Desolation Peak

There are certain places where names alone seem to demand a visit.

Desolation Peak is one of them.

Perched high above Ross Lake in the North Cascades National Park, only about six miles south of the Canadian border, Desolation is home to a historic L-O four fire lookout built in 1932.

It's also famous for one particularly well-known occupant, Jack Kerouac.

Yep, I chose that [laughs] because why make the trip civilized? Approaching from Canada sure seemed like a fun adventure, and I suppose it was, though whether it was type two or type three fun could easily be debated.

In July 2017, my partner at the time, Nick, borrowed a pair of sea kayaks from a friend.

We scheduled a four-day kayak camping, border jumping, Desolation Peak adventure for the first weekend of August.

Then as our departure date approached, thick wildfire smoke began pouring into Washington from Canadian wildfires.

She also read Jack Kerouac, and friends said she'd fallen hard for the Dharma bums.

This is Kerouac's 1958 novel about trading the noise of ordinary American life for a fire lookout solitary summer on Desolation Peak in Washington's North Cascades.

For a young woman who'd just buried both parents and walked away from the script her life was supposed to follow, it wasn't hard to see the appeal.

She talked openly about wanting a trip like that, unplanned and westbound, the kind of journey where the whole point was not knowing what came next.

You have wild Berkeley poetry parties.

You have grueling but transcendent hikes up Desolation Peak.

You have the poet Gary Snyder, fictionalized as Japhy Ryder.

Kerouac was selling the idea that the High Sierra, the exact same mountains John Muir wrote about, combined with Eastern Zen Buddhism could act as a sort of spiritual technology.

They're interesting questions, and they're the types of questions, after all, that have become the center of so much fire tower lore, like in Jack Kerouac's novel, The Dharma Bums.

The book ends with a protagonist working as a lookout on Desolation Peak, searching for truth.

He writes about meditating one night outside the tower.

Quote, "Here indeed was the great truth cloud, Dharmamegha, the ultimate goal." That interest in spiritual contemplation is partly what brought the Joudreys up to Stratton in the first place.