Thanks, Don and Roberta!

When I first came to Portland, the go-to hiking guides were written by Don and Roberta Lowe. There's always a nice picture in the back of the couple, clean-cut Don in his darkroom and smiling Roberta in a plaid pencil skirt and a sensible Pixie cut. As far as I know, no one else had decent trail guides to this area. They had the franchise. Nevertheless, I suspect they didn't get rich. People in the olden days accepted a reasonable remuneration for their efforts and weren't expecting the big score.

I used these guides to death. The glue on the spine didn't hold up in the rain, and the pages kept falling out, which was actually handy, because then you could take the individual pages in your pack and reintroduce them to the complete volume later, after your shower and beer. Eventually other people started doing the work of documenting trail conditions and directions and elevation gains, but I kept with Don and Roberta for a good long time, because I already had the guides, and the new people were asking serious money for their books, and after all the terrain didn't change that much, did it? I picked up a few new books but I haven't yet thrown out Don and Roberta's oeuvre, which now exists as piles of individual pages loose inside the covers.

Some of their instructions are antique at this point. "Be sure to fill your water bottle before you go," they warn, "because some water sources are not reliable through the season."

"Not reliable," meaning some of the trickles might dry up. Not: the water is loaded with Giardia and you'd best have four quarts loaded in your pack if you don't want God's Own Diarrhea for the next eight weeks.

Wasn't that many years ago that I had their hiking guide with me as I introduced my friend Linder to the wonders of pikas and ferns and alpine meadows, and we hesitated at one juncture, unsure of the correct path to take. I fished out the guide and quoted: "Veer left at the old hemlock stump."

At that intersection, everything visible was considerably past stumpage. Linder paused and framed her query in a calm tone.

"Murr, how old is that hiking guide?"

I consulted it. Well! Not old at all. Shoot! Look at that date. I was a young adult. Which could not possibly have been long ago. Nevertheless, I did the math.

"Um, forty years?"

Linder said nothing.

"Is that old?" I wondered. There was no answer.

Today I got out my Don and Roberta Lowe hiking guide to guess at how far Dave and I just hiked. We'd gone up to Salmon Butte, the site of a former lookout tower. The guide had a photo in it depicting the scene from the top: snow-covered peaks in the distance, a rocky prominence, and a two-lane road that is utterly not in existence at the moment. I had to do some more math to come up with the answer, because the current trailhead is a good mile and a half away from the Lowes' trailhead. That kind of thing is happening more and more up here on Mt. Hood, and basically we approve. Some of the trails were accessible from old logging roads, and now those roads are being decommissioned. They pull out the culverts and return the streams to their natural topography; they use earth-moving equipment to shove some hummocks and low spots in, hoping to discourage motorbikes. The first few years these trails look unreasonably wide, and then the alders and such start to fill in, and by about year five you can hardly tell there was a road there at all.

Possibly your quadriceps can tell. We're kind of tired. We had a twelve-mile hike with considerable elevation gain that used to be a nine-mile hike when the estimable Lowes hiked it. And that is just fine. That is quite within our capabilities. Spooky thing, though? This is such an amazing coincidence, and there's no explaining it: in the forty years since our hiking guide was published, we got forty years older.

Tracking The Fall Dot Migration

There are two kinds of people in the world: regular, and birders. Usually, identification is easy. Birders are the ones wearing binoculars. But there's also an intermediate phase--the pictures in the guide book are of Dave and me--the swell-hearted clueless aspiring birder. This form also wears binoculars, so you have to look for the random ass-scratching and perplexity around the eyebrows.

Dave and I would like to complete the transition into full birder, but we have problems. It doesn't just happen on its own. I once got a very clear look at an enormous bird with distinct markings, every one of which I memorized, and when I checked it in a field guide, it exactly matched a bird whose entire range is the southern slope of a single mountain in a country I can't get a visa to, and you'd think birders would get excited about a thing like that, but they don't.

So when Dave read about Bonney Butte, a prominence on Mt. Hood at which the fall migration of raptors is particularly splendid, we went to see. Here the selection of birds was likely to be contained in three pages of the guide books, and we thought we'd have a good chance of being able to identify them. Just to get in the mood, we attempted to reach the place using directions off the internet. They were very specific, advising us to "make a sharp left at 6.8 miles on a rutted road you're too liberal to have a vehicle with high enough clearance for." They called it "unsigned Road 4890," and it looked pretty much like every other unsigned road--no identifying marks, indistinct plumage, and no particular correlation to the mileage indicated. I've been following hiking guides for a long time now, and I am not fooled by this sort of precision. 6.8 miles can mean 7.2 miles or 4.6 miles, or, in some cases, it can mean--ha ha!--that there is no road at all. Sometimes this is a result of deliberate sabotage, and sometimes it means the writer of the hiking guide had a very nice hike and tried to estimate, back home after the fifth beer, about how far down the road that particular turn-off was.

Anyway, we finally gave up and parked on the shoulder somewhere near sea level with Bonney Butte jutting in the distance, and started walking up. By the time we arrived, we joined a dozen people who had no difficulty with the directions and were parked nearby. We were the ones with 1800 vertical feet of righteousness, and they were the ones with unfogged binoculars.

Half of these were pros, employed by HawkWatch International, and they were counting raptors on their migration. There was also a banding operation going on. A "raptor" is defined as a "bird of prey." If you don't mind my saying so, this is a little dismissive of your robins or woodpeckers, which do one heck of a job locating prey that isn't even visible, let alone flapping or squeaking. The people who make these distinctions are way more impressed by birds that eat other birds or mice or something. So be it. You may be the world's champion finder of invisible insect larvae, but you don't get to be called a raptor, no sir.

So we settled in, anticipating a casual afternoon sitting on a warm rock watching soaring birds drift upwards in such a way that we could finally--finally--learn their names. Specifically I anticipated that I would see a tableau that matched the introductory raptor page of the field guides, in which birds hung stationary in the sky, wings out, with all conceivable characteristics displayed, in such a way that their minute differences were evident.

Not so much. Our birds were dots on the horizon, up to fifteen miles away. Nevertheless the pros were confidently marking them down as one bird or another. "Red-tailed," one would say, squinting into his binos. "Male. Immature," he'd conclude, as the dots popped wheelies in the sky. I don't know how they did it. As one confided, "you can definitely tell a female Sharp-Shinned hawk from a male Cooper's, but there's a whole intermediate range where you're just going to have to give it your best shot." Let's check the field guide for the differences, shall we? Sharpie: Adults blue-gray above, pale reddish below; young brown above, striped below. And the Cooper's: Adults blue-gray above, pale reddish below; young brown above, striped below. Hmm. Sharpie: tip of tail usually looks squared-off, but can look rounded. Cooper's: tip of tail more rounded (can be hard to judge). All-righty-then!

What it comes down to is that there are significant variations depending on whether the individual is young, lost, evolutionarily creative, or just messing with you. Fortunately for us, we were able to observe one bird close up, when the banding operation scored a Sharp-Shinned hawk that had blundered into its net. [Note: you are not interested in knowing how hawks are lured into the net, any more than you would like to be a pigeon.] Our temporarily captive Sharpie struck us, primarily, as small. And it was a large one, being a female. Most female hawks are larger than their mates, and not just through the hips.

How they resolved the dots is still a mystery. For each species there's a regular phase, and a winter phase, and an immature phase marked by general dishevelment, plus random variations for vagrants, and assorted gang colors. The writers of the bird field guides are not as careless as the hiking-guide people, but their product still falls short. They are sorry about it, they really are. They know how to tell the birds apart, but they have to keep it simple so as to avert despair and burn-out in the novice birder, and refrain from details such as the particular wardrobe favored by female goshawks on Bunko night, or the freckled camouflage of juveniles sneaking out on a toot.

So I didn't really learn much. But I was happy to serve as a dot-spotter, hollering my find on the horizon and causing three real birders to wheel my way and squint my dot into a slot on the hawk count. Proud, even.