Here, once again, is proof that wandering the new book shelves at your local library is a worthy use of time. I stumbled onto this book quite by accident and am wonderfully impressed by the breadth of content Mr Reid has managed to stuff into this volume.

Equal parts adventure travel, philosophy, and spritiual guide commentary, the story revolves around journey's taken from his home in Carson City, Nevada to utterly remote locations north of the Arctic Circle in his quest for sightings of the Porcupine Herd of barren ground caribou. He writes of arctic exploration in the past, timeless vistas along still frozen rivers, the mystic ability of the caribou, and other animals, and how they manage to find their way across trackless miles of land and sky by mechanisms that still defy science, tying all this together with man's current and past views of the land and where we fit into this puzzle.

This is a thought provoking, beautifully written story that weaves multiple tales into a single view of life, time and the earth. I strongly recommend it.

Cascade Pass

I can hardly believe it's been forty years since I first set foot here. In fact, I had just arrived in the Northwest as a guest of the US Navy and took my very first trip ever into the Cascades with a group from Whidbey NAS and showed up at this place. I followed that same year with my first ever backpacking trip using gear loaned by the Navy recreation office. My pack was a wooden frame, canvas bag know as a "trapper nelson".

Stuffed into this state of the art gear was a tent large enought to hold four people and lawn chairs, a two burner coleman stove, and one of those discount store poly filled sleeping bags that rolls up to about the size of a medium sized dog. Lashed across the top of the pack were the tent poles - steel and about five feet long. Every time I passed someone on the trail, I had to turn sideways to allow them to pass. I got more than a few stares. I was a novice.

At the time the North Cascades Park was barely two years old and little had been done to develop the area. As a result, camping was still left up to the discretion of the traveler, and for someone like me, with absolutely no knowledge of anything related to no impact camping, the soft meadows of Sahale Arm were the perfect place to erect the mostrosity of a car-camping tent so as to provde the optimal view of Doubtful Lake.

Over time, with years of study at the university and many more years of trail experience, I have mended my ways and would never consider either carrying such a load of non-essentials nor moving in atop one of the fragile meadows. That's all changed, along with the gear I carry. My whole load these days just barely outweighs the oak frame and canvas sack I lugged on that trip. But what has not changed is the dramatic beauty of the pass and areas above it. This trip takes you right to the core of the wilderness park and surrounds you with vertical rock and ice in all directions. Last weekends jaunt also surrounded us with bears, as a veritable fleet of big black bruins busily stuffed themselves on roots and rodents in anticipation of the coming La Nina winter.

This was my sixth trip to this locale, and like every other time I found myself thinking, enjoy it since this will probably be the last time I come here with so many other places to go. We'll see if that holds true. In fact, if you are interested, you probably only have to tell me so and we'll be planning yet another drive up the Cascade River for visit number seven.