A walk across the Wallowas

The Matterhorn, second-tallest peak in the Wallowa Mountains, dominates the view from Hurricane Creek Trail.

By JAYSON JACOBY
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So I hiked clear across the Wallowas and all I saw were some Mormon crickets and several flocks of conifer-chewing pine butterflies.

I’m still tinkering with the slogan, mind you.

I’d like to print it on T-shirts.

You know the kind I mean.

That shoddy cotton garment your parents gave you, thinking it made up for them going to Hawaii for a week and leaving you home to watch your little brother, who cusses at your friends and eats all the Pop Tarts besides.

Anyway I’m still a trifle sore (and so are my calves) about bisecting Oregon’s biggest wilderness and seeing little wildlife besides the insectile varieties.

And I saw a lot more of some of those than I would prefer.

Mosquitoes, mainly.

I feel bereft that the Wallowas, over the whole of a weekend and 26 trail miles, couldn’t produce a single example of the charismatic megafauna for which the range is renowned.

No bears, no elk, no bighorn sheep.

None of those wolves that get into the newspapers so often.

I’d have settled even for a mountain goat.

And those are so ubiquitous in the Elkhorns that you practically have to swat them away sometimes up around Twin Lakes.

But enough with the whining.

The Wallowas, as anyone knows who has spent much time amid their wild vastness, are literally incapable of disappointing visitors who relish the raw sculptures that nature, with its tools of wind, water and ice, hews from stone.

The Elkhorns, I suspect, will always be my favorite range.

Yet whenever I walk through the Wallowas I am reminded of how modest — and though it pains me to write the word, even inconsequential — the Elkhorns seem by contrast.

When I stand atop Eagle Cap, which isn’t the Wallowas’ highest peak but concedes to none in the quality of its vista, I marvel at the scale of this landscape, the depth of its canyons and the sheer verticality of its precipices.

It helps, I think, in such surroundings to have some experience as a hiker.

Those who get around on foot better appreciate the physical significance of such monumental topography; they know the sacrifices legs and lungs must make to travel, say, from Glacier Lake to Minam Lake.

And that’s just a minuscule part of a wilderness that’s big enough to absorb Multnomah County with room enough to wedge in Beaverton and Gresham besides.

I crossed the Wallowas last weekend with my son, Alexander, my father-in-law, Howard Britton, and his friend, Doug Crawford.

The three-day trip was a mixture of the new and the old for me, geographically speaking.

We started Friday afternoon at the East Eagle trailhead, and we came out Sunday afternoon at Hurricane Creek trailhead.

My wife, Lisa, and I hiked the East Eagle trail to Horton Pass six years ago. We went to the top of Eagle Cap and then down into the Lake Basin.

But I had not been down the Hurricane Creek Canyon before.

(Nor up it, come to that.)

I considered this a serious blemish on my backpacking record.

Hurricane Creek, besides being one of the major drainages on the north side of the Wallowas, passes beneath the Matterhorn, perhaps the best-known peak in the Eagle Cap Wilderness besides Eagle Cap itself.

Certainly the Matterhorn dominates its surroundings as thoroughly as any other summit in the Wallowas does.

It also ranks second in altitude. Right now, anyway.

Surveyors have been kicking around for more than half a century the great geographic dilemma of which point in the range reigns supreme. For some years they concluded that the Matterhorn was slightly taller than its nearby neighbor, Sacajawea, and that both exceeded 10,000 feet.

More recently the experts have downgraded both mountains and given the edge to Sacajawea, 9,838 feet to 9,826. This is a noteworthy advantage in, say, humans or giraffes, but rather a trifling difference between mountains.

Such elevational uncertainty aside, the Matterhorn is an imposing mountain.

It doesn’t, though, much resemble its namesake in the Alps, which quite likely is the most famous peak on Earth.

Like most major summits in the Wallowas, the Matterhorn is the apex of a ridge.

Europe’s Matterhorn, by contrast, is the epitome of the isolated peak, a rock pyramid that stands aloof and improbable, almost a caricature of what a mountain is supposed to be.

Our route is one of the easier ways to cross the Wallowas from south to north. There’s only one pass to ascend — Horton, at 8,470 feet — and except for a few short sections on either side of the pass, the trail grade is gentle.

Yet it’s also one of the more beautiful — which is no small praise considering the Wallowas’ wealth of scenery.

The panorama from Eagle Cap, as I mentioned, is unrivaled.

But that’s hardly the only place on the route where you’ll feel compelled to rifle through your pack to get at your camera.

(Besides which your shoulders could use a break.)

Less than half a mile up the East Eagle trail you pass beneath the brow of Granite Cliff, a 2,000-foot eminence with a name that would satisfy a geographer but infuriate a geologist.

It is indeed a cliff.

But it’s not granite.

The rock is in fact limestone.

This cartographic error is at least an understandable one — the Wallowas are lousy with both granite and limestone, both of which are whitish and, at a distance, difficult for the layperson to distinguish between.

About three miles in, East Eagle Creek squeezes through a throat of stone and is expectorated in a froth. It’s sort of like a sideways waterfall. A very pretty one, especially when, as we were fortunate to do, you see it on a sunny afternoon.

The canyon of East Eagle Creek is a pleasant place to hike through during summer in large part because you’re not likely to get caught then in an avalanche.

If I were passing by during winter or early spring, though, I’d be nervous anytime I heard a rumble.

There’s ample evidence of avalanches — swathes of subalpine firs, for instance, all lopped off at the same level.

Where the Frazier Pass trail branches off en route to the upper Minam River, about 7fi miles from the trailhead, we came across the detritus of a snowslide that happened this year.

The snow had swept down the west side of the canyon (a slope that ends in the basin which holds, and hides, Hidden Lake). The snow was still there even in the last week of August, several feet deep and almost as hard as concrete where it bridged East Eagle Creek.

Snow lingered even in places that hadn’t been buried by an avalanche.

The north side of Horton Pass, for instance, was blocked by a drift that was nearly vertical where it lay across the trail.

When Lisa and I went that way during the first week of August 2005, the entire trail was snow-free.

The bigger impediment, though, was the Matterhorn.

The peak has a voracious appetite for megapixels. It did for mine, anyway.

As we hiked northeast from Mirror Lake toward Hurricane Creek, the Matterhorn’s west face, the most Alps-like feature in the Wallowas, peeked through the subalpine firs and whitebark pines often.

No sooner had I taken what seemed the ideally framed picture then we rounded another bend and the peak, though only fractionally closer, reared ever more imposingly.

We camped on a granite knoll (the real stuff, not its sedimentary imposter) above a meadow through which Hurricane Creek ran. Or rather strolled, it being a listless little brook near its headwaters.

Here, too, the Matterhorn demanded attention.

Its narrow white tip glowed, like the mantle of a lantern, as it caught the day’s last sunrays while the rest of the mountains and the forests below dimmed to dusk.

While I was scrounging around the thickets for dead wood to feed the fire, I could almost feel the mountain’s gaze.

I was reminded of a story from World War I.

It had to do with British infantry who manned a trench on the Somme battlefield in France. The region, Picardy, is generally flat. As a result, even a minor elevation, some dimple we in the rumpled West would hardly deign to give a name to, was significant in a military sense.

These soldiers served on a section of front near such a hillock. It was on the German side of no man’s land, and the Germans had turned the butte into an impregnable position, studded with machine gun posts and trench mortars.

The Tommies who survived forever remembered the palpable menace of that hill, how it was always in their minds.

The Matterhorn commands a similar respect.

Fortunately, it is otherwise the opposite of that French slope, being a place which instills a sense of peace rather than dread.

No machine guns.

Hurricane Creek Canyon didn’t disappoint me.

Unlike some drainages, its scenery doesn’t diminish as you descend. On both sides the mountains rise beyond 9,000 feet clear to the trailhead where a pickup (and almost equally important, clean clothes) awaited.

And a few mosquitoes.