By Balan Selvamuthukumaran ’27
Last semester, I read Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Dharma Bums” in which Kerouac and his friends, the Beats, wander all around Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, seeking the Dharma. In the book he is introduced to mountain-climbing by Gary Synder, a Berkeley poet and Zen Buddhist. Eventually, Kerouac decides to spend a summer of solitude as a fire lookout on Mt. Desolation in Washington, a peak overlooking the imposing and jagged Mt. Hozomeen, one of the coolest peaks of the North Cascades.
Inspired, my friend Liam (‘26) and I decided to go on our long quest through California and the Pacific Northwest, along with his sister. We had been wanting to go on a long road trip ever since he purchased his original van (though we were on van #2 by the time of our trip, a van we affectionately named Rosie). He drove from Tennessee to Claremont—where I was working on summer research—and from there we drove up to San Francisco, where a friend of ours—Adam, a recent Pomona graduate, was living. We stayed in San Francisco for a few days, hanging out with friends, until it was time to pick up his sister (flying in from Austin) and start our drive up to our first stop: the imposing Mt. Shasta.
Sadly, we made a gametime decision on actually climbing Shasta. We knew that we could not climb Shasta without mountaineering gear, and that the three of us were not mountaineers. As such we held off on that and climbed a nearby peak, Eddy, instead. It was a long, difficult climb (made worse by the fact that I led us off course for twelve miles on the wrong trail first), and we were glad we had not attempted Shasta when we finished with that. After some run-ins with potential cultists in the Shasta area, we drove north to Oregon, where we visited Bend (just for kicks) and eventually went up to the Wallowas to climb Oregon’s Mt. Matterhorn (not to be confused with the Swiss Matterhorn or even the Matterhorn at the edge of Yosemite, which Kerouac and Snyder actually climbed). We backpacked this hike, climbing Matterhorn over the course of two days, summiting a difficult peak after some tricky traversal at the top. Well, tricky for us, the “non-technical” climbers anyway. Matterhorn was incredibly rewarding, and we were glad to have climbed it.
Unfortunately, due to an injury towards the end of our Matterhorn climb we were unable to finish out the final leg of our trip—a backpacking trip through the North Cascades to climb the aforementioned Desolation Peak. Instead we simply hung out in Seattle, visited friends, and enjoyed a few peaceful days before the end of our trip, with just one week remaining until school started.