There was no great epiphany when I reached the summit of Mount Chugach.  Disappointment and even mild depression set in as readily as the weariness from having been on the trail so long, and it lingered with the chilling moisture of the high mountain fog that gathered around me.  When one takes to the road or a trail through the forest, it is a conscious act, but there comes a point where the hours melt by, and you are somewhere in between from where you departed and where you intend to be, and the road is as far in every direction, that a zombie like state overtakes you, and the great affair, ones only purpose, is to keep moving.  Perhaps that is why when the trail ended near the timberline, I continued to follow the slope of the mountain upward to the summit with a numbing Zen like single mindedness that had long since become the norm.   

As the vertical climb transitioned into a slope and then leveled out, and I realized that I was approaching the very summit, there was a sorrow and mourning upon reaching this new found place.  There were no more paths to follow.  It was here the journey must end, on a rocky top of a distant mountain where I could push forward no longer. Circumstance compelled me to sit and take my rest; a condition that had become contrary to the very purpose of my very existence since the journey began, now I was forced to pause and remain in the psychological desert of have reached my objective on the high peak of Chugach mountain.  And truly, what does it profit a man to gain the world only to lose his soul?

As I gazed over Prince William Sound, I could look downward to see the bald eagles soaring between the mountain passes far below.  Sometimes to break up my despair, I triangulated their positions and calculated how many hundreds of feet of altitude they dropped as they made Kamikaze like dives at great speed, only to level off suddenly a thousand feet above the valley floor.  The bald eagles had long ago become part of the scenery to me….nothing more remarkable that encountering a sparrow or a squirrel in the park.   Even now, contemplating their deep power dives between the rocky cliffs, they were no larger to me than beetles one may commonly see in a stroll through the park.  Soon I was filled with jealousy for at least the eagles had a journey and thus a purpose to their lives.  That direction of my life that led me to the summit of Mount Chugach was rendered impotent on the top of the silent mountain.   

“You lose things on the road” an old man once said to me.  And there on the top of Mount Chugach, I was forced to sit and contemplate in my weariness the many things that had come to pass away since my journey began.   From the expanding waters of the sea that led into Prince William Sound, through the lush floors of the old growth forest, to the rocky peak of the mountain, to the desert on my soul, I recalled a discarded shard from a broken plate discovered a few days before at the abandoned Chugach mine. 

A few days earlier, we broke camp and took to the trail to find the mine lost somewhere in the forest.  The maps published by the US Forest Service only estimated the location and even the park rangers said that they never found it themselves.  We passed through a dense stand of trees that towered above us and the forest floor was covered with moss and undergrowth, teeming with life.   One could easily feel like an insect passing among the trees towering overhead.  Their height and girth showed they had been here for many generations.  A short distance away from most trees was a rotting stump, nearly twice as wide as most trees.  After a long journey in the forest, one realized these were the “Parent Stumps” that once grew larger, wider and grander than their offspring that surrounded us.  They cast their seeds, lived their lives, and gave birth to the next generation of forest which I now navigated my way through. 

A seasonal stream passed through the stand of trees, and we followed the rocky bed to the source of the stream.  Pieces of flat shale with quartz attached to it were plentiful in the stream bed.  This is an indicator that miners use to pan for gold.  We were correct in our assumption that the stream may have once been panned for gold, and would lead to the abandoned mine.  A canopied clearing in the stand of trees near the mouth of the stream was littered with debris.  Layer upon layer, that which was abandoned told a story of a life that was long forgotten, and could no longer even be located on official maps or memory. 

A short distance away, there was a ravine that was used as a garbage dump filled completely with massive boilers, steam engines, and exhaust pipes, all hand bolted together in the days before welding.  The rusty Pepto-Bismo color from the rust proofing still did not flake off, and some of the steam engines had only single expansion chambers, denoting they were built sometime before 1880.  The rusting caterpillar bulldozer nearby seemed to be the only evidence of 20^th century technology that still remained. 

In the center of the canopied clearing, a large bushy structure had grown around a small bulldozer.  Its size and ancient style of the treads was recognizable from WW I tank photographs one may find in a history book.  The tread reached over the very top of the bulldozer, no larger than a coffee table in the same manner as the first British tanks used almost a century ago, and copied by the Caterpillar Company, but not used since 1917.  The front blade of the bulldozer was ripped with bullet holes, and rusted cans were still lined up on the top edge of the blade, with several more lying about that had been successfully chinked with a 45 caliber slug. 

Strewn about the forest floor was a scattering of porcelain shards, many that showed detailed of pictured scenes depicted on the plates.  Obviously the “Chuck Wagon” area of the mine, the luxury of eating off a porcelain plate here in the wilderness seemed out of place.  On one of the shards, I noticed the words “Letchworth”.  This was my Grandmothers maiden name, and the name of an upscale porcelain factory started in Buffalo New York just after the civil war.  The discovery of the shard caused me to contemplate the landscape of generations that lead me to the mine.   That one of my ancestors fashioned the dinnerware now broken and strewn upon the ground of the vast Alaskan forest, a landscape steeped in the connections of moments lost to time like tears in rain. 

But here on the summit of Mount Chugach, there were no more moments of epiphany.  Here the trail was forced to stop and take a rest.  The changing landscape of the scenery, the changing landscape of the generations no longer allowed one to contemplate the specific geography for more detailed study and reflection and discovery.  Here on the summit, the journey and its purpose seemed to resolve itself with complete lack of inertia in the desert of the mind.  Nothing was left to explore in the unique geography and features of a greater outstretched world. 

All seemed to me as resolved and absolute as the fact that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, and never changes from this eternal monotony, giving sameness and rhythm and a heartbeat to the world from which we measure out our personal landscapes of time, pattern, and frequency in our lives. 

A gentle outstretched hand made a simple gesture across the vast wilderness, and canceled these physics with the faintest whisper. As I gazed across to the distant range on the other side of Prince William Sound, I saw the sun slowly rise above the distant peaks,  and then in a slow and graceful arc, it descended below the horizon from whence it came making only a circle in the sky.   The vast outstretched horizons shrouded the mountain top where I sat in solitude, gazing into the eyes of the midnight sun, as its golden rays melted away strung clues of cause and effect, of certainty and the sensation of the absolute. 

I sat on the top of Mount Chugach at a crossroads rather than a final destination.  A week later I went to the public library in Cordova to read the papers and magazines about what was happening in the lower 48.  The passions, concerns, and frustrations of the world and the issues of daily life which once absorbed me, seemed strangely irrelevant after having seen the midnight sun; and understanding that the world works in a way more wondrously and mysteriously than our best efforts to comprehend it.