Steamboat Rock

A few years ago, I went to Eastern Washington and camped at Sun Lakes State Park, looking for a good place to see the Perseid meteor showers. We only spent one day out there, and we ended up driving down a forest road and parking illegally (after being shooed away by a ranger at a more visible spot) to watch the stars. While driving up Banks Lake, we found a campground and turned in, looking for a convenience store. It was such a gorgeously situated place that I said to myself, “I have to come back and camp here.”

(driving by Grand Coulee)

Easier said than done. First of all, this area is far away. On our first trip, we camped near Wenatchee on the first night to split up the drive, and the drive home seemed to take forever. So it was a bit of an ordeal to make the drive to a campground that was even further from Seattle than Sun Lakes. After camping for a few years in Western Washington, last year when I was doing my annual campsite booking, I decided that it was time to go to Steamboat Rock. Washington State Parks reservations open up exactly 9 months before the start date of the reservation you want. So I went to the site exactly 9 months before a July Friday and… nothing was available. The next week, I woke up at 6:50am to hit the website exactly at 7am, when the reservations opened up. There were two sites available when I loaded the page, and when I tried to grab one exactly at 7am, it was gone. Same thing happened the next week. I was getting pretty tired of waking up so early to get nothing, so I was ready to give the whole thing up and find another option. But as luck would have it, I checked a few weekends back, just out of curiosity… and there was a site open for the weekend after the 4th of July! Someone must have booked it and canceled. MINE!

Hiking in Seattle’s Backyard

West Tiger 3
6 miles, 2100 ft elevation gain

I’ve done a lot of hiking over the last two years, but people are often surprised to hear that I haven’t done the popular hikes closer to Seattle, like Rattlesnake Ridge, Mount Si, and until this weekend, Tiger Mountain. Instead, I’ll drive an hour or more to go hike elsewhere.

Why? Mainly because what I get to see is more spectacular when I hike in the Cascades, and the hikes closer to Seattle tend to be extremely crowded due to their convenience.

But this time, Mike and I wanted to take a hike before going to the Seattle International Beerfest, and all the hikes I’d normally consider were buried in snow except one in Eastern Washington. So we went for the most popular hike on Tiger Mountain, West Tiger 3 – a short but challenging hike to one of the three summits of West Tiger Mountain.

The convenience of hiking close to home can’t be denied. As you can see from the map above, West Tiger is just minutes away from Seattle’s East side suburbs. A short drive + a short hike = time to do other things that day. It was a quick 1.5 hours up to the summit and about 1 hour coming down, with stops.

In search of gold

Ingalls Way (to Ingalls Lake)
9 miles, 2500 ft elevation gain (I don’t believe it, I think it was longer)

(Mount Stuart standing majestically before Headlight Basin and its larches)

Anyone who has listened to me talk about hiking this year has heard the names of two hikes mentioned over and over: Blanca Lake (with its light blue glacial waters) and Ingalls Lake (a shocking gem of a lake, with the possibility of golden larches on the way). I gave up on Blanca for the year after a failed attempt to reach the trailhead but continued to watch the weekend weather forecasts for an opportunity for Ingalls. Last weekend was it! Sunny weather, golden larches barely still hanging onto their needles, perfect. Unfortunately, everyone else thought so, too. By 10:30am, the trailhead parking lot was way more than full, and there were over a dozen cars starting to line the side of the road. This weekend was also the opening weekend of hunting season, and we passed many hunting camps on the way in, including one very reassuring sign that said, “Kill zone.” The last stretch was 9 miles on unpaved, bumpy USFS road that was pretty slow going.

 
(left: Mt. Rainier is watching you, right: crunchy ice threads on the trail)

Three trails leave from this trailhead. The Esmeralda Basin trail splits off pretty quickly, then the trail starts a nice series of switchbacks upwards. We started to see crunchy ice in shapes that looked like bunches of little threads (see above) along the trail, and there were light patches of snow as well. Despite the highs being forecast in the 50s, at 10:30am it was definitely in the 30s. Nice weather for hiking while the sun was out, but it got chilly pretty quickly anytime we would stop moving. We hit the first point of the day where we’d look and see teeny tiny people in the distance, far away and high above us, and think, “We have to go there?!” This happened a number of times during this hike. I don’t think I’ve ever done a hike where it really felt like we covered a lot of distance, maybe because so much of the hiking was on exposed surfaces where the distance was visible.

 
(left: a bit of meadow, right: golden larches)

Surprise Hike

Surprise Creek (to Surprise Lake)
8 miles, 2300 ft gain

I normally don’t hike alone for safety reasons, but this weekend I decided to throw safety to the wind to seek some solitude. At a yoga retreat I attended, one of the activities was to spend a few hours in the morning in silence, not speaking, gesturing, or making eye contact with anyone else. A lot of people found it to be weird, but I didn’t. This is my preference in groups of people, and I only feel the need to speak due to societal expectations. So spending a few hours in the woods without the pressure to speak was really refreshing for me.

Not that there weren’t challenges. My navigational incompetence came out even more when there wasn’t someone to assist. My original plan was to hike Blanca Lake, so I drove to Index to get on Index-Galena Road, only to discover 5 miles down that the road was closed. I had done a bit of research before, but not enough. One of the roads to the trailhead was repaired last year, but not this one. Oops. My phone was out of data range, so I picked another hike in my book and headed there. Surprise! (groan) I should also mention that on the way to Index, it started raining (real rain) around Gold Bar, and my mood instantly darkened. It was not in the forecast at all, and I thought about turning around, but fortunately, it stopped quickly. I missed the turn for the Surprise Lake trailhead – well, I actually saw it, but I saw signs that said “emergency parking only” and didn’t think it was a road – and the next place to legally turn around was at the Stevens Pass ski resort. So I ended up driving 8 miles up to the pass and briefly considered changing itineraries yet again to Lake Valhalla, since I was already there. But 11 miles sounded long, so I turned around and drove back down. It wasn’t an entire waste – there was a toilet at Stevens Pass and there wasn’t one at the trailhead, and the drives down Index-Galena Road and Stevens Pass were gorgeous. Pollyanna Nina sees the bright side!

Melakwa Lake

9 mi, 2300 ft elevation gain

Wikipedia: Melakwa Lake is a lake in King County, Washington. The name Melakwa comes from a local native term for “mosquito.”

I admit to being a weather wimp, and usually when the forecast looks bad, I cancel my hikes. But the hiking season is reaching its end and I hadn’t gone anywhere in a month, so this Sunday’s hike was a “rain or shine” sort of thing. Having exhausted all of my lucky weather points on my backpacking and Rainier trips, of course… it rained.

I guess there are some benefits to the rain. The cool weather drives the bugs away, and the rain drives the people away. When we reached the lake, we were the only ones there for a little while, something that would be pretty impossible during a summer weekend. It also gave the views a little more depth, I think. It’s easy to see the beauty when the sun is shining and everything’s green, blue, or flowery. But on an overcast day, you have to look a little harder to find that beauty, and in a way, you see more.

Trees that are usually just trees end up looking magical because of the layers of fog in between them. One of our party members discovered that since the fog was moving, if you stared for a moment, it gave the illusion that the trees were moving, too. Not too many blueberries left (the Saturday people probably ate anything that was there), but the fall foliage was in magnificent form, the bright oranges and yellows popping out even more in the overcast conditions.

One of the reasons that this is a great hike is because there’s a lot to see on the way to the lake. There are several waterfalls, Keekwulee Falls being probably the most impressive of them. As we were looking around for Snowshoe Falls (harder to spot), a little kid heading back with his family announced to us, “Pat yourself on the back! You just passed Snowshoe Falls!” We really must have looked like sad drowned rats in desperate need of encouragement!

My hiking group did part of this hike a few years ago but turned around before reaching Hemlock Pass. Looking back over those pictures, things look so different as the seasons change. Nice to experience it in another way and to finally reach the lake at the end! Cautions about trail conditions at this time of year, though… lots of mud, and a good portion of the trail is rocky, which slows things down when the rocks are wet.

Great hike, but I am hoping for some sunny weekends in October. Still a weather wimp. :)

   

~N

Ptarmigan Lakes Backpack

Ptarmigan Lakes via Tonga Ridge and Fisher Lake – ~15.5 mi, ~2000 ft gain

It had been a number of years since my last backpacking trip, and I was itching to go, so I pestered Mike until he went and bought a pack and sleeping bag, and off we went.

It wasn’t without risk. A bunch of our gear was new (including water filter and GPS), and the plan was “I think there’s a trail that goes to this lake, and there should be one campsite at either this one or the other.” Add a forecast of cold weather with possible rain, and there was definitely potential for a miserable weekend. But everything ended up working out beautifully.

Mike had suggested that we do one of the standard lake day hikes as an overnight, which I almost immediately vetoed. I find that sort of elevation gain to be hard enough without a pack, and I find carrying a pack hard enough without the masses of day hikers scooting around me on a trail. And those also tend to be crowded. So I opened up my Wild Sky book and started looking for candidates.

The Tonga Ridge trail emerged as the winner. It’s a pretty easy hike because it starts at a high elevation. 3 miles and 500 feet of elevation gain to Sawyer Pass and the first available campsites, in case things did end up being harder than we expected. But past the official trail, there was Fisher Lake at 5 miles, Upper and Lower Ptarmigan Lakes around 7 miles, and a slew of trips past that if we felt ambitious: Terrace Lakes, climbing Terrace Mountain to Lake Clarice and Marmot Lake, etc. In the end, we didn’t end up going for the side trips, not even the 700 feet up Mount Sawyer near the beginning of the trail (too overcast for good views) because the solitude we found at Lower Ptarmigan Lake had us content to rest there for two nights.

But first we had to get there. We grumbled up the slight uphill at the beginning of Tonga – Mike was carrying a 40 lb pack and I was carrying 30 – but cheered up a little at the sight of wildflowers (well, I did, anyway). As we got closer to Sawyer Pass, we started to notice berries along the trail. At the pass, there were fields of huckleberry plants with trails going through them. A nice snack along the way. :)

After the official trail ended, the hiking got a little rougher. There was one segment that was pretty steep and slightly muddy, without great foot holds. The trail also split several times, and we ended up taking the route that went over the highest point in the area, a mistake that we definitely avoided on the return trip. A few drops of rain had begun to fall as well. Finally, we made it to Fisher Lake. It didn’t look particularly spectacular with the overcast skies, but there were a number of empty campsites. We encountered a party of two that was occupying one of the better sites there. Mike wanted to drop his pack and camp there, but I passively rejected this suggestion by “looking for more campsites” until we were no longer at the lake. It wouldn’t have been a bad place to spend the night, but I knew there was more.

Okay, so I suck as a trail finder. We followed something of a trail for a short distance, then lost it. And essentially bushwhacked half of a mile or so, using the GPS to affirm that we were indeed heading towards a lake. Mike was getting pretty annoyed at me at this point, and the final straw was the giant boulder field we traversed at the end, which apparently was completely avoidable because there was a trail that went through the woods next to it. Oops.

Mount Rainier – Skyscraper Mountain

Two things you should never fully believe: the weather report and the elevation data in a hiking book.

Weather forecast: cold, rainy, and possibly snowy.

Actual weather: cold, windy, moving clouds, a bit of mist.

Trail info as reported in the book: approx. 8 mi, 1100 ft elevation gain.

Actual hiking data as reported by GPS: 9.2 mi, 2392 ft elevation gain. (Extra distance and part of the extra elevation was due to our route changes/additions, but not 1200 ft!)

Leaving from the Sunrise lot, we took the Sourdough Ridge trail to Frozen Lake, where it starts to branch out. There are lots of possibilities from this beginning – Berkeley Park, Fremont Lookout, Burroughs Mountain, Dege Peak, etc. There’s something great for any hiking skill level. We took the Wonderland Trail from there, past the Berkeley Park turnoff, all the way to Skyscraper Mountain. Lots of pretty flower fields (perhaps a bit past their peak, but still in great shape) and views of Mount Rainier. Not a ton of people on the trail, and probably over half of the people we saw were people on multi-night backpacking trips.

I think it would be pretty hard to top the conditions during my trip to Mount Rainier last year (pics), and the overcast weather on this hike definitely made for more challenging picture taking. However, there were two things that were better: no mosquitoes (because it was so cold) and marmots! I saw no wildlife last time, and this time our group sighted about five marmots, all eating. One was so hungry that he came up really close to the trail and posed for pictures.

There was a great viewpoint where the unofficial trail up Skyscraper Mountain branched from the Wonderland Trail. A few small groups were hanging out here, taking photos of Mount Rainier, which kept peeking in and out of the clouds. The four of us were the only ones who went up further during the time we were there. The makeshift trail (pictured: above left) up was extremely steep and rocky, with short, random switchbacks. We ate lunch at the top but didn’t stay long. It was windy and cold up there, and it was a bit scary looking so far down. We were above the low layer of clouds, and at one point, they completely engulfed the mountain, leaving us on a small rock island surrounded by pure white. Creepy!

This being the first cool weather hike of the season, I took the opportunity to try a little experiment. My dad got me a Ms. Bento jar during one of his trips to Taiwan, and I’d been itching to try it out. (I also have the Mr. Bento jar, but it’s a little big and heavy for hiking use). I packed my lunch 7 hours before eating it, and my risotto and mac & cheese were still very warm when lunch time came. Not piping hot, but warm enough. Definitely more nourishing than a cold sandwich. I think this has great potential for ski season as well!

Overall, this hike went a lot better than I was anticipating. I think the weather forecast and the cold (it was probably 40 degrees or below for our whole trip) kept most people away, and I’m not used to Mount Rainier being a solitary experience. It’s another plus that Skyscraper Mountain isn’t listed as a trail on the map at the lodge – but definitely worth doing. There are so many hiking possibilities at Mount Rainier National Park, and I hope to return next year to explore more of them!

~N