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Searching for the 'who' of the Scotchman Peaks

by AMY RAE PEARSON Contributing Writer
| July 13, 2021 1:00 AM

I pull over at the intersection of Lightning and Mosquito Creek Roads to check my map. Sure enough, I am en route to find the trailhead to a noted peak in the Idaho Cabinets, and namesake for 88,000 acres of proposed Wilderness: Scotchman, 7,009 feet.

I’d asked the locals about it. Someone had never been. Someone said it would take at least eight hours. Someone said I had to go.

My jeep is hugging the edges of FR2294A and I give thanks that Dad insisted I purchase an all-terrain vehicle; these are forest roads meant for hardy people who don’t mind going slow or getting lost sometimes.

I slow down, appreciate the sense of the unknown. It feels wild and that’s somehow comforting.

*

The first mile is steep with switchbacks, and I wonder if I might have had one less glass of wine the night before. I am encased by tall pines. I note the ghost-like silhouettes of bear grass coming to terms with the end of season.

It’s a hot day in late August. I’m sweating hard and focused on my boots moving up the trail.

“Have you been up here before?” A woman’s voice breaks me from my reverie.

“No,” I say.

“Well,” she says, “you’re in for a treat. Pretty soon you’ll get some views.”

“Thanks,” I say, not wholly convinced in my heart that Idaho will have the views I’m looking for.

•••

I come around a long switchback and see people gathered ahead. I wonder what the commotion is and then start to see patches of blue water to the south and a massive expanse of sky, Lake Pend Oreille.

My heartbeat quickens with a surge of adrenaline and I hike without stopping to what looks like a summit.

“Is this the top?” I ask a couple settled in for lunch on a massive piece of greenish-gray rock.

“You’ve got about half a mile to go,” they say.

I look up to where they’re pointing. It looks like a climb, and I’m in climbing mode.

•••

“Scotchman, Scotchman,” I hum under my breath as I heave my body up argillite to quartz, “who are you?”

The ruins of an old fire lookout sit on a crest. I scurry up to the left of it. Then, nothing.

I have reached a plateau of silence. My body eludes me. Vastness down the drainages. Vastness across the mountains stretching miles and miles across the Panhandle into Montana. It’s astonishing.

“Wilderness,” I whisper.

I sit down to try to take in the enormity of the landscape. I feel the sun on my back. A sense of wonder compels me to trace the ridgelines with my finger.

You could spend your life learning this country.

•••

I take my time going down. I give thanks to the mountain for being here. I give thanks for natural beauty and the sense of awe it inspires. I give thanks that wilderness is wild, and we can go there and remember who we are.

Amy Rae Pearson is a writer, teacher, and wilderness advocate. She grew up on a farm in northcentral Montana and earned a doctoral degree in organizational communication from Arizona State University. After finishing her formal education, she hit the road to Asia for a few years, but found herself missing the mountains of Montana. Pearson has worked for the Park Service, Forest Service, as a professor, and now as the Northwest Montana outreach coordinator for Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness.