Secret Places Secret Lake Spot. Photo by Claire Tenscher.
by Claire Tenscher
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ecause of the Covid crisis, I’ve had the opportunity to live and work from my hometown in the mountains of northern California. I can hike from my door; the house backs up on national forest land and wilderness, crossed only by the PCT. Within a short drive dozens of lakes are accessible by hundreds of miles of trails, and there are rafting, mountaineering, and mountain biking areas surrounding the town.
It turns out that I’m not the only one suddenly liberated. While the pandemic and associated economic crisis have put millions of our friends and family out of work, they have also given many people the freedom to enjoy summer like never before. The natural features that drew me home have also lured thousands of tourists to the area and turned this summer into the busiest we can remember. This means that easy or well publicized hikes that were serene before are now crowded. The riverside spots we’d usually go for a quick swim after work are occupied by campers, and litter and trash dumping have become a public health hazard around our drive-in lakes. A friend reports encountering a large group with a drone, stereo system, and an inflatable structure at a hike-in lake in a USFS wilderness area. While I will admit the idea of a floating 14 MAZAMAS
castle at a remote lake does appeal to me, drones and music are both poor etiquette and illegal, as is the trash dumping. Assuming good intent, some people just aren’t aware of their impact on the land or others, and that has made for a worse experience for those of us who place our faith in the 1964 federal Wilderness Act: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. …retaining its primeval character and influence …which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a
primitive and unconfined type of recreation …” Crowded hikes in my region would be considered positively desolate compared to most in the Gorge or on Mt. Hood. Nevertheless, my desire to avoid people has driven me to explore spots that I’ve heard about for years but never visited. I’ve used the Gaia GPS app more this summer than in the past five years. I visited a 25 foot waterfall, a five miles hike from my house, with a swimming hole and no official trail. A 15-minute drive away, a 3,000-vertical-foot, five-mile trail leads to two perfect alpine lakes that I’ve seen on maps for a decade and never visited. They’re now lodged in my heart for their perfect combination of isolation, easy access, and swimability. A friend and I hiked to a cedar of record-setting diameter. We followed a faint, cairned trail there,
