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If last week’s hike was about alpine lakes, this week’s hike was all about high ridgelines and mountain views. I spent four days, three nights, hiking a wonderful loop in the North Cascades. This could easily be done in three days, with campsites perfectly positioned to have each day be ~10 miles, but I spent two nights at White Pass so I could spend a day wandering around with no specific destination.
The first challenge was getting to the trailhead. The trailhead is six or seven miles down a forest service road (FS49), but the forest service road is located off the optimistically named Mountain Loop Highway. You can indeed drive the road as a huge loop for a nice day drive but 15-20 miles of the highway is no highway, it’s a gravel road in various states of disrepair. The fastest way for me to get to FS49 was to go through Granite Falls and take the road eastbound but until late last week a section of the road from Barlow Pass to Bedal Creek was still closed due to downed trees. The trailhead is just past Bedal Creek so with that section closed the only way to get to the trailhead would be to go through Arlington to Darrington and come in from the north. Not a problem, just a much longer drive for me.
Luckily they got the trees cleared and changed the road status to open Thursday or Friday of last week. I called the ranger station first thing Monday before leaving and confirmed this. All was good until about a mile before the intersection with FS49 when I encountered a small four inch sapling that looked like it had just blown over during the previous night. It had fallen off a slope and across the road at an angle. I couldn’t drive around it and it was too big to just push through. I thought maybe it was completely detached from the roots but I couldn’t swing it out of the way by hand. It was either get by it somehow or turn around and drive 50-60 miles around and come in the other way, which I did not want to do. I have accumulated a number of emergency items in my truck over the years but one simple item I don’t have is a saw. I will be rectifying this oversight! A simple hand saw would have made this a five minute job. As it was I had nothing to cut the tree with but I did have a recovery strap, a thick flat braided rope used to tow a vehicle. I put one end of this around my trailer hitch and the other around the tree and tried to pull it off the road. Apparently there were even more roots still attached than I thought because it wouldn’t come out of the ground. I just sat there and spun all four wheels on the truck. I did manage to pull it to an angle a little more off the road though and broke off a bunch of the limbs. Eventually I was able to break the top ten feet or so off the tree and all the work gave me just enough room to squeeze by with inches to spare on either side, the downed sapling on one side, a huge cut log on the other. So, thirty minutes out of my day and a note to buy a hand saw. All this while it rained of course…
The trailhead was pretty full for a Monday morning. White Pass is a popular jumping off point for climbers summiting Glacier Peak so most of the cars were people going up there (technically up the North Fork Sauk Trail). When I arrived at the trailhead there was a group of nine or ten people who were just finishing the hike and taking group photos and whatnot. It was sprinkling so I put my rain gear on but it stopped within twenty minutes or so and I didn’t get rained on the rest of the hike.
The first six miles of the North Fork Sauk Trail is an easy hike along the river through a beautiful old growth forest. At the six mile mark everything changes though and you turn and go straight up the hill, climbing ~2,700 feet in the next couple miles. Once you’ve accomplished that though you’ve largely completed the major elevation gain and the rest is easy going. At this point you’re traversing huge alpine slopes and marmots are everywhere! In the next couple of days I saw countless marmots. Cutest rodents of all time.
After another 1 1/2 miles you intersect the PCT and take the PCT south for another 1/2 mile to White Pass. White Pass has multiple nice campsites and a reliable water source. There were probably 15-20 people camping in the area the first night. You have people like me doing the loop hike, people (more of them) who are using White Pass as a staging area for the Glacier Peak climb, and an assortment of people hiking the PCT (in both directions). It’s all good though, from where I pitched my tent I could see no other tents so I still felt somewhat isolated.
The clouds came in late in the afternoon and touched the surrounding hills but, like I said, there was no rain. There was a good deal of wind though. The benefit of the wind is that there were no bugs at all. Nice!
The clouds cleared overnight and the next morning was beautiful and sunny, and it stayed that way the rest of the hike.
On Tuesday I left my tent set up and went on a little day hike.
For the first part of the hike I took a trail (Foam Creek) out towards Glacier Peak. This is the preferred path of most of the climbers approaching the mountain so as you can imagine you can get some magnificent views of the mountain as you get closer to it. I followed the trail for a few miles to a pass and then scrambled several hundred feet to the top of Marmot Knob. From there I had a perfect view of the mountain.
I turned around and retraced my steps back to White Pass and the PCT and took the PCT north for a few miles to Red Pass. I then scrambled up a fun peak called Portal Peak. This was quite a bit more technical than Marmot Knob and not for the faint of heart but also not particularly dangerous (says I) if you take your time and are careful. From Portal Peak you truly have a spectacular view in any direction you look.
I then headed back to camp for the night.
Wednesday morning I awoke to another stunning day. I broke camp and headed south on the PCT for seven or eight miles to Dishpan Gap. From here I took the high route up and through a brutal unnamed notch and down the other side to Blue Lake. I’m familiar with Blue Lake and hiked through this area on a slightly different loop with my friends, Jeremy and Solomon, a couple of years ago. Blue Lake is another hugely popular destination and on the weekends it can be overrun with people but on this mid-week run there were only another couple of people camping in the area and I never actually got close enough to any of them to have a conversation.
I set up camp and then decided to take a quick hike up Johnson Mountain. Johnson Mountain sits directly to the north of Blue Lake and although it’s only a couple of miles each way, it’s a decent workout. At some point in the distant past there was a fire lookout on top of the mountain but all that is left are some concrete blocks. It’s another great view though! Once up on top there were swarms of bugs and I didn’t expect to last more than a few minutes before being driven off the mountain but I quickly realized the bugs were all ladybugs! I have no idea why they were there but only on this one particular peak they were literally everywhere.
Back at camp I spent a peaceful and quite warm night and was up early the next morning. The Pilot Ridge Trail back to the North Sauk River is another quad busting workout. The trail echoes the trail to White Pass in that you’re traversing a sloped alpine meadow for a mile or two but eventually you reach the ridge and do what ridge trails do, that is follow the ridge up and down in whatever fashion God decided to form the ridge. For a day that’s supposed to be downhill to the trailhead there is a lot of uphill trail. By the time I was done with the ridge I had done 1,700 feet of upwards hiking. That also meant about the same amount of elevation going down. That’s not a lot but it meant that when it came time to head down the mountain, the trail headed DOWN the mountain. By the time I was back at the trailhead I had dropped almost 5,100 feet, most of it in a three mile window. It was a test of my knee strengthening program I embarked on this spring and I’m happy to report my knees still felt good at the end of the day.
I always meet interesting people on the trail. On this trip I ran into a guy, Drew, who I would have guessed was maybe my age. He was hiking southbound on the PCT, starting at the Canadian border. He was only doing a section (Washington?) but had completed most all the long trails in the US over the course of the past 10 or 15 years. He was a triple crown finisher (PCT, CDT and AT) as well as completing the Arizona Trail (AZT), Colorado Trail, Pinhoti Trail and a couple of others he mentioned. He was 69 years old. I also talked to a husband and wife who were doing the same loop as I but in the opposite direction. They were going much slower but easily looked to be in their mid-70’s, in great shape. I love these people who give me confidence that if I can stay healthy I can potentially be out in nature for many years to come.
So there you have it. Four days, 45 miles and 12,723 feet of elevation gain, in absolutely the best weather I could have asked for. God is good.
For more photos, go here. This is just a fraction of what I took so if you’re bored you can ask and I’ll send you a link to all of them, but this gives you a good idea of the beauty in the area.
