I spent Friday doing exactly what I planned: hiking up a challenging trail and swimming in an alpine lake with no one else around.

The trail is difficult but not grueling

This hike is labeled the most difficult in the Columbia River Gorge. The climbs are intense and require deliberate breathing and measuring every step. I took frequent breathers, water breaks, and moments to simply stop and enjoy the views across from me and the living things at my fingertips. I often checked in with myself mentally and did a deliberate centering exercise.

An interesting fact is that the trail follows ridges very closely. As a result you find yourself walking on a high point with stimulating sights to your left and to your right. The Oregon Hikers site describes it better than I ever could.

I prepared

I left early before the forecasted heat arrived. I brought a shit ton of water and drank every drop. I brought a large Powerade to drink when I got back to the car. I had consumed two bananas, three huge peanut butter burritos, and two boiled eggs by the time I was done. I picked and ate bright red berries throughout my trek up. 

I enjoyed Warren Lake 

I reached this mountain lake by noon and had it all to myself. I stripped down and swam. It’s shallow and the bottom is muddy but I found it easy to float and paddle leisurely. The sky was thankfully hazy by then so I did not burn.

I crouched in the water on a log to look around me and experienced a moment of horror when I thought I was standing on a deer carcass. It turned out the log had an antler-shaped projection but was just a log.

Psilocybin mushrooms

I ate so many mushrooms while perched naked on a rock on this lake. And I chewed them thoroughly. After trying four times to get high, with increasing doses, and feeling nothing, I intended to up the dose until I finally saw (at minimum) some visual hallucinations and (ideally) some insight into the mind. This did not happen. At an upcoming camping trip with friends, I’m going to triple the dose and eat the whole fucking bag in pursuit of something wild. My companions can hold me back if I start clawing at my eyes and ranting about forest nymphs. Psychedelics are a shortcut to certain truths about the mind and consciousness. I would never take them regularly, only on special occasions. And I make sure to integrate into my psyche the lessons I draw from each trip.

I meditated on the dubious boundaries of the self

I sat on the lake and meditated using the Waking Up app. Today’s meditation guided me in the following paraphrased way:

Keeping your eyes open, on inhalation, breathe in all the contents of your visual field. On exhalation, pour your self into your visual field. Then focus on the tension between these two actions. Focus on the transition between them. And when you try to see the transition, the moment you look at it you find there is nothing there. 

The guided meditation also emphasized contemplating how the sense that there is a self is anchored in the visual field. And looking for this transition, trying to define it, is impossible and so this exercise provides the preliminary seeds of dissolving the self and grasping a truth about unity and connectedness.

I alternate these guided meditations (usually 20 minutes) with a 20 minute meditation of complete silence, with no device whispering to me. I only watch my own thoughts, feelings, memories and sensations as they appear. And in my initial, amateurish practice, I turn my focus as best I can from the contents of awareness to awareness itself.

Without sitting there for so long, I would not grasp the spirit of the place. When I dwell in a special place, I learn to take it along with me. And I can return to it later in my thoughts. This fall or next summer I’ll camp on Warren Lake and absorb its character better.

On a long solo hike your thoughts can help or haunt you

I thought of two damaging patterns in my life: avoidance and regret. There were so many things I could have done with that day, and they were mostly online chores. I also thought, for some mysterious reason, of a stupid thing I said to an attractive female classmate when I was 16. 

I thought about how much I hate the barking dogs surrounding my apartment on all sides.

The music in my head that day was the flower duet from the opera Lakmé. It was a great thing to accompany me. Last year when I hiked Mount Defiance Rachmaninoff’s Elegiac Trio looped in my head endlessly, perhaps because it is a swelling and receding piece with no real finale, only emotional highs and lows.

I also mentally replayed Kings of Leon’s “Sex on Fire” again and again. It’s too bad the other tracks on that album suck.

Ecological succession

It is now four year after the Eagle Creek fire, and things are changing fast. In burned areas the green ferns look especially green against the charred tree trunks. The weeds in “sweetly blushing purple” are taking hold and protecting the slopes from erosion, doing some good even if they happen to be invasive. Many stands of dead burned out trees give slopes an eerie look. Other huge Douglas firs have charred trunks but otherwise look healthy.

Penis protection

Sadly I was subjected to non-therapeutic genital cutting (male circumcision) as an infant. One thing they never tell you is that you have to protect your penis from relentless abrasion over your lifetime or else your glans (penile head) gets keratinized (thickened and calloused).

So, when hiking I wear a simple fabric sheath I buy online. This helps my poor dick to be happy at the end of the day instead of chafed and abraded. Men and boys who were left intact do not have to worry about this.

If you cut your baby’s genitals for any of the following reasons, fuck you:

• “We want him to match his father.”
• “God said to do it.”
• “It’s cleaner that way.”
• “It won’t get diseased if it’s cut.”
• “His future girlfriends will prefer it that way.”
• “I prefer the look.”

When you cut a baby’s genitals in the absence of medical need, you violate the person’s bodily autonomy and bodily integrity and you inflict lifelong harm.

I saw only two other hikers

People who complain about crowds in outdoor areas are lazy and unimaginative. They are the same people who complain about the lack of abundant unlimited free parking in dense cities. A hike like this thins out the stroller crowd and welcomes Leave No Trace practices. I did see some toilet paper traces from where sloppy people shat in the woods. Now if only those who reach the summit would stop making dumb rock cairns everywhere…

The summit

Beyond Warren Lake is the summit. There is an ugly communications installation there. But it’s easy to ignore when you have magnificent Mount Hood across from you at eye level. I sat there among the huge boulders and scarfed down my trail food and watched this timeless mountain. I found a small rodent jaw and examined the long curved incisor snaking through a cavity above the molars. A raptor must have decapitated it and left it on the rock there. 

I enjoyed the sights for half an hour under light sprinkles from very high clouds. All the distant sights were visible despite high cloud cover, making it perfect for my tender Norwegian skin. The wind was steady in intensity but constantly shifting direction.

Life is wonderful

I live in a great city I chose. Within an hour I can get to remote trails and enjoy astonishing natural beauty. 

I can sit on the edge of an alpine lake and hear the knowledge and teachings of a world class neuroscientist and philosopher, as if he was my personal companion in understanding the mind. I try to think critically, as this same person gets preoccupied with Twitter feuds and cannot let go of his fixation on the problems of wokeness. I live in the most “woke” city in the world and yet to me my fellow city dwellers are the same as anywhere else in the US.

I can enjoy relatively safe psychedelics (not yet legal but getting there) and a safe, pure, legal supply of cannabis. I have the knowledge and trip reports of thousands of other hikers to keep me safe. I have health knowledge honed by dedicated scientific minds to power me through a day of exertion in the heat.

I am thankful for a splendid body that can meet the challenges I give it, and respond by growing stronger. I am thankful for staff who maintain the bathrooms, monitor the trails close to the parking lot, and for Trailkeepers of Oregon, who had done extensive and noticeable work in the days before I hiked this trail.

I am thankful that a hike like this does not take much out of me. I was in the gym the next day (doing upper body exercises only). I did not feel the knee soreness I did last time. This is because I leaned heavily into my walking sticks with every stroke of the arms, taking weight off my knees and using arm strength instead of straining my joints.

Wildlife I saw

• Salamander in a small pool of a creek. It may live its whole life in that little pool. I only noticed it when I stooped to splash my face with water and scrub pine sap off my hands.
• Garter snake
• Raven
• Small fish
• Damselflies mating (are they always mating?) and eating fly prey on my arm
• Brilliant blue dappled dragonflies and their nymphs rowing underwater
• Northern flickers
• Western scrub jays
• Water striders
• A group of 11 grouse (I think they were ruffed grouse)
• Chickadees
• Beargrass blooms in abundance (is this what was giving me strong whiffs of semen odor?)
• Coyote scat
• Pileated woodpecker pair
• Turkey vultures
• Bald eagles
• Unidentified songsters (vireos or sparrows)
• Chipmunk