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The North Fork Skykomish Trailhead is actually the trailhead for three trails, West Cady Ridge heads south, the North Fork Skykomish trail heads east and the Quartz Creek trail goes north. It’s a great trailhead because you can connect all of these trails with other trails and create loops of anywhere from two days on up to pretty much as far as you want to go. Theoretically you could probably hike six or seven days, come back to the trailhead and never have walked the same trail twice.
Last winter the road to the trailhead was washed out just prior to the Lake Blanca trailhead. You could park at the washout and hike up the road to the trailheads. Lake Blanca wasn’t a problem because the washout was only a half mile from the trailhead but the North Fork trailhead was a different story. The washout was at least four miles from the trailhead and, especially if you’re just doing a day hike, most people aren’t going to walk 8 miles round trip just to get to the trailhead and back. The road was finally cleared within the past couple of weeks, which was great news.
With that in mind I did a three day loop.
The first day was West Cady Ridge to the PCT, with a little detour to the top of Benchmark Mountain. I last hiked this particular trail three or four years ago but on that particular day it was so foggy you couldn’t see anything. This time it had been raining the night before but was clearing when I started and turned into a nice day by the time I was up high enough to have views. The only issue was that, because of the road closure, very few people have hiked these trails this year and no maintenance has been done. The trail was actually clear with no blow-downs or other obstacles but the huckleberries (blueberries?) and other vegetation are growing into the trail. It’s not a big deal when it’s dry but these plants hold water on their leaves for a long time once they’re wet and try as I might to stay dry I was soaked from the waist down within a couple of miles and I stayed wet all day.
Benchmark Mountain really is more of a butte than it is a mountain but, at almost 5,800 feet in elevation, it’s up high enough relative to the surrounding hills to have pretty good views.
Continuing on I intersected with the PCT and camped for the night at Pass Creek, which has multiple nice campsites. I didn’t see a single person all day long until after I had gotten my camp set up. Being on the PCT I figured I would have company for the night from PCT hikers heading north. Sure enough, hikers started showing up around 4pm and I think the last person to cram into the space arrived around 10:30pm. At this point in the year any PCT hikers left on the trail are going northbound, pushing as hard as they can to reach the Canadian border before the snow starts, so most of them are doing 25+ miles daily. By now they’ve been hiking for months and are in great shape so doing that many miles every day is no big deal. Southbound hikers intent on heading to Mexico passed here six weeks ago and I didn’t meet anyone going south. Anyway, there were probably a dozen hikers who spent the night in the same area. I was the first person there in the afternoon and the last person to leave the next morning. It’s nice to not have an agenda pushing me…
The next day I hiked north up the PCT to Dishpan Gap. My plan was to leave the PCT there and head over to Little Blue Lake via the Bald Eagle Trail for night two. It’s a good thing because as it turned out the PCT continuing northbound was closed at Dishpan Gap due to a fire. The only fire I know of in the area is the Chocolate Creek fire and it’s not remotely close to the trail but I think the Forest Service closed the trail due to smoke. The re-route is to go from Dishpan Gap and take the Pilot Ridge trail down to the North Fork of the Sauk River and then take the North Fork Sauk trail back up to White Pass. It’s only around an additional twelve miles but it’s not an easy hike. You’re trading a nice rolling section of the PCT for a brutal descent to the river and then climb back up the other side. The difference between the two routes is almost 5,500 feet of descent and then the same amount back up. Every PCT hiker I talked to was planning to ignore the closure and just hike through the smoke as fast as they could. Frankly, I would probably have done the same thing if I were headed north.
As it was the closure didn’t affect my plans at all and I spent a nice peaceful night at Little Blue Lake without seeing another person. The next morning I headed on down the Bald Eagle Trail to Curry Gap and the intersection with the Quartz Creek trail and from there back to my truck. Evidently Friday was the first day of buck hunting season and I started seeing hunters coming up the trail by mid-morning. I met eight or nine parties heading up to hunt and outside of one lone day-hiker in the three days on trail I only saw PCT hikers or the hunters. Other than the day hiker I was the only person on the trail who was just out to enjoy nature and didn’t have some sort of agenda.
It was a very nice three days with a little over 34 miles and over 8,400 feet of elevation gain completed. Additional pictures can be found here. It’s evident that fall is here and colors are changing. It’s a beautiful time of year to be out.
[…] Last week I did a three day loop that took me on the West Cady Ridge trail before intersecting the PCT to the Bald Eagle Trail and back to the trailhead via the Quartz Creek trail. That loop was 34 miles. You can read about it here. […]