Emily Articulated: Scotchmans flyover

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

I have always believed there is something magical on the knife’s edge between fear and fun, anxiety and elation. Moments spent suspended between the safety of what we know and the uncertainty of what we cannot are the moments in which I feel most alive — wherein I have the highest likelihood of learning and growth. 

It’s the feeling of traveling to a new country, staring at a public transit map in a foreign language, but knowing lines and dots are universal. It’s the feeling of starting a climbing route, knowing my feet will soon be too high on the rock to safely hit the bottom, but also that I’m capable of getting them to the top. It’s the feeling of staring up at a mountain peak, knowing I have everything within myself to reach it if only I choose to begin. And it was the feeling I got when I was invited to get in a little plane and fly over the wild and rugged mountains comprising the area I’m so lucky to call my backyard.

I first visited the site of this flyover — the proposed Scotchman’s Peak Wilderness area — in my inaugural spring-turning-summer in North Idaho nearly seven years ago. I read that the area’s namesake, Scotchman’s Peak, was a “bucket list” hike, reaching some of the highest elevation profiles around, with unparalleled views of the Cabinet Mountains and Lake Pend Oreille. I decided I’d attempt it as soon as the snow melted off the low country around me.

Emily Erickson.

On the morning of the hike, I left Sandpoint, driving out on Highway 200 with a gently rising sun illuminating the surface of the lake. I was in such a stage of newness to North Idaho that the curving bridge outside of Hope above the purple-and-gold glassy water still made my heart flutter into my stomach. Continuing the winding drive toward my destination, paved roads gave way to dirt, and eventually to the rock and hole-pocked access that ended at the trailhead. I’d arrived.

I swung on my pack, stuffed with all the essentials for a shoulder-season hike, and began to climb. Thick trees lined the steadily inclining trail, and I watched the camelback hump of the adjacent hill before me shrink into a pine-speckled mound below. I shouted into the quietness between heavy breaths, alerting wildlife to my presence, while double and triple checking that my bear spray was at hand. I was walking the edge between fear and fun, between being prepared and being alone in the wilderness, all the way until the dirt and rock of the trail opened up into the snow and scree of the mountain’s top. 

Wind whipped my smiling, triumphant face as I picked my way a careful step at a time to the peak’s highest point, from which I basked in the panoramic views of the stunningly rugged place to which I’d just moved.

Since that first ascent, I’ve visited Scotchman’s Peak and its surrounding mountains more times than I can count — in every season and in various modes of traverse. I’ve run from bottom to top and from peak to peak, I’ve camped and hiked and bushwhacked, and learned its “ins and outs” to the point of near-comfortable familiarity.

But, from the inside of a six-seater plane on a crisp October morning nearly seven years after my first visit, all of that familiarity and comfort was sharpened into clarity and awareness. From my seat in the sky, I watched the wind paint rippling patterns on Lake Pend Oreille and witnessed the curves of the rivers and creeks and the way they perfectly matched the valleys they helped carve. I traced the sharp spines of the surrounding mountains, piecing together the collection of my experiences with each individual peak into a cohesive map — every range and valley clicking into context with one another in my mind. And I was reconnected to the part of myself that saw this area for the first time; reintroduced to that cocktail of giddiness and humility, of wonder and wildness that comes from big experiences in beautiful places.

Whether from a plane in the sky or the dirt of a path, it’s being in places like the proposed Scotchman’s Peak Wilderness Area that alerts us to our limitations, while simultaneously inviting us to push them. They’re places of solitude, but also of collectiveness with the animals and land, and the people dedicated to stewarding it all. And they’re the kind of places for which I have boundless, wild gratitude, and a deep-seated knowing that they can never be replaced. 

So, as the world around us continues to shift, and as our population sprawls farther out into the edges of solitude, it’s in these places that we can return to the unchanged; rediscover the parts of ourselves that need to be among the untamed — if only we decide to protect them.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.