What’s the North Cascades equivalent of a deserted island? Desolation Peak, 16 miles by boat from the nearest road and 6,102 feet tall, topped with a simple one-room cabin. Every summer, a single worker trudges up the remote trail, hunkers down in the 81-year-old hut, and peers in all directions for signs of forest fire.
And when Beat poets manned that sky-high deserted island and others like it, they gave the North Cascades a new claim to fame—an artistic one.
Gary Snyder was the first poet to get a job as a fire lookout, manning the now-gone station atop Crater Mountain in 1952 while writing
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