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The North Fork Skykomish Trailhead is great because it’s actually the trailhead for three separate trails, all of which can be put together to make loops of different lengths.
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.
This week I decided to head out from the same trailhead but try to do as different a loop as possible. In the end despite leaving and returning to the same trailhead, other than a couple mile stretch of the PCT, I spent no time on the same trails as the previous week.
A picture is worth some words so here’s a map that shows the routes better than I can explain them. Blue is last week, red this week’s route. The trailhead is on the far left side of the map.
In hiker-speak you would call this week’s trail a “lollipop loop”. That’s because you start on a trail, in this case the North Fork Skykomish Trail, and you hike a section that you end up coming back on to complete the loop. For this hike I continued to Dishpan Gap, did Cady Ridge and Cady Creek and then continued on to Pass Creek (not labeled on the map but you can see it). Pass Creek intersects the North Fork Skykomish Trail about three miles from the trailhead and then you backtrack the three miles on the same trail you started on. If you use your imagination you can see why it’s called a lollipop loop.
My intention was to spend two nights out this week but I got to where I was planning to spend the night at 2pm and knew that I had less than seven miles left to just finish the trail out so I decided to put in the big day and go home. This isn’t unusual for me. It’s hard for me to stop and set up camp early in the afternoon, especially if I know I have plenty of time to just finish the route and head home. At this point in the year, other than my heel still bothering me, I’m in good enough shape that twenty miles days aren’t really a big deal and it’s hard to stop at two in the afternoon and hang out when you know you could easily hike another three or four hours.
I’ve done all these trails multiple times before with the exception of the Cady Ridge and Cady Creek Trails. They were both new. I was pretty sure what to expect though. If you look all the way at the lower right corner of the map you can see where the ridge and creek trails meet and that there’s another trail that goes to the east. That goes to the Little Wenatchee trailhead and is where the vast majority of hikers for both trails would come from. Unfortunately there was a forest fire along the road last year and the road to the trailhead has been closed ever since. That means very few people have hiked these trails this year and it shows.
The Cady Ridge Trail is in decent shape and that makes sense. The ridge has lots of wide open areas with sparse tree cover and no water. There really isn’t much to go wrong with the trail and in six miles there were maybe a couple of downed trees to step over and that was about it. This is a nice trail with lots of great views up on the ridge. I liked that the trail goes back and forth from the east side of the ridge to the west side so you’re continually getting views of both directions. The last couple of miles drop down in elevation pretty quickly so if you’re going the opposite direction coming up the ridge would be a chore but that’s standard for ridge trails.
The Cady Creek Trail is a completely different animal. The trail is about five miles from where it starts to where it ends when it intersects the PCT and the vast majority of it is almost impassable at this point. The trail meanders up a valley but you rarely see or even hear the creek. There is plenty of water though. It clearly has had no maintenance in a couple of years and that’s a problem because the valley is oozing water everywhere, with an accompanying growth of Devil’s Club and other stinging nettle-type plants as well as other vegetation, some of which was over my head. There are large portions of the trail that are almost completely obscured by growth and more than once I was just guessing where the trail was. If that wasn’t enough there were trees on the ground over the trail in all directions and some were quite large. I’ve worn shorts on all my hikes this summer and most of the time that works for me but, when you’re effectively bushwhacking for miles on end, long pants would be nice. By the time I finally reached the friendly super-highway that is the PCT my legs were a bloody mess. It’s all good fun but I wouldn’t send my worst enemy down that trail until some serious maintenance has taken place.
In the end I completed almost 30 miles with 6,000 feet of elevation gain on this trip. Although the creek trail was rough, I can say I’ve done it now! I didn’t take a lot of photos since most of the views are similar to previous hikes in the area but it’s a beautiful time of year so I couldn’t resist taking a few. You can find them here.
As a side note, the weather is changing quickly and maybe more importantly the days are getting short and the nights long. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was my last overnight hike of the year. I did hit a couple of milestones on this hike though, with 600 hiking miles and 20 nights spent on trail so far this year.
