Wall of Thorns

Journal 2005 11 13
Wall of Thorns

The men move less than a thousand yards back upriver to a small brook they didn’t see earlier and find slightly better refuge. They sink the canoes with rocks to protect them from being battered by the crashing waves on the shore. Gear is moved about half a mile upstream and fires are built to dry blankets and clothing bringing some level of comfort as recorded by Captain Clark.

Clark sets out to get above the banks of the river for a better view of this geography. He doesn’t record it, but his motivation had to lie in finding a better way to the ocean and a better camp should that way prove difficult.

“I walked up the Brook & assended the first Spur of the mountain with much fatigue, the distance about 3 miles, through an intolerable thickets of Small pine, a groth much resembling arrow wood on the Stem of which there is thorns; this groth about 12 or 15 feet high inter lockd into each other and Scattered over the high fern & fallen timber, added to this the hills were So Steep that I was compelled to draw my Self up by the assistance of those bushes—    The Timber on those hills are of the pine Species large and tall maney of them more than 200 feet high & from 8 to 10 feet through at the Stump”

Laying aside momentarily the usual treatment of this material, don’t you just feel better knowing that three miles in this jungle of the Great Northwest tired out this mighty traveler? This is the same man who covered marathon-like distances like we might walk to the store. When you travel “off trail” along most of the Pacific Coast at some point, like William Clark, you will be pulling yourself up by the assistance of bushes and trees. I did crossing a steep clearcut south of Glacier Peak late this summer and have many times along the rivers and streams in the woods of Washington.

Back two hundred years and we find that the temperate climate, abundant water and soil have created a garden where the trees have grown two hundred feet high and are ten feet across at the bottom. Big and tall!

Colter, Shannon and Willard are dispatched to try and find a better camp downriver. They don’t return this evening. (Colter is kind of a tough guy and becomes one of the first “mountain men” of the Rockies. In fact, he doesn’t return to St. Louis with the Corps as he is allowed an early discharge in order to head back into the mountains next fall as the mission comes to completion.) Shannon and Willard are the two youngest members of the expedition. Their youth must have been tempered with experience at this point. That youth either put them at the bottom of the chain of command or gave them an advantage in strength and endurance fitting them for this mission.

What is one my mind today is the twelve to fifteen foot wall of arrow wood that faces William Clark as he ascends the valley created by the brook. I assume the arrow wood with thorns is some form of our common blackberry bushes that we have all come to “know and love.”

I would get a brush axe, chainsaw, gas trimmer with circular saw blade, machete, pruning shears or preferably a bulldozer to clear the way through that tangle. My North Face synthetic long johns have all kinds of “pulls” in the fabric from these bushes as I encountered them south of Mt. Rainier in pursuit of the elusive wapati two years ago. Can’t imagine cutting up my only buckskin shirt in the pursuit.

How many times before have I said it? These guys are tough!

What obstacles stand in the way of our view today? Are you pushing to finish something good? Do you need to climb the mountain for a better look at the problem? What wall stands between you and that better view? We can take inspiration from William Clark as he uses all resources at his command to “get on top of it” in his quest for the finish line.

Send out scouts. Climb the mountain. Push through the wall of thorns. Proceed on.