Cascadian Paradigm by Alex Roberts
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Meltdown Medicine: Where the Music Meets the Mountains and Helps Heal a Community

8/13/2015

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 I wish to thank Coast Mountain Culture for giving me the opportunity to tell this story in their Summer 2015 issue.  They only had space for a couple hundred words, but I had a great deal of material and wanted to add to the story.  Thank you for reading, and I appreciate you sharing this with friends, especially those in the Meltdown Family.  Photos provided by Summer Meltdown.

The highway winds through dense Cascadian forest.  Nahko and Medicine for the People, the weekend's opening headliner blares on the stereo.  We are cruising to the 204 Summer Meltdown Music Festival, four days of music and positivity.  Just as the dramatic glaciated peak of Mt. Whitehorse comes into view, the forest terminates in a mile wide swath of destruction.

At 10:37 a.m. on March 22, 2014, a massive landslide claimed a portion of the rural community of Oso, including the lives of 43 of its residents, resulting in the deadliest single landslide incident in United States history.  The Governor declared a state of emergency and President Obama surveyed the damage from a helicopter. An extensive rescue and recovery effort ensued in conjunction with a deluge of community support.

We turn the music down and slowly drive past heavy machinery sorting through wreckage.  It's a sobering preamble for four days of festivities.


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When Condors Soared Here Too

6/25/2015

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An internal debate rages as I nervously watch the teens scramble about the basalt formations.  Half of me is joyful to watch them climb about and explore; this is why we came out here - this is what they need.  Half of me wants to prohibit them from leaving the ground; if one of them falls I am so screwed.  

I'm the leader/chaperone guy for a group of Portland teens, who fan out around the walls and caverns of HorseThief Butte.  These crags are the stalwart remnants of a basalt monolith that survived the prehistoric glacial floods.  We play hide and seek, evading one another behind rock outcroppings, laughing.  Once we get our breath back, we climb to the top to eat our lunch.  The Columbia River surrounds the escarpment like a horseshoe.  Mt. Hood dominates the skyline with its sharp relief.

Before the creation of the dams, there was a Native American Village on these shores.  The Columbia roared cascaded over a steep drop known as Celilo Falls..  For many and more generations, the Wishram and other indigenous peoples gathered their sustenance from the river, netting and spearing behemoth salmon.  The dams flooded everything, buried the falls and the village.  Today, hand crafted wooden fishing platforms remain along the shores; weathered white, the bones of what once was.


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Lonely Exploits:  A Solo Journey into the Chelan-Sawtooth Wilderness

5/10/2015

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PictureThe view of the unnamed peak I climbed from my camp site at Crater Lake
I cram my fingers into the cold crack and scan for the next hold.  The rock wears an icy veneer, with snow choking the inner recesses of the corner system.  The wind whips around me, and for a moment it feels like a hand on my shoulder, beckoning me into the void below.  I keep looking for that magic, “oh-thank-god” hold that unlocks the sequence and delivers me to the summit.  But all I see are exposed friction moves on slippery rock, too dicey for hiking boots and no rope.

I take several deep breaths, feeling the all encompassing solitude, and know that as I have gotten myself into this position, I alone will have to get myself out.  I delicately down climb on slick holds, my foot reaching blindly for the ledge below, until my toes finally touch down.  I step across an exposed slab and end around back to the climbing route.  I had hoped to gain the summit, but now I must find an alternate route… or retreat.

It’s mid-October and I am on one last backpacking venture into the Cascades.  Unable to find anyone with the same days off, I go it alone to a zone I have never explored.  The Chelan-Sawtooth Mountains rarely blip on backpackers’ radars.  Overshadowed by the somewhat more dramatic and well known neighboring peaks of Washington Pass and the Enchantments, these trails are better known by hunters and dirt bikers.  Having heard rumors of superlative backcountry skiing, and the fact that this was the only corner of the Cascades not forecasted to get absolutely poured on these few days, I decided to check it out.


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Reflection and Redemption on the Colorado River

4/24/2015

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I read this entry the night I wrote it on the Grand Canyon.  The group had suffered the worse weather of the trip and patience was fraying.  The release of tension I felt at the end of the day coupled with an appreciation for the group.  I have made some minor edits from my original journal entry, but this is largely what I wrote there on the beach of Pancho's Kitchen


April 3, 2013    Pancho’s Kitchen, Colorado River, Grand Canyon National Park

Today we pushed from Forester Canyon to Pancho’s Kitchen.  When I woke this morning, my gut already felt tight from the memories of my rookie trip last year on this stretch.



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Out of My Element:  Descending into Utah's Coyote Gulch

4/24/2015

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PictureMaggie Looking into Escalante Canyon
We cautiously approach the edge of the precipice. The rolling slick rock drops away into the Escalante River Canyon.  The canyon snakes through the desert plateau, with the Stevens Arch on the far side staring at us like a serpent's eye.  It's my girlfriend Maggie's and my aim to hike up Coyote Gulch, one of the Escalante's main tributaries.  But we are momentarily paralyzed by the landscape into which we will descend, and I can't help but wonder if we are making a huge mistake.

We find the "Crack in the Wall," where a section of the rim has cleaved a foot away, creating a narrow entrance.  We body belay our packs with a rope over the lip to a flat spot below, then scramble down the tight passage, shoulders scraping the rock on either side.  The corridor opens up into the desert sun, and I am struck by how far I am from the forested mountains of my native Cascadia.  Here, I am out of my element.  While I am thrilled to have my beautiful backpacking novice girlfriend, I feel an underlying trepidation.  In the many miles before us we will need to find potable water, route find up the creek and over rocks, and then make an exposed climb back to the rim.  I fear being chastised, on online news comment sections, for being another tourist underestimating the desert, and getting himself and his girlfriend in over their heads.

A steep, sandy descent leads us to the gulch's entrance a half mile above its confluence with the Escalante where we step into a desert eden.  Dragonflies buzz about our heads, and butterflies flit in the morning sun.  We don our neoprene socks on sunny sandstone slabs under cottonwoods, and begin tromping up the creek. Coyote Gulch shatters our preconceptions of what entitles a “gulch.”  This is a massive canyon with grand, sheer walls.


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Remembering My Friend Tommy Fruend

1/25/2015

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Over beers you told me about tramping through jungles in search of Mayan Ruins.  I urged you to keep going, to tell me how you got there, and what you found.  I ordered a round of Agavero to coax the tale forth.  

You told me of swimming in cenotes and drinking cerveza with friends on the beach.  You spoke proudly of your Washington roots and your children.  When I hiked a portion of the PCT you took over trivia for me, charming everyone with your whit and smile.  

I would run into you, swaggering around town in fringe and an inexplicable tan in November.  We would embrace and continue to evolve the plan of the Central American Adventure we would go on in the hypothetical future.  A trip I still intend to go on.  I plan to make my trip to Mexico this year.  To climb those ruins and swim in the underground rivers of the Yucutan.  

It's been a year since we lost you my friend.  And we still remember.  


There is a place
In the grandest canyon
Where water gushes from rock
There is a mountain
Whose snows reach three oceans
There are azure rivers that flow
Through subterranean caverns
There are trees
In the jungle 
Who pick up their roots
And seek out sunlight
And trees that stand a stationary vigil
For a thousand years
There are places where the entire night howls at the moon
Where the ocean glows


Birds travel far without passports
And they always speak the language
And life
In its humblest forms
Scrapes out a living in earth's least hospitable environs

There are alien worlds 
With alien inhabitants
But the stories are all the same

There are webs
Connecting trees and rocks
Birds and bees
You and I

There are strangers
Making sacrifices
For one another
And a dog 
Laying a comforting muzzle on his boy's knee

There is a singer singing
A band playing
And a young man 
Wanting the attention of the
Young woman 
Who he will one day marry
In the church on the hill under a cloudless autumn sky

Somewhere there is a father
Combing his daughter's hair
And packing her lunch
So that she can be ready for the day
So that she can lead a happy life

There are storms
To remind us

And there you are my friend

You are the eye of the storm
The spectral note of the coyote's howl
That calls all neck hair within earshot to stand at attention

You are the spirited burn of tequila

You are the rain
Seeking low spots on the plane 
Sewing life where you may
On your journey to the ocean

You are the wind
And always will be


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    As an outdoor professional, I get opportunities everyday to enjoy unique experiences, see beautiful scenery, and meet interesting people.  These are stories about those experiences and interactions.  

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