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I did my first overnight backpacking trip of the year on Thursday/Friday of this week…and ended up camping in the first rain in weeks. Go figure…
If you search WTA.org for Jade Lake you won’t find a hike by that name. To reach Jade Lake you’ll hike the East Fork Foss – Necklace Valley trail. Jade Lake marks the entrance into the Necklace Valley and from this point there are a string of alpine lakes; Al Lake, Emerald Lake, Cloudy Lake and various other named and unnamed lakes. Once you’re in the area you can easily spend a couple of days exploring and I intend to do so later in the summer.
My point in doing this hike though was just to do a quick overnight hike, hopefully spending the night at Jade Lake. To get to Jade Lake you’ll start out on a nice meandering trail heading up a lower valley. At almost exactly the one mile mark you cross a raging little creek on a picturesque bridge and I think a lot of people turn around at this point, and that does make a nice little two mile hike. If you continue on though the trail doesn’t get much steeper and eventually you’ll parallel the East Fork of the Foss River and get multiple views of the river as you continue on. It’s a nice trail with several campsites along the way. Everything is going great until you reach the five mile mark. At this point you’ve only gone up about 600 feet in elevation so although 10 miles is a long day hike for a lot of people, it’s really pretty achievable for someone in decent condition.
At the five mile mark you cross the East Fork of the Foss River and things change considerably. First, just getting across the river feels like you’re leaving civilization. There are a couple of logs to cross and both feel like an afterthought in terms of being bridges.
From there you hike straight up through a boulder field and for the next three miles up to Jade Lake you’re climbing almost a thousand feet per mile and it never lets up. I always think I’m in decent shape until I do one of these hikes and find myself humbled at how much I’m huffing and puffing going up the mountain.
I finally reached Jade Lake, turned around and hiked back down the mountain. That was not the plan. I intended to spend the night at the lake but that’s not how it worked out. It’s a beautiful little lake but it appears the main campsites are on the far end of the lake and there was still a patch of snow to cross to get around the lake. It’s not much and won’t be there for long but there was still enough snow to make for a potential dip in the lake if you slip going across it, which I wasn’t interested in.
There was one possible campsite at the lake outlet but you would need a really narrow tent to comfortably stay there. I love my tent but with a huge vestibule on each side, narrow, it is not.
If it were getting dark or in an emergency I’m sure I could have made it work but I had plenty of daylight so I hiked back down, crossed the river again and made camp along the river.
Shortly after I got my tent set up it started sprinkling and rained off and on all night and then all the way back to the truck in the morning. All in all I ended up doing just over 16 miles and 4,100 feet of elevation over the two days.
Jade Lake is a beautiful little lake and the Necklace Valley beyond the lake is supposed to be otherworldly so I can’t wait to explore deeper in the region once the snow melts out a bit more.
To reach the trailhead, take Highway 2 a couple of miles past the town of Skykomish and turn right on Foss River Road NE. The road turns into NF-68 and you stay on the main road until reaching the trailhead on your left. There’s a decent sized parking lot but on a summer weekend it fills quickly.
