Hollyburn Peak

I am creating a library of live plants; divided and subdivided into shrubs, herbs, trees, and mosses, and then into the more detailed Liliaceae, Rosaceae, Asteraceae, Ericaceae, Cyperaceae, among many others. I go on collector walks in the forest; scissors and a specimen box keep the hiking slow and concentrated, interrupted excitement over a new discovery, a puzzling species, or a particularly bright-flowering lily or fireweed.
Yesterday we walked up Cypress mountain to Hollyburn peak. Everything had been soaked by our first autumn rainfall the day before and we were wading in dark black mud pouring down the mountain and forming in root-framed pools. Little mushrooms, browns or whites, were emerging through the thick and soaked moss. We could see our breath in the morning shadows and squinted into the sun eclipsed by the hemlock, cedar, alder. Small alpine wild blueberry shrubs kept us walking stooped and slow, like black bears, purple stains on our lips and fingertips. These are some of the plants we gathered; some of the summits we saw:

western hemlock; Tsuga heterophylla

deer fern; Blechnum spicant

clubmoss; Lycopodium ssp.

oval-leafed blueberry; Vaccinium ovalifolium

yellow pond-lily or spatterdock; Nuphar polysepalum

Hollyburn peak

chief mountain

to be lost in the woods is to remember what hearing sounds like; is to forget fallen trees scraping the skin on your legs and for your feet to become paws hands grasping the ground more light and quick; is to have your toes think.
scree slopes, boulders and caves, fossils in the heat, we climbed fingers and feet and sweat through rock piles we could recognize from shed fallen away skin of mountain. the height the view i am not a bird and i quake and i faced a real possibility of gravity while the wind teased our balance.
we slide down the mountain; graceless skiing the scree. the rock turns to moss, to juniper bushes, to stream beds, the trees grow taller, the sun sets behind the next hill, and we drink from a spring, filling our waterbottles from the mountainside. we walk closer together.
cool nights looming trees; a path we cannot find, a bear we cannot see, in the the forest night, the moon is obscured, the pebbled underbrush of the ground has to imagine becoming a bed.
to be lost in the woods is to watch the sunrise, our creaking bodies pushing forwards our feet our feet our feet our feet to be bathed to be found to find our way out to know the mountain.