Part 2 of 3

Another milepost for me from the past millennium was visiting Meta Lake, once again, in the timeline of my existence on Earth. How Peter, Paul, and Barry, ended up exploring the string of Mt. Margaret back country lakes — Grizzly, Boot, Shovel, Panhandle, Obscurity, Ghost, Venus, and or favorite of all, Meta— has to do with grade school ‘chums’ attending the YMCA camp at Spirit Lake. In those days a boy in search for adventure backpacking could outfit himself with a war surplus ski trooper rucksack, pup tent, and mountain sleeping bag for under five dollars. We learned to cook everything Camp Mehan style in a number 10 can turned into a pot with a wire coat hanger bail.

As a novice photographer I had selected the new super fast color negative film —ASA, now called ISO, speed of 64— to take this shot from Norway Pass. It is a record, but I wish today it had been done in Kodachrome quality, even though that was a very difficult to hold ASA 8!

After a YMCA guided climb of snowcapped Mt. St. Helens the summer of our 8th grade graduation —leather boots with screw-in caulks, manila rope, and alpenstocks— as “certified climbers,” we somehow talked our mothers into letting us hitch-hike to go get lost in this roadless wilderness, with the only limitation being, in the day before dried potatoes, of how much food growing boys could carry. Our most successful trek was ten days, with only three of them “confused” as where we really happened to be.

And Meta Lake happened. We ran into the only people, other than a USFS horse packer on the trail, we had seen the whole trip. Of course they were Eagle Scouts from our troop. As high school seniors these cool big kids asked if we had heard the song, Shaboom! No, as this was before transistors, we had been living radio program free — missing Jack Armstrong, All American Boy, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and Your Hit Parade. They sang it for us. Last year I learned that “Shaboom!” really was a parody on surviving a Cold War atomic blast. Writing this piece today, I also have to suggest the “BOOM” part at Meta Lake was very prophetic.

Years later, taking my children on their first real backpack trip — my youngest daughter was a kindergartner, but she carried her own change of cloths— to Meta Lake, following a well known trail up over Independence Pass from Harmony Falls, I taught them the “life can be a dream” part of the song. After the road had been built to within a quarter mile of the lake, my son and I used Meta as a hiking trail head of an over the top of Mt. Margaret loop across the headwater of Coldwater Creek, and return by making our own way through following the Green River. Going off designated trails in “the monument” today would be subject to huge fines.

Another ”no-no” today would have been another father-son adventure in the mid-seventies of reclaiming a lost Boundary Trail from Mount Adams to St. Helens, horseback, with one pack animal. We took advantage of the open-faced shelter at Meta to keep an eye on a hobbled Charlie Horse, Big Enough, and Crazy Daisy, grazing on the small meadow at the outlet of the lake.

Looking at young growth overcoming the volcanic explosion I know geologic time will lead to a green recovery equal to California’s Mount Lassen National Park. What I will most likely never see again, on account of a population explosion, was a frontier birthright to wonder freely through a wilderness

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