An Afternoon in Heaven

Looking west from near the summit, source unknown

1,518-foot Mt. Pisgah got its non-Indian name 175-years ago when an early settler felt such joy upon seeing Oregon's Willamette Valley from its summit that he named it after the mountain from which Moses saw the Promised Land. The 2,363-acre park that encompasses Pisgah today offers oak prairies, fertile bottomlands, a dense conifer forest, 17-miles of trails, and a 209-acre arboretum, along with deer, rabbits, bobcats, coyotes, numerous hawks, and an occasional bear or mountain lion. We invariably see multiple large hawks and an occasional buzzard riding the mountain's air currents. On our last visit, we saw a colorful bird called a paraglider.

Pisgah was born 40-million years ago as a pool of subterranean lava that, over the millennia, hardened into basalt, diabase, and a smattering of snow white mesolites. The erosion which exposed the mountain continues to keep the depth of its soil shallower than the length of my hand. At the flat bottom of the mountain, the soil is deep and rich thanks to erosion from Pisgah itself and to deposits that were carried from the Cascade Mountains by the Coast Fork and the Middle Fork of the Willamette River. 

February through May are my favorite times to visit Pisgah because that's when leaves open, flowers bloom, and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of burbling streams bring beauty to the eye and music to the ear. I get a thrill from finding the very place where one of these streams breaks through to the surface.

In the photo, Peggy is relaxing on one of scores of benches that honor dead loved ones. A nearby bench commemorates the life of a 31-year-old murder victim, and another contains drawings done by the six-year-old girl to whom it pays tribute. I'll enclose a photo of one of the many dedications that touches me. The mountain in front of Peggy is 2,058-foot Spencer Butte, the highpoint of a 12-mile trail that will someday encircle Eugene.

After moving to Oregon in 1986, Peggy and I climbed Pisgah three times a week with a group of six to twelve friends. It was still a working ranch, and despite being afraid of the cows, Peggy called it my holy mountain, and everyone would sing The hills are alive with the sound of music...when we summited. We climbed year round in good weather and bad, although it meant descending in the dark of winter. Now, the rancher's cows are gone; the park closes at dusk; most of our friends have moved or died; and we almost never hike to the summit. 

We seldom choose to a destination, but when we do, it's often a mysterious labyrinth within an abandoned quarry. Because most visitors take primary trails, we usually have the quarry to ourselves, and we enjoy examining the offerings that were left since our last visit.

We recently spotted two coyotes. They were too fast for me to film, but I got a photograph of their scat and Peggy recorded their voices (turn your volume up and note the distant reply). Ten minutes later, we met a woman who excitedly reported seeing a bobcat. We later found bear scat.

A barn and a large Quonset-hut remain from ranching days, and we sometimes picnic in the latter while enjoying Fancy Cloud Friends' latest artwork: https://www.threads.net/@fancycloudfriends .

In January of 2024, Eugene was hit by an ice storm which closed the park for two long months. Its effects remain obvious in the form of downed limbs and broken trees--note the Douglas Fir Cone on the standing trunk of a dead maple. Soon after I moved to Oregon, a forestry student who has since died taught me to identify these cones by looking for the tails and hind-feet of scurrying mice. Each of these tiny cones can produce dozens of 330-foot-tall trees.

I'll close with an example of Mt. Pisgah's seasonal streams. While they might be less memorable than booming waterfalls hundreds of feet high, my life is far more enriched by these humbler members of the waterfall family. I am pleased to say that I have the good fortune of living but nine miles from the one place on earth that I most enjoy visiting.