Green Mountain (6500 feet)
Distance: 8 miles roundtrip
Elevation gain: 3100 feet

A fall hike began late in the day, 2:00 P.M., when the harshness of the light begins to diminish and all the people are already hiking out. I like hiking this time of day, this time of year, when the meadows are yellow, orange, and red. I like how the colors interrupt the heavy blue, and how, at dusk, the sunset catches the cooler valley mists and the lavendar color is so thick you could touch it.

Switchback after switchback the blueberry confirmed its title as perfect fruit, its berries turgid, almost black, and the bushes absolutely livid, red like a wound. All the mountains in the vicinity suffered from this inflammation along altitudes of delicate alpine skin.

We climbed slowly from the forest, across the meadows, to an exposed spine of rock, upturned in the beginning to reveal an unrecordable age. This was a conveyor of time, slow like that, and we rest-stepped to save energy. (A snowless ascent!) The spine peaked at 6500 feet, at a narrow platform among but separated from Mt. Baker to the north and Glacier Peak to the south by a vast forested moat.

Standing up there was like being invited to a meeting of great ones.