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The vast majority of my hiking the past few years has been in the Highway 2/Stevens Pass corridor and/or off the Mountain Loop Highway. These are indisputably wonderful areas for hiking and backpacking but I’ve been wanting to branch out and explore other areas. Thus my trips to the Olympics and the (attempted) far North Cascades this summer. Next year I plan to make it to other areas such as the Wallowa mountain range in northeastern Oregon, the Goat Rocks Wilderness south of Mt Rainier and Central Oregon around the Three Sisters.
Theoretically the I-90 corridor to Snoqualmie Pass and beyond should contain similar hikes to the Stevens Pass side since the Alpine Lakes Wilderness lies between the two passes. I’ve found the reality is that many of the day hikes that start in close proximity to I-90 are marred by the freeway noise. You climb and climb but can still hear the freeway from miles away.
Once you get over the pass though things take a turn for the better. The trailheads are no longer feet off the freeway and you’re well into the wilderness from the start.
All that said to say that I thought I would try to find a quick loop to hike with my friend Brandon. We decided we would start at the Salmon La Sac trailhead, hike to Waptus Lake, up and over Waptus Pass to Pete Lake and back to the trailhead via the Pete Lake Trail. In addition to Waptus and Pete Lakes we also passed by Cooper Lake. Total mileage was almost exactly 25 miles with only 4,000 feet of elevation gain, with the vast majority of that gain achieved in a four mile stretch up and over Waptus Pass, which stands between Waptus and Pete Lakes.
Salmon La Sac is about 10 miles due north of Cle Elum and Roslyn and you pass by the huge master-planned development of Suncadia to get there. I’d heard of Roslyn from its use in TV shows but really never knew where it was located. I was surprised to find it was quite a bit bigger than I thought it would be but it very much had a small ghost town kind of feel. All the buildings looked like they hadn’t been updated in 75 years and, as we were passing through town around 8am, I have no idea how many of the businesses are actually functional. Still, it’s a cute town that might be fun to spend an afternoon walking around in.
What we found, frankly, was that the trail was a bit of a letdown. You’re technically on the east side of the Cascades at this point, which is a different climate than the west side, and I did find that refreshing. The climate is quite a bit more arid and you have pine trees and other vegetation that we don’t often have on the west side of the Cascades. It’s very much like Central Oregon. Other than the pass though the trail is pretty flat so you don’t have much in the way of views and it’s also a trail which allows horses so most of the trail was dusty and littered with horse manure.
The loop is kind of in a triangle shape, with either of the lakes being about 9 miles from the trailhead and five miles from each other. Most of the camps were located at the lakes so we either had 9 miles the first day and 15 or 16 miles the second day, or long mileage the first day and shorter the second. We reached Waptus Lake around 1pm so decided to push on up and over the pass and spend the night at Pete Lake, making the second day a relatively short and easy 9 miles, most of which was downhill.
On the weekends this is a popular area due to the easy trails and proximity to large lakes but in the middle of the week we pretty much had the place to ourselves. We did see a campsite at Waptus Lake where someone had cases of beer, awnings set up, folding tables and chairs, and other assorted items I would associate more with car camping. I can only assume they hired someone with horses to carry everything up because even with an easy trail I can’t imagine carrying everything they had nine or ten miles to camp.
No such partying going on at Pete Lake though. In the area where we stayed there was a father and son and there was another similar father/son pair on the far side of the lake. That was it as far as people went though. It was peaceful and quiet. That was until around midnight.
Last week Jeremy and I had stayed at a campsite where many of the trees were dead or dying and we had a conversation about dead trees and how we probably wouldn’t feel safe in that area if there was to be a major windstorm. I always try to look for dead trees and not camp under them or any closer than I absolutely have to. This particular area wasn’t as bad as the camp the week prior but there were still some dead trees (called snags) and Brandon and I had a similar conversation about the state of the forest, trees not looking healthy, and how there could be trouble in windy weather. While we were setting up camp there was a bit of wind but by the time we were done with dinner the wind had died down and by the time we turned in for the night the air was dead calm.
Almost exactly at midnight we were awakened by the sound of crashing all around us. It sounded like the forest was collapsing. I was instantly wide awake. In the dark and in my tent it was impossible to know where the noise was coming from exactly but it was clear something large was coming down and it was very close. When the commotion stopped I found I had instinctively moved to the foot of my tent and was crouched as low as I could with my arms over my head. I don’t remember moving at all.
The noise stopped and I got out of my tent to see what had happened. Brandon was wide awake and scrambling out of his tent as well.
What we found is that a snag about thirty feet from our tents had decided to just break in half. The tree was still standing about thirty feet tall but the top half of the tree had snapped off and fallen. The top part of the tree had landed about ten feet from our tents and basically exploded when it hit the ground with a couple of good size tree pieces, probably five or six inches in diameter and a couple of feet long, bouncing and landing on Brandon’s tent. Fortunately these pieces didn’t land on the sleeping area but they were holding down the vestibule of his tent. In the morning I found that something must have hit my tent as well because I found an area where the fabric was abraded and I had a tiny puncture hole in my tent. Needless to say it took a bit to get back to sleep.
The next morning we hiked back to the trailhead. As you can see from the pictures there was absolutely no wind, which made for some cool pictures of the lakes.
We stopped in Cle Elum on the way home and had a delicious lunch at Smokey’s BBQ. Smokey’s is located outside of the main town on a rail trail with the restaurant being inside of an old railroad station. There’s also a museum of some kind there but we just enjoyed the BBQ. Fantastic BBQ!
You can find more pictures here.
