Through High Still Air: A Season at Sourdough Mountain

Poetry. Poet Tim McNulty served as lookout in Washington's North Cascades during the fire season of 2003. These poems and journal entries evoke the wild beauty and solitude he experienced during his time among the peaks. Sample Poem: Night, Sourdough Mountain Lookout A late-summer sun threads the needles of McMillan Spires and disappears in a reef of coral cloud. Winds roil the mountain trees, batter the shutter props. I light a candle with the coming dark. Its reflection in the window glass flickers over mountains and shadowed valleys seventeen miles north to Canada. Not another light. The lookout is a dim star anchored to a rib of the planet like a skiff to a shoal in a wheeling sea of stars. Night sky at full flood. Wildly awake.