Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that many of my photos are taken in the Olympic Peninsula. I do go other places … and I grew up spending much more time in the North Central Cascades … which were much closer to my home in North Seattle. The forest in North Cascades are much different than the rainforests of the Olympics. These were taken on the east side of the range, near Lake Chelan, about where the transition to pine forest begins.
Mt Pilchuck is a very easy to spot mountain east of Everett, Washington (twenty some miles north of Seattle). This was just after New Year’s Day a couple years ago and shows the low snowpack that year. Normally, this would have been a struggle without snowshoes or cross-country skis … we had our snowshoes with us and we wore them for a while, but mostly because we could and then wouldn’t have to carry them.
Just looking through my old hiking images and found a couple of shots that I took while taking a water break. The top one shows a lush area that gets plenty of water and the bottom shows a much drier area showing rhododendron growing in deep woods in a relatively dry area.
Lake 22 (TwentyTwo) is located just west of Mt Pilchuck, west of Everett, WA. in the Central Cascade foothills. The area was part of one of the very first ecological studies, in the 1949 book Pilchuck, The Life of a Mountain by Harry Higman and Earl J. Larrison. (Working my way through college in the late ’60’s and early ’70’s, I mowed the lawn and did gardening at Harry Higmans’s widow’s house.) The book is a classic and I’m happy to have a first edition print of it in my library.
This is also the site of my very first backpack trip (August 1962) … and we ended up soaking wet. The image below shows the lake surface a few minutes later from the image above, when it began to pour on us … just a brief summer shower. This time we were prepared and didn’t end up soaked. There is no overnight camping permitted at the lake anymore due to excessive usage and to protect the environment around the lake.
The South Fork Stillaguamish river valley was the location of most of my earliest camping/hiking adventures … starting in the late ’50’s – early ’60’s. Verlot and Turlo Campgrounds, Monte Cristo, Big Four and Lake 22. These views are from the trail to Lake 22 … one of the most heavily hiked trails in the Central Cascades. That is due to its relative proximity to Seattle, Bellevue and Everett areas.
