Kerouac's Peak Still Draws Pilgrims -- Beat Writer Immortalized His Lonely Summer As A Fire Lookout In The North Cascades

DESOLATION PEAK, Wash. - In the summer of 1956, a 34-year-old writer and wanderer emerged from a shack on top of this mountain high above Ross Lake after two days of wet, gray weather.

In his novel, "The Dharma Bums," Jack Kerouac described what he saw:

"Lo, in the morning I woke up and it was beautiful blue sunshine sky and I went out in my alpine yard and there it was, everything Japhy said it was, hundreds of miles of pure snow-covered rocks and virgin lakes and high timber, and below, instead of the world, I saw a sea of marshmallow clouds flat as a roof and extending miles and miles in every direction, creaming all the valleys, what they call low-level clouds, on my 6,600-foot pinnacle it was all far below me."

It's been 35 years since Kerouac, author of "On The Road," "Desolation Angels" and other tales of the Beat Generation, spent a summer working as a fire lookout for the U.S. Forest Service.

But today Kerouac's ghost still draws people to the top of this 6,085-foot peak and the spartan lookout station where he spent a lonely 63 days.

Jim Harris, a park ranger and unofficial historian with the U.S. Park Service, said trekkers are attracted by the views, but also by the Kerouac connection.

"I do know people have come in pilgrimages to go to Kerouac's place in the sky," he said.

People like Rusty Kuntze of Bay View and Oscar Graham of Samish Island, who spent three days in the lookout in July, reading Kerouac and enjoying the spectacular vistas of Ross Lake and Jack and Hozomeen mountains.

For Kuntze, an attorney for the Swinomish Indian Tribe, the hike was something he had wanted to do for about 20 years. He first read Kerouac and learned of his Northwest connection when he was a sophomore at Columbia University in New York, Kerouac's alma mater.

After moving to Skagit County in the early 1980s, Kuntze realized he had settled in the same place Kerouac and Gary Snyder, another Beat Generation writer and Forest Service lookout, had formed some of their philosophy.

Graham, a Skagit County planner making his second pilgrimage, said he was drawn to Desolation because of its importance to Kerouac's writing. "You look at `The Dharma Bums' or `Desolation Angels,' and the peak is a metaphor for so much that he wrote," he said.

"I had a tremendous sensation of its dreamlikeness which never left me all that summer and in fact grew and grew, especially when I stood on my head to circulate my blood, right on top of the mountain, using a burlap bag for a head mat, and then the mountains looked like little bubbles hanging in the void upsidedown."

- "The Dharma Bums"

Today, only a handful of fire lookouts remain in the North Cascades, said the Park Service's Harris. "By the '50s, they were doing daily reconnaissance flights during the fire weather over the whole North Cascades," he said.

But even these days, Desolation Peak and other lookouts are manned during times of high fire danger, he said. The Park Service intends to maintain as historic sites the lookouts at Desolation Peak, Copper Ridge and Sourdough Mountain, the original North Cascades lookout, he said.

Desolation Peak is not too popular with summer hikers because it requires either a costly boat trip or a long hike up Ross Lake to the trailhead, Harris said.

The trail makes an unforgiving ascent for 4 1/2 miles, with dozens of switchbacks through cool forests and sun-baked meadows dotted with wildflowers. There are inspiring views of Ross Lake (the Skagit River before it was dammed) and the monolithic, glacier-gripped Jack Mountain.

From Desolation Camp, it is a 45-minute hike up along Starvation Ridge, the final hump leading to Kerouac's lookout hut. The only other structure is a rickety outhouse with no door and a tremendous view to the east.

Kerouac spent 63 days on Desolation Peak and wrote about the experience in the end of "The Dharma Bums" and the beginning of "Desolation Angels."

In "Kerouac: A Biography," Ann Charters writes:

"His eight weeks on Desolation Peak were just like the eight weeks of all the fire-watchers who spent their summers in the Cascades. It was monotonous, uneventful and boring. By the end of it what he felt most intensely was his own loneliness."

"I want to come down RIGHT AWAY because the smell of onions on my hand as I bring blueberries to my lips on the mountainside suddenly reminds me of the smell of hamburgers and raw onions and coffee and dishwater in lunchcarts of the World to which I want to return to at once, sitting at a stool with a hamburger, lighting a butt with coffee, let there be rain on redbrick walls and I got a place to go and poems to write about hearts not just rocks - Desolation Adventure finds me finding at the bottom of myself abysmal nothingness worst than no illusion even - my mind's in rags -"

- "Desolation Angels"