerly-anticipated outdoor adventure. One can’t be completely sure if yielding to a crummy-sounding weather forecast is prudent, or just wimpy. As I look out my window this morning, I humbly submit that not being on Mt. Adams is okay by me. I cast one vote for prudent.
Not being willing to entirely give-up on the weekend however, we headed yesterday to the nearby Olympic mountains to hike an area known as “The Valley of Silent
Men” -- a place I would want to visit, if only because it has such a cool name. One of the hiking guidebooks I own explains that, in the 1940’s, a college climbing club from Olympia had a tradition of doing trips up a nearby peak named The Brothers. The climbers, beginning their uphill trudge early in the morning through the brooding forest, began to mentally focus on the miles and the effort that loomed ahead of them. They walked along, a column of pensive travelers, lost in their own thoughts. At some point, climbers began referring to this place as "The Valley of Silent Men.”
Climbers and hikers seem to have a gift when it comes to finding just the right words for place-names. If I tell you there’s a peak called “Dragontail,” my guess is that you can visualize that mountain without ever having seen it. Likewise, I suspect you can imagine the look of Ripsaw Ridge, or picture the up-and-down verticality of the peaks in the Picket Range. Washington has a Black Peak, a Red Mountain, and a Yellow Aster Butte. In the North Cascades there is a flat-topped peak called The Chopping Block, and there are scary, severe mountains with the names Terror, Fury, and Torment. Some place-names are fanciful: Kool Aid Lake, Pogo Pinnacle, The Blop, and the Wine Spires.
My favorite place-name, though, is for a mountain between Nepal and Tibet, a peak many know as Mt. Everest. That summit, the highest on our planet, is Chomolongma, which means "Goddess of the Wind."
