You can take the hiker out of the Northwest…

Black-crowned Night Heron

On our trip to Southern California to visit Joe and Laura we have come across a great variety of weather to go with the great variety of everything else one finds here. Tuesday we drove south to Redondo Beach, where Wanda’s (much) elder brother was the editor of the Daily Breeze in the late forties after mustering out of the service. It was a beautiful day for a drive along the coast from Marina del Rey to Redondo and after lunch we were visited by a very friendly Black-crowned Night Heron. At first glance it appeared to be a tern but then I saw the long, delicate white plume that extends from the back of his head almost the while length of his body. That and the brilliant ruby eye cinched the identification.

The next day Joe and Laura were once again busy with work, so we drove out to the Angeles Crest mountains for a visit to the historic Mount Wilson Observatory. After some overnight rain the weather was fine in town but we entered the clouds as we drove to the observatory’s 5600′ elevation, and at first we could hardly read the few signs. The temperature had dropped to about 35°F (2°C) and I thought we wouldn’t be spending much time there. But after the obligatory trip to the restroom the clouds pulled back a bit and we could find our way over toward the observatory.

I should say “the observatories” since there is a large campus with a number of different types of observatories. The centerpiece is the 100-inch diameter Hooker reflecting telescope, but there is an older 60-inch reflector, a couple of towering solar telescopes including one with a 150-foot (not a typo) focal length and a CHARA array of six one-meter reflector telescopes linked together by large light pipes and some seriously sexy computing devices to form a instrument that can resolve objects that would require a mirror 340 METERS in diameter (which works out to about 1100 feet). The Hooker mirror (2.4 meters) is 13 inches thick and weighs tons so I cannot begin to imagine what a 340 meter chunk of glass would be like.

There are no pictures worth showing because of the weather and because all of the action there is intellectual and nothing is very photogenic.

Then last night at dinner Laura told me about her favorite hike in the area: Runyon Canyon. If you’ve ever seen a TV series shot in LA (e.g., Entourage) where people are shown hiking and jogging in the hills, there is a good chance you’ve seen Runyon Canyon. It is a public park in a notch in the Hollywood Hills just above Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue (of tar-pit fame). It climbs up to Mulholland Drive and affords panoramic views of the Los Angeles basin.

At least it does when the atmosphere is friendly. Today the forecast was for rain and we headed out into the sort of drizzle that is so familiar to hikers  (and everyone else) in the Northwest. We first popped into downtown LA’s fashion district to visit the Michael Levine fabric store – an enormous warehouse-like room jammed with any sort of cloth you can imagine. Wanda picked up a few yards for a future quilting project and we headed to Joe’s restored theater where he runs his business of sound editing and mixing for motion pictures (he was raised in Seattle, so his company is named “Puget Sound”) and Laura runs her calligraphy and event planning business. I dropped Wanda off so she could have some quiet time and I headed for Runyon Canyon.

Downtown LA from Runyon Canyon

Santa Monica from Runyon Canyon

By now the rain had reduced to an intermittent misting so it looked like I had a good chance of a pleasant hike. I didn’t bring any of my hiking gear on the trip – no trekking poles, no pack, only some New Balance walking shoes – but the whole hike was only about 2 miles round trip with about 700′ of elevation gain. The terrain is mostly low brushy stuff (chaparral, maybe?) with occasional trees so you get almost continuous views of the city.

The first half-mile was quite steep, covering most of the 700′ of gain. The footing was pretty good – mostly coarse sandy earth derived from the dark granitic bedrock that showed itself frequently. I think it would be classed as diorite – basically like granite, but with the darker minerals predominating over the lighter quartz. It was the latter that formed the coarse sand, much like at the start of Hannegan Pass trail.

The hard part

Diorite bedrock

There were a couple of steep spots further on, including this rocky face coming down from the high point of the trail. By this time the mist had moistened the track pretty well and it was a bit slippery. It wouldn’t have been a huge problem if I’d had my poles, but even then I might have done some sitting and sliding. But I was wearing some fairly nice pants so I ended up doing a crab walk on hands and feet, facing up – I’m glad there was no one there to take any pictures.

Micro box canyon

When I got to the north end of the trail I was looking at a choice of going back down the old sort-of-paved road or down another ridge trail something like the one I’d just done. My decision was made for me when the wind suddenly began to roar up the canyon and the mist turned to a downpour – I had a light rain jacket on but everything not covered by it was drenched to the skin in about fifteen seconds. As I went squishing down the road and the brown runoff spread across it, I remembered thinking at the start of the hike that, given the rain, I was better off on the ridge than in the gully since a flash flood was more likely, and more dangerous, than a lightning storm – I remembered that just as a massive thunderclap echoed across the canyon, reminding me that I did not have to choose between those two potential disasters.

Flash Flood

The road had been paved at one time, but is badly washed out in spots. When the runoff stream hit those potholes/washouts it would turn into a mini-waterfall at the top of a micro-box canyon. By the time I got back close to city streets the water had spread across the entire width of the road in places. And then it funneled down into a gutter and roared on past the opulent mansions lining the street. I took a short movie of the point where the runoff from the trail turns and runs down Vista Street – I don’t think I can include a video in this blog.
Tomorrow we’re expecting a return to the normal, boring old sunny warmth of Southern California for a trip to Alhambra to visit with Laura’s family, followed by another sardine session on Allegiant Air for the return to Bellingham. (Did you know that the seats on Allegiant don’t even recline any more?)

Additions & Corrections

Joe informed me that the tall buildings in the distance that I identified as downtown Santa Monica are actually in Century City, a neighborhood of tall office buildings that are home to many lawyers and agents who control the flow of money in and around the motion picture business.

I wasn’t able to find any detailed information about the bedrock mentioned – all the geology discussions I found in a quick search was understandably focused on earthquake faults and soil stability. So I will stick with my identification of the rock as diorite; follow this link to a picture that seems to confirm.

And it appears that I can add my video of the storm runoff, via the good offices of flickr.com:

The Gargett Brothers’ Gold Mine

Packing up at Twin Lakes

On Tuesday, my friend Earl and I took a much delayed hike to the old Gargett Mine on the side of Mount Larrabee. Earl is a Bellingham Lifer, with the exception of a mid-life parole in California, and has a strong interest in local history in general and mining in particular.

We left Bellingham in fog but soon saw some blue skies, although there were plenty of clouds all day, too. The road to Twin Lakes is in better condition than I’ve ever seen it – just about any car could make it to the lakes with a little care – and it was so nice to be in that beautiful spot without a jillion cars and smoky campfires!

The first thing we noticed was that every mountain around us had some fresh snow – I think we can safely say that summer is almost over and we should prepare ourselves for a premature end to the high country hiking season. The snow is above 6000′ of elevation at the moment, which will not interfere with most of our hikes, but it does put next week’s hike to Ptarmigan Ridge into some jeopardy.

The Skagit Range in clouds

Snow above HIgh Pass

As we hiked out toward Low Pass the clouds obscured the grand views of distant mountains but provided their own smoky splendor. A little further on they allowed us a haunting view of the new snow on Mount Larrabee just above High Pass. We blew on past High Pass toward the mine, bemoaning once again the pathetic supply of blueberries. This is a very lightly used trail (most folks who manage to drive to Twin Lakes just hike to Winchester Mountain, if they leave their cars at all) and should be awash in berries at this time of year, but we found only a few truly ripe ones and those were mostly small. There were many that were hardly bigger than a BB.

On the way down to the mine

But we could enjoy the gorgeous landscape even without berries. As we hiked down from High Pass toward the mine, the stream that drains the cirque above High Pass was aroar from the recent rain and snow and beautiful to look at – the only concern was that we would have to cross it in a few minutes. Usually it is little more than a trickle but this time we would have to hunt around for a safe crossing.

The Forest Service maintains this trail as far as High Pass and has done some great work on it in the last couple of years. Beyond that point it has deteriorated significantly. It has been especially damaged by shortcuts, to the point where the moderate old mule trail has nearly disappeared in spots, supplanted by excessively steep cutoffs. Last year I went out and spent a few hours one day trying to locate and partially clear out the old trail, but it is still hard to find in places, with some smallish Christmas-size trees growing right out of the trail. I think I should try to go back out again this year with a bigger saw – anyone interested?

Earl at the mine

The adit

The mine entrance, or adit, is pretty hard to see from a distance but you can see one old rusted tub-like affair from High Pass. On closer inspection it is more than a tub, with pipes and gadgets and driveshafts for whatever purpose. There are a lot of other old pieces of iron and sheet metal lying around and it makes you wonder how they managed to get that stuff up here. You can see from the picture that the “tub” is a pretty big chunk of metal – what you can’t see is that the walls are a good half-inch thick.

Inside the mine

Someone, or perhaps a storm, has modified the adit since the last time I was there. In the past you could walk right up to a wooden framework and stick your head inside, but now it is just a literal hole in the ground, and there is an active stream cutting a tiny ravine. It was too dark to see much, but the camera’s flash showed some old timber bracing standing in a foot or so of water and lots of debris under the water. Drops of water fell almost constantly from the ceiling and plopped into the pool – if you look closely you can see a small splash in the picture, near the center bottom.

You can also see a brilliant white spot on the ceiling near center top. We couldn’t get close enough to see it well, but my guess is that it belongs to a vein of pure white quartz, just the sort of thing that would have drawn prospectors to dig, since gold and other heavy metals often are found along such quartz seams.

Hiking back toward Winchester

We walked back to High Pass to have lunch, by which time a lot of the new snow had already melted on the trail up Larrabee. The hike back was as lovely as the way out, including a nicely framed view of Winchester Mountain – if you look very closely you might be able to see the flag flying at Mount Baker Club’s lookout cabin.

Just before reaching the trailhead, on the side of Winchester, I took a bunch of pictures of some bizarre looking boulders that I’ve noticed on earlier hikes. They are mostly brownish-gray with a sandy texture, but show a number of roughly lenticular inclusions of a smooth, almost silvery light gray rock that stands out prominently from the background. They look to me like they might be bits of marble. From the general look of the rock, I was guessing that they are from the Yellow Aster Complex that I have gone about at great length in earlier posts. And when I got home I looked at the state geology department’s online geologic map and found a little tiny speck of YAC right at the very summit of Winchester. From the location of these boulders, it is not too hard to believe that might have tumbled down from that summit.

Marble(?) in Yellow Aster Complex

Back at Twin Lakes we took the side trip over to Skagway Pass to look down at the only active gold mine in the area, the Lone Jack Mine. There was no sign of activity, and no big piles of quartz ore, so we guessed that they have completed their operations for the season, not a moment too soon from the looks of the new snow.

And the clouds that had been gradually rising all day, finally exposed a full view of Mount Larrabee and the Pleiades, giving me one of my best pictures of the day,

Larrabee and the Pleaides from Skagway Pass

Keeping Cool

This is a trail?

Today I hiked the old Keep Cool Trail for the first time. I just had to get out and take advantage of what promised to be the last fine day for awhile. Bellingham was submerged in fog as I started out Mount Baker Highway but it cleared before I got to Deming, revealing perfectly clear skies. I got to the trailhead at 3000′ on Twin Lakes Road just after 9:00 and headed out.

The Keep Cool Trail has been disowned by the Forest Service for about 10 years and the lack of maintenance was clear within a few steps of the trailhead, as the brush quickly closed in. The first half mile or so follows a long-abandoned logging road so it isn’t very steep but is heavily overgrown. The rains of the past few days and the morning’s foggy, foggy dew meant that I was quickly drenched from head to toe, despite the clear skies and fresh breeze. In some places the old roadbed is entirely obliterated, so the footing is difficult even on this “easier” part of the trail, especially since it is often hard to see the ground through the brush.

Shuksan peek-a-view

At about 3500 feet elevation, the character of the trail changes abruptly when, after switch-backing up the old road, the trail turns and head straight up the mountain. Reminiscent of Boulder Ridge, it is very steep, rutted and rooted, gaining the next 500′ in less than half the distance of the first 500′. There are also some pretty substantial deadfall situations to get past. The good news is that, for such a wooded hike, there are some nice little peek-a-views of Baker, Shuksan and even Larrabee.

At 4000′ the trail plateaus for a short while, giving a welcome respite from the climb. It is here that I lost track of the trail on my only other visit several years ago. I had come up to go snowshoeing and Twin Lakes Road happened to be passable to this trailhead. I was able to follow the trail this far through the snow and mush along on the level, but when it got steeper I had no idea where I was going and had to turn around. And this time was similar – just as the trail started to steepen again, there was a big fallen tree, too high to go over and too low to go under, right before the trail made a jog to the left. I chose to go to the right to get around the tree and it took a bit of hunting to find the trail again.

Quartz dike in Yellow Aster Gneiss

The next section was as steep as the earlier one, often following a lovely stream. In fact “following” is too weak a word – it was hard to tell whether it was more correct to say that there was water on the trail or thatI was hiking in a creek.

After about 2.5 miles, at 4700′, the trail emerges into an open meadows with great views to the south and east. It had taken me almost 2.5 hours to get here, so I stopped for a snack and a rest. The remainder of the trail alternates between level and damp (even boggy at times) and very steep, but it simply gorgeous. The flowers were everywhere and even the rock outcroppings were interesting, especially a large, snow-white quartz dike over a foot wide right across the trail.

The Destination

Old Adventures

As I looked up at the mountains ahead I began to remember a couple of adventures I’d had a number of years ago in this area, both centered an unnamed peak which now appeared above me. It is southwest of Yellow Aster Butte, on the opposite side of the chains of little lakes (often called “tarns”, mistakenly, I believe) that feed the stream that I had been “following”. This peak would stand in the way if you wanted to travel from the Yellow Aster area over to Welcome Pass and the rest of High Divide. So Earl and I accompanied his friend Lee in an attempt to find a way. We came up the new Yellow Aster trail, via Gold Run Pass, and had someone take the car to meet us at the Welcome Pass trailhead, so there was no turning back.

Now, when faced with any large obstacle to travel, there are three obvious possibilities: go around it to the left, go over the top, or go around to the right. It turns out, in retrospect, that two of these are reasonable – we chose the third.

Going over the top looks extremely forbidding, and going left is the long way around and looks overgrown. So we went right, directly into a nightmare. We started out going down a slope that was so steep that I was pretty sure I couldn’t get back up. We scrambled on rocks and scree, and sometimes a grip on a bit of heather was all that was between me and … I don’t want to think about it. This was very early in my hiking career, before I lost 35 pounds (leaving the ranks of the “obese” and joining those who are merely “overweight”). It was pretty awful, but we survived, even though it meant hiking down the obscenely steep Welcome Pass late in the waning day, getting to the trailhead in full darkness.

A couple of years later I took my first overnight hike in the North Cascades and chose to camp in the Yellow Aster lakes area. It was my plan to try going around the peak to the left, but in a more controlled way, avoiding any “point of no return” situations. I’ll spare the details, but it turned out that I found a trail, albeit a scratchy and precarious one, right over the top of the peak, and a longer, safer way around the left side.

Back on the Trail

Bell Pass Melange

I hadn’t a clear destination in mind for this hike, but as I looked up at the unnamed peak, I decided to try to make it up there. After one more steep section, at 5200′ the trail comes to the first of the chain of small lakes and becomes a gentle ramble through rocks of the Yellow Aster Complex with lots of the quartz seams that drew so many prospectors here in search of gold and lead. The trail up to the summit was even steeper than I remembered (six years of aging may have had something to do with that) but the reward was a spectacular 360 degree mountain panorama. Just before reaching the top, there is a dramatic outcropping of the Bell Pass Melange, and as I scrambled around it the steep slope to my left, covered with blueberry plants in their brilliant red fall plumage, made a frame for Mount Baker and gave me one of my favorite pictures in a long time.

Baker and blueberries

There was one ominous sight from the summit: I could see what looked a lot like fresh snow on Mount Redoubt in the distance. This could be a very short hiking season, indeed.

New snow on Mount Redoubt?

It had taken me 4 hours to climb these 4 miles and the return trip was not going to be much easier so I realized that I was going to be home later than expected. Luckily the peak has direct sightline to the cell tower at the Mount Baker Ski Area and I was able call home – it kind of weird to be on top of a mountain making a phone call.

The way down from the peak was considerably more challenging than I remembered. Part way down I even considered tossing my pack down, since it was holding me out further from the rock face than was comfortable; I also could have turned around and backed down, but that technique has it’s own issues. Eventually I found a nice safe place to plant a foot and lowered myself uneventfully. And I remembered later that I had never gone down this trail with a pack before – on my camping trip I just took a small fanny pack on this side trip.

The rest of the trip down was pleasant, although it did take me 3 hours. In summary, this hike would be a good choice on a summer weekend – get a good workout and avoid the crowds. But don’t even think of doing it in the rain.

Epilogue

I got back just in time to stop in and check out the new restaurant east of Glacier called “Chair 9″. Their sign just says “bar and pizza” but they have a fairly broad menu, including salads and buffalo steaks and burgers. The service was friendly and prompt and the pizza was quite tasty, even if the crust was a bit soft for my taste.

Finding Faults

Yellow Aster Butte is arguably the most geologically interesting hike in the Mount Baker area (and that is saying something!). In the course of less than four miles, you walk on remnants of at least three different tectonic plates, or terranes. Some may have broken off from other continents, others might be oceanic island arcs (like Hawaii), but wherever they came from, continental drift has piled them up on the western edge of North America long ago. Now they are all scrunched together, eroded over time, and form the the western portion of the North Cascades.

It is possible that similar formations underlie the Cascades further south, but there the remains of the huge chain of volcanos that built the Cascade Range are what you see. Only up here in the north have the Cascade lavas eroded away almost entirely (the Black Buttes and Table Mountain are exceptions) to expose these “basement rocks”.

I have given a lot of attention over the last ten years to trying to find the actual transition lines between these plates. The heavy vegetation and snow cover, and the extreme complexity of the formations themselves, generally make it pretty difficult for an amateur to find those faults, but this trail has a couple that just shout at you. Well, they whisper really loudly, at least.

The hike starts in the Swamp Creek valley on rocks of the Easton terrane, crosses the Chilliwack River terrane as you go up through the woods and ends on the Bell Pass Melange and the Yellow Aster Complex. As usual, I ran on and on about the geology, but I decided to pluck that stuff out and put it in a little appendix so I could get right to the pictures.

Fault #1

Serpentine hills (and 2 hikers)

The first fault (Bpm - Yac)

As you walk along on the level part of the Yellow Aster trail after splitting off from the Tomyhoi Lake trail, the rocks gradually change from the Chilliwack to the Yellow Aster Complex. The change is gradual because you are walking very close to the fault-line; the Chilliwack is below and the Yellow Aster Complex above the trail, so the rocks you see are pretty jumbled up. At the end of this mostly level stretch of trail, about 2.5 mile into the hike, you come to a series of strange, bare, brown hills followed by a sharp drop into a valley, usually filled with snow. This is the first of two striking fault zones. The brown hills are solid serpentine, which usually shows up near faults. It is also usually green and shiny, almost like jade, but here it is darker, almost black, and is heavily weathered – iron produces the rusty brown color.

It is very common to find stream valleys following fault lines, since the movement along a fault tends to grind up the rocks, making openings for water and roots to get in and do their erosional magic.

Looking up toward the butte, you can also see some brownish serpentine on the face of the notch, just above the center of the photo on the left. This fault separates the Yellow Aster Complex, on the right, from the Bell Pass Melange, but the difference is not at all obvious from a distance.

Approaching the fault

Fault #2

But the really cool, textbook example of a fault exposure comes almost another mile up the trail. The first picture shows Con, Cindy and DJan approaching the fault, which runs diagonally across the scene just above the middle. Notice that on the lower right we are hiking along an even slope through a lot of wildflowers and there are few exposed rock outcrops – and then suddenly it is all bare, craggy rock with only sparse vegetation. The snow puddle at the upper right is lying right on top of the fault, and draining along it right through the big shiny gray patch (which may be more serpentine) near the center of the picture.

On the fault (Yac - Bpm)

Wherever I’ve found the Bell Pass Melange, I’ve noticed that the terrain is comparatively smooth, with few outcrops, and the samples I’ve picked up are always covered with moss and lichens and such. Perhaps there are some really tasty minerals in there, or maybe it’s because of all the nooks and crevices between the various components of the melange, but this stuff seems to weather and erode away easily. On the other hand, the Yac is very old and much harder and more compact.

Looking back down the fault

When we got up on top of that snow puddle the contrast was even more striking – we were picking our way through sharp, bare rocks and a few feet away was a gentle mountain meadow leading up to the top of the butte. It is not unusual for the nature of the underlying rock to affect the vegetation that grows on it, but this is a particularly good example. In the last picture you can see that the snow near the center is lying right on the fault, and that the transition is only a few feet wide.

Appendix A

As promised (threatened?) here is some more on the geology.

The hike starts in the Swamp Creek valley on rocks of the Easton terrane, called the Darrington Phyllite. Goat Mountain, across the creek, is one big chunk of phyllite, and we’ve seen it often on other trails (Anderson Mountain…), but we don’t see much along this trail since it is covered by glacial deposits and a lot of vegetation. Most of the gold mined in the Mount Baker area was found in quartz seams in this formation.

As the trail rises through the woods it crosses onto the Chilliwack River terrane, a broad mixture of various volcanic, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks that is very widespread in the area (Herman Saddle, Canyon Ridge, Sauk Mountain…) but the forest hides the transition. The first really noticeable rocks don’t appear until you are on the section of the trail that contours around to the north and west from the Gold Run Pass / Tomyhoi Lake trail toward Yellow Aster Butte and Mount Tomyhoi, and, at first, these are the Chilliwack rocks.

Now the Easton and the Chilliwack terranes are very nice, I’m sure, and very important geologically, but it is the third terrane that has always interested me most. It is called the Bell Pass Melange, named for a seldom-visited pass at the head of Bell Creek, a tributary of the South Fork of the Nooksack. That pass is a saddle in the ridge that joins Mount Baker to the Twin Sisters and separates the South Fork from the Middle Fork. (That really has nothing to do with today’s story, but I put it in to emphasize that these various terranes are all jumbled up and crop out all over the place. It is a very, very complex system.) The geologists call it a “melange” (French for “mixture”) probably hoping that it will sound sophisticated and most people won’t notice that they really don’t completely understand what’s going on here.

Ultramafic Rocks

There are several very different types of rocks within the melange, and each of them is strange and extraordinary. The most prominent local exposure of this terrane is the Twin Sisters Range, which is one great big chunk of ultramafic rock called dunite which is composed entirely of one mineral, olivine (which is unusual in itself), and began it existence as part of the earth’s deep mantle, rather than the thin, crispy crust we live on. Somehow it got attached to a piece of crust that got turned upside down in some violent tectonic interaction.

Yellow Aster Complex

Yellow Aster Complex

Another is the Yellow Aster Complex (note the use of another general purpose noun to cover a lack of full understanding). I went prospecting for this one a few weeks ago on my trip to the Baker Lake region. It is very old and is sometimes called the Yellow Aster Gneiss, since it is rather coarse grained and has undergone metamorphism, but it is cut with other things, and is truly a complex within the melange. I’ll call it “Yac”.

It was named for this general area, probably for the area west of the butte where the chain of small lakes is and where a good deal of prospecting and perhaps mining went on at one time. That area is entirely underlain by the Yac; but the part of Yellow Aster Butte that the trail leads to is actually built of the third rock species.

Bell Pass Melange

Bell Pass Melange

My favorite is also called, confusingly, the Bell Pass Melange (Bpm). So it is a melange within the melange. (From now on I will use the term “melange” and  ”Bpm” to refer to this particular rock, rather than to the whole terrane. Why do people do things like that?) It is a truly gnarly and mixed up mess. It is dark gray to black overall, but with bright white quartz intrusions, folded and layered parts that almost look like petrified wood, cracks, crevices and what-all. When you hike that last steep slope up to the “top” of Yellow Aster Butte, this is the stuff you are stepping on.

As I mentioned above, it seems to weather rather evenly, so it tends to hide from view under vegetation, but substantial outcrops can also be found in the Middle Fork area (near Elbow Lake and, strangely enough, near Bell Pass) and near the west end of Canyon Ridge.

These pictures are of samples I gather near Schrieber’s Meadow (Yac) and the Middle Fork (Bpm). The last one is of a small piece, also from the Middle Fork, that I sliced and partially polished in my lapidary class last year. The teacher wouldn’t let me cut it in the big slabbing saw because it looked like it would shatter and jam up the works. You can see many small cracks and rusty spots and near the upper left you can see some crystals forming a small geode. It is really strange stuff.

Bpm (sliced)

Boulder Ridge in the rain

The week before last I spent two days hiking on the east side of Mount Baker with the goal of finding some places where we could hike. The information on the USFS website just didn’t seem very credible so I went to see for myself. In particular they were claiming that there was snow right at Schreiber’s Meadow, the main trailhead in the area, which is at about 3500′ above sea level, while we had been encountering snow only above 4700′ for a couple of weeks.

I left early on Monday, July 12, and planned to go to the Meadow and scout around there, and then do some or all of the Forest Divide, Boulder Ridge, Rainbow Ridge and Park Butte trails over the next two days, based at a camp at the Boulder Creek FS campground. On the previous Friday, the day after a beautiful hike up Goat Mountain in warm, almost too warm, sunny weather, and with the same sort of weather forecast ahead indefinitely, I had made my campground reservation online. About an hour later, the Weather Service began to modify the forecast, and continued doing so throughout the weekend. By Monday it was gloom and drizzle everywhere, but I had already paid for my campsite (and I’m really cheap) so there I was at Schrieber’s Meadow in the rain, with not a single other vehicle parked at the most popular trailhead in the North Cascades.

[Orthographer's note - I just noticed that I have already spelled the name of that meadow two different ways. It's a struggle. The name is pronounced like the German word "Schreiber" which means "writer" or "scribe" and is pronounced with an "aye" (as in "Aye, matey!") but is spelled with an "ie" which has no meaning in German, but would be pronounced as an "ee" (as in "Eek, a snake!"). Usually my rudimentary knowledge of German has helped me in life, but it makes it awfully hard to write "ie" when my mind is saying "aye".]

The Yellow Aster Complex

Years ago I read in my favorite geology book, “Geology of the North Cascades” by Rowland Tabor and Ralph Taugerud and published by the Mountaineers, of a short off-trail junket to the base of a cliff below Survey Point where there is a rockfall of a complex and very ancient type of local rock called the Yellow Aster Complex, after the place where it was first cataloged near the small lakes at the base of Yellow Aster Butte. Some crystals in the rocks can be dated back over a billion years, into the Pre-Cambrian Era. Igneous rocks were formed then, eroded down into sands and muds, compacted into sedimentary sandstones and shales, then reheated and metamorphosed, perhaps more than once, into something like a gneiss or schist. And over the millennia, it was also cracked and broken, with the cracks being filled in with other sorts of molten rocks. Some books I’ve seen call it a “gneiss” (a coarse-grained metamorphic rock usually derived from granite) but others are non-committal and just call it a “complex” (the geologist’s equivalent of a punt).

The Yellow Aster Complex pops up in a number of places in the area, including the two mentioned above, some spots along the Middle Fork of the Nooksack and near Canyon Creek Road below Church Mountain. But it is often in close proximity with another ancient and even more complex looking mess of a rock called the Bell Pass Melange (another taxonomic punt), so I wanted to get to a spot where I could have it on some authority that the rocks I would find were examples of YAC and not BRM. (We will have the opportunity to see both types in the next week or so on the Yellow Aster Butte trail, if they aren’t all still buried in snow.)

Snow at Schrieber's

To get to the rockfall, you go about 2/3 of a mile along the Park Butte trail, then head cross-country toward the cliff and find a ford across Rocky Creek. Almost as soon as I left the trail I was amazed to find patches of snow, corroborating the info on the USFS website! It turns out that there is a lot more snow over there than up along the North Fork of the Nooksack. That makes some sense, since that area is on the leeward slope of Mount Baker for storms that came from the west, and snow does tend to build up on the lee side of a mountain, as it does on the lee side of a fence or a house. The prevailing winds around here in the winter are from the SW, so the Mount Baker Ski Area, which is NE of Baker, normally gets huge amounts of snow despite its modest altitude of 3500′ to 5000′. (I’ve read that more snow falls there than on the top of Baker at 10,800′.) I just saw that the DOT is not even willing to estimate when the road through the ski area to Artist Point will be opened; after almost three weeks of plowing, they are just past halfway up the road.

So that was the major upshot of my trip: there is no point in looking to either Artist Point or the Baker Lake area for trekking opportunities in the next few weeks unless we want to hike with ice axes and crampons. I did manage to do parts of all the hikes I mentioned (except Forest Divide) and I ran into significant snow at 4000 to 4200 feet on all of them.

Boulder Ridge

I will spare you some of the gruesome details, but between the drizzle and nearly falling into rocky Creek (twice), I was wet all over and through for the next two days. Actually it just seemed that way, since down at my campsite at Boulder Creek it only rained a little and just at night.

The only hike where I went a respectable distance was on Boulder Ridge, mainly because its trailhead is at a lower elevation of about 2700′. I wanted to do a good job of checking this one out since it is on our schedule for the first week in September. Pat and Ron hiked it last year and reported that it was a great, if somewhat difficult, hike. Ron says it was one of the most beautiful places he’s ever been, which is saying something around here.

We’ll have to take Ron’s word for the beauty, though, since I couldn’t see anything most of the time. The trees were nice, but how beautiful can a tree be? But on the road and at the trailhead, there were big openings in the trees, which I could imagine being filled with some great views of the mountains east of Baker Lake (Blum, Hagen, Bacon, et al.), and I read somewhere online that the trailhead is one of the most beautiful in the area.

Mudhole #1

The trail heads immediately into the woods and is quite gentle for the first two miles, rising only about 500′. There were a lot of muddy spots, and I found myself wishing that the trail would get steeper and allow the water to run off. And it did get steeper. About the time I was regretting what I’d wished for it leveled out again and presented some truly epic mudholes that dwarfed the earlier ones, and then came out into a lovely open meadow – I could almost see Maria and the Lonely Goatherd gamboling through.

The Meadow

But it was, in fact, a bog. There was water running everywhere just below the level of the grasses. It turned out to be possible to pick my way across without immersing my boots, but I had to choose carefully.

And just past the bog the character of the trail changed dramatically – a quick right turn sent me straight up the side of the ridge without benefit of switchbacks. It is as steep as anything I’ve ever encountered that is still called a trail – it comes close to being a scramble. There are plenty of trees and other flora to grab for support, so it wasn’t at all scary, except for one big rounded outcrop of old Chilliwack River volcanic rock. It was glistening wet from the drizzle and exposed to a dramatic drop-off to Boulder Creek a long way below, but turned out not to be slippery and to have many small pits and cracks where a boot could get a good purchase. Combined with the wetness, both the very light drizzle in the air and the wet foliage alongside the narrow “trail”, it was a pretty miserable slog, and I was one soggy and dirty dude.

Chilliwack volcanics

The Bog (same as The Meadow)

But it really didn’t go on for that long. It was only about a half a mile before slope eased up and the trail starts to come out of the trees onto a bit of a ridge. The geology underfoot also changed quite abruptly to modern Mount Baker lava rock, and the mist pulled back just enough to get some foggy glimpses of the head of the valley. I’m pretty sure that the blank whiteness of cloud ahead above the valley was hiding a truly spectacular view of Mount Baker. (After I got home I checked on my computerized topographic maps that it was only 3 miles to the summit. It would be basically the same view that DJan took from Baker Lake Road on our Baker River hike,  but 4 miles closer).

Looking toward Baker?

From what I read in various climbers’ reports (this is one of the less popular climbing routes to Mount Baker, but even here I ran into two pairs of climbers who, thankfully, had been on the summit the day before when it was sunny) that there is about another mile of trail beyond the point where I ran into deep snow, for a total of almost 4 miles. At that point there is a cliff that requires some technical work to get up onto the ridge for the Baker ascent.

When I got back to the car at almost 8PM I was wet and as dirty as I’ve ever been on a hike, but I still think it would be worth our while to do it. By September it should be pretty well dried out, and it was the wetness that was the worst part of the hike. The steep section is as tough as anything we regularly do (think about the Oyster Dome trail) but it is only a minor part. And there should be a great scenic payoff if we can hit a nice day, which in early September is a pretty good bet.

Heliotrope Ridge

On Sunday, July 18, I drove out to Douglas Fir Forest Service campground near Glacier, set up my camp at 2:00 in the afternoon and headed right out to hike. My plan to explore the Skyline Divide trail for snow conditions was thwarted when I turned onto Dead Horse Creek Road (FS #37) and was greeted by an orange sign announcing the closure of the road at mile 7.1, a good 5 miles short of the trailhead. So I switched to Plan B and headed on up Glacier Creek Road (FS #39) to Heliotrope Ridge, which I had been planning to do the next morning. I would then have all evening to decide where, if anywhere, to go the next day.

Uphill from the outhouse

The road is in good shape, but I went slowly, figuring that I would be going against any traffic on this beautiful Sunday afternoon, on the way to one of the most popular day hikes in the area and the start of the most popular climbing route to Mount Baker. I didn’t meet many cars on the road, but well before I could see the parking lot, there were parked cars packed along the side of the road. The first place I found to park was at the upper end of the parking area, right next to the outhouse, and the chain of parked cars continued on up the hill and out of sight around the next curve.

New bridge over Grouse Creek

It was hard to believe that there was room for people from all those cars to fit on the trail, and even before crossing the brand new bridge across Grouse Creek (remember the flattened log with a steel cable handrail?) I began to meet people, both climbers with great huge packs and day hikers in tennies and their dogs. I decided to count them: in a little over an hour, I met 123 critturs of the human and canine persuasions, for a total of 264 feet/paws tromping on the trail. [Assuming that all individuals had the usual number of legs, how many were people and how many were dogs? Show your work.] Most hikers were coming down, but early in the hike I was passed by a couple of teenaged boys with skimpy packs and a black dog.

The trail is in great shape, despite the usual downed tree or two, and there was no snow at all until almost 5000′ elevation – a bit surprising since the trail is sheltered from the sun on the north side of the ridge. On the other hand, this is the windward side of Baker, which normally gets less snow. Just last week on the opposite side of the mountain on Boulder Ridge there was substantial snow cover at 4000′.

And the creek crossings are good, too. The Kulshan Creek ford, the first one that looks scary (but never stops us), has a lot of water, but many well-placed stepping stones. The big Heliotrope Creek crossing, the only one that has turned us back in recent years, has a big, sturdy snow bridge just above the trail. But I had found a nice spot to cross before I saw the trail “trodden black” across the snow bridge.

First look at Baker

As I reached Heliotrope Creek, I met a family group of 4 who had just passed me, but had turned around after deciding not to cross the creek. The father (I presume) asked me to watch out for the two boys with the black dog, as they had become separated. (Well separated, indeed, as the boys had passed me an hour earlier.) They were guessing that the boys had turned off on the climbing route, about a quarter mile back, and were going to go back and try that route. None of us were expecting me to see them, since there wasn’t much trail left in the direction I was going, and they had passed me a long time ago.

Up the Coleman Glacier to Baker

I got over to the the moraine overlooking Coleman Glacier and headed up toward Baker. We have been doing this hike in the late fall in recent years and have only made it up to the point where the tree-covered moraine runs into a ridge of solid volcanic rock that (I believe) is called the Hogback. On this day I got quite a bit further up, since it was essentially free of snow.

I was looking up at the high point of the rocky ridge that I had chosen as my destination when I saw the black dog, and then the two boys. Oops. I hoped that they were not going any further and that I could catch up to them, but I was right at the base of a steep rocky hill which would slow me down. And then I saw the older boy seeming to move further on. So I waved and just bellowed as loud as I could, and managed to get the younger’s attention. They came back down to meet me and I filled them in on the situation, told them to go back to the climbing route junction and made them promise that at least one of them would stay there until they found their family. Good deed for today? – check!

Threatening clouds?

The views were absolutely splendid, better than usual because of the time of day. It was after 5:00PM, and shadows were beginning to deepen on the glaciers but the sun was still bright. To the south and west some puffy cumulus clouds were trying to grow into thunderheads and scare every one off the mountain, but they weren’t very convincing. Besides, almost everyone was already gone.

My dinner spot on the Hogback

I spent about a half hour having dinner there on the Hogback and taking many, many pictures. The trip down was uneventful and not nearly as busy – I only saw 5 more people.

So the Senior Trailblazers have a hike for this Thursday, after all. The lovely weather is supposed to continue indefinitely and I look forward to a fine outing, perhaps even as great as last week’s trip to the top of Church Mountain. But that’s asking a lot.

Baker over the Hogback

Mountains, beer and pizza – What’s not to like?

The North Fork

On Tuesday, Karen, DJan and I set off for an afternoon hike in the North Cascades. The main reason for trying this radical variation from our usual early morning departure was to take advantage of the sudden appearance of summer after our June of Gloom and to take pictures in the afternoon light. We are usually up in the high country at the very worst time of day, with the sun directly overhead (or what passes for that here on the 49th parallel) or shining right in our eyes; by the time the light softens and the shadows begin to lengthen we are back at the trailhead or on our way back to town.

The immediate impetus for this trip was the partial closure of Canyon Creek Road for the next two months for repaving. On weekdays (M-Th) it is supposed to be closed from 8-5:00 except at lunchtime – our idea was to get up to the base of the road at noon, scoot up to the Damfino Lakes trailhead, hike and enjoy the afternoon light and come back down after 5:00, stopping for dinner at the celebrated North Fork Beer Shrine, Pizzeria and Wedding Chapel on Mount Baker Highway near Kendall.

We all found it a bit disorienting to be leaving for a hike in the middle of the day – we were all double- and triple-checking our gear. But everything was going along fine until I made the mistake of stopping at the Glacier Public Service Center (nee Ranger Station) and asking someone (who actually seemed to know what she was talking about) for an update on the Canyon Creek situation. She was very discouraging: the contractor is “supposed to” open the road from 12-1:00, but they don’t have much direct control over them; it will open again “around 5:00 or maybe later”; there were fresh reports of patchy snow near the lakes (only a half mile into the hike) and solid snow from there to Excelsior Pass. She urged us to give the warm weather at least a week to melt the trail out, and suggested Goat Mountain, where you can get above tree line without snow, as an alternative.

So there we were, all dressed up and no place to go. Goat Mountain did sound like a good choice, even though we just did it a month ago, but it seemed like a better choice for the main group hike on Thursday.

For some reason that I no longer remember, that morning I had read the FS website report on Wells Creek Road: the gate that closes the road to protect elk habitat during the winter just the past Nooksack Falls viewing area had just been opened on July 1, but the road was said to be partially blocked at mile 10.3. If we could drive to that point, a bit over 2 miles from the trailhead, we could perhaps hike up the road and then start up the trail and reach a really nice viewpoint that comes about a half mile up the trail. And the drive up that road, while long (12.5 miles) and difficult, affords some of the best mountain views, especially of Mount Baker, that you can find from any road in the area, with the possible exception of Artist Point at the end of Mount Baker Highway. So even if we couldn’t get a decent hike, there would be a good scenic payoff.

Baker between Ptarmigan & Chowder Ridges

So off we went. And everything I’d remembered about the trip up that road came true in spades. The first four miles is in pretty good shape and gives some great views up the Bar Creek valley to Baker. At that point the road begins to climb rapidly and deteriorates at a similar rate. (The picture at the left was taken from the side of the road about 8 miles in.) Decent stretches of road alternate with some truly dreadful patches. And “patches” is a bit too kind – some are long enough that you begin to forget what normal driving is like. And there are a couple of traverses of rocky faces that are truly scary – maybe not quite as bad as the upper section of Twin Lakes Road, but they are in the same ball park.

I had neither the time nor the inclination to study up close the rocks that were obviously resentful of our presence, but they looked to be volcanic, similar to stuff we see along Ptarmigan Ridge near Mount Baker and different from the mostly sedimentary bedrock along the North Fork of the Nooksack River. (Chowder Ridge, for example, was named for the fossil shellfish found there.) So these would seem to be part of what is called, appropriately enough, the Wells Creek Volcanic Formation, remnants of one of an ancient of volcanic ancestor of Mount Baker,

It was on the worst of these traverses that we passed what we believed to be the advertised “partial” closure – a couple of small boulders 15″-18″ across that were nestled against the uphill side of the already very narrow roadway. I drove as close as I could to the boulders, reasoning that a scrape on the side of the car would be a lot better than the available alternative.

Just a short way further on, at about 4400′ of altitude, we came to patch of snow that had a set of tracks through it, but still looked a little dicey. So we parked and headed up the road – we were now about 1.5 miles from the trailhead, at 4900′ the highest drivable spot in the area except Artist Point (I’m not counting Twin Lakes as drivable). We soon passed a parked car that had made it through the snow patch that had stopped me, and we could see the tracks of two people and a dog.  The hiking was fine for about a mile, with a lot of dry road and occasional snow patches, but suddenly at a fork in the road at about 4700′ the road was solid snow. The road also got steeper at that point. There was very little snow off the road in the woods, and my hope was that when we got to the trail proper the tree cover would give us some bare ground, and we could still make it to the viewpoint. (If not, we couldn’t be too broken-hearted, for there were nice views of Shuksan along the road. But still.)

Baker

My stalwart companions were game to continue and we completed the slog to the parking lot none the worse for wear. The ground was completely snow-covered, but not very deeply; the parking area is ringed by some big boulders, about 3 feet across, and these were standing well proud of the snow. But there was no sign of a trail, and I couldn’t remember exactly where it runs. From this point the trail goes right up the ridge, so there’s very little possibility of getting lost – you just head uphill as steeply as you can manage.

Well, we never found the trail but a mild case of summit fever drove us on up the ridge until a stunning view of Baker suddenly jumped out in front of us. This was the place I remembered, but I had forgotten how stunning the views are: 360 degrees of spectacular North Cascades scenery, Mount Shuksan, Church Mountain, Larrabee, Tomyhoi, etc., etc., and so forth.

Shuksan

I did my best to get us lost on the way down – it is harder to go down a ridge in the snow, since gravity wants to pull you off the ridgeline, but we did make it back to the trailhead and on down the road. The limit of the solid snow was right where we’d found it on the way up, but from there on it was hard to believe the amount of melting that had gone on in just a few hours. We all remembered crossing a good number of snow patches, but the road was clear and even dry now, except for those first patches that had stopped the car. And those were seriously depleted.

We have noticed on our recent hikes that we will be going along with no snow visible and all of a sudden we are in deep stuff. During our rainy May and early June (almost 6″ of rainfall in Bellingham) the snow level must have sat at about 5000′ and just dumped a huge amount of snow. We reached an altitude of 5400′ yesterday, and the snow was still not much deeper than it had been at 4700′. I’m taking this as a good omen: Now that we are having some sunshine and genuinely warm weather (life-long residents call it “hot”) I’m betting that the snow is going to disappear in a flash. (I will of course deny that I ever said any such thing when we are still scrambling to find hikable trails in August.)

Baker from Wells Creek road

The North Fork Beer Shrine lived up to its advance billing: we tried 3 of their homemade beers and shared a large Greek pizza. The pizza was truly excellent, and not just because we were ravenous. (I just finished the leftovers an hour ago, and it was even good cold.) The beers got mixed reviews: the India Pale Ale was the unanimous favorite.

Springtime in the Cascades

When we set up the June hiking schedule back in February, the snowfall in the mountains had been pretty light and we chose to schedule some high country hikes earlier than usual. Last Thursday that planning ran into reality on our hike to Goat Mountain. We had been warned of snow at 4000 feet (about 3 miles along the trail) by the Forest Service, but that “intel” was almost three weeks old. It was sunny and pleasant and we were hopeful.

Spring in the Cascades

Karen had brought a clipping from a hiking book that described a short trail that supposedly spurred off the main Goat Mountain trail for a about a half a mile to the site of an old “lookout cabin”. This had come up last summer on our last trip to Goat, and I was convinced that is was complete nonsense. I had hiked this trail many times and many features of this book’s description, including that spur trail, had made no sense at all to me, not the least being that it would be a pretty silly place for a lookout – on the side of a mountain, well below tree line. What were they looking out for? Squirrels?

But we followed the book’s directions and watched carefully after passing the boundary sign for the Mount Baker Wilderness. I had been pretty vocal about my disdain for the whole concept, to say the least, and so was more than a little surprised, and chagrined, to find signs of a trail right where it was supposed to be! We skipped it for the time being, but pencilled it in for exploration on another day.

When the bough breaks...

We continued on and got all the way to the 4000 foot level without even seeing any snow, on or off the trail. But all of a sudden at about 4200 feet the trail disappeared beneath mounds of the white stuff. We kept on for awhile, but it was pretty rough going, and after post-holing into a few voids and a snow bridge I lost most of my enthusiasm for reaching those spectacular views of Mount Shuksan that appear at our usual stopping point. As it was already noon, we found a large bare spot among some trees and settled down for lunch. Cindy managed to find a couple of trunks that were nearly horizontal and formed a sort of sling or hammock, and did some serious basking.

While we didn’t make it to the alpine terrain, we did enjoy some nice views of Mounts Herman, Sefrit and Shuksan peeking through clouds. And the tip of Grant Peak on Mount Baker just peeped over the top of Mount Herman.

Baker peeking over Mt Herman

Since our trip had been cut short, we decided to explore the mysterious lookout trail on the way down. We schussed and hiked back down to the 3700 foot level and set off on the abandoned trail. It was easy going right at the beginning but we soon ran into some bushes that needed whacking, and it turned out to be steeper than I’d expected. Before we’d gone the advertised half mile we started to run into the snow again and the trail started to disappear. We did indeed find a level spot that could have been a cabin site; in fact we found two of them. There was even a bit of a view between the trees, but I still don’t quite believe the “lookout” part of the story. Maybe a prospector’s cabin? The bedrock that Goat Mountain is made of, the Darrington Phyllite, has hosted most of the gold mining activity in the Mount Baker region, although I don’t know that were mines on Goat, itself.

I have to put in one more picture, this of a trillium blossom next to the trail on the way down. It is a graphic illustration of the compression of the seasons in the mountains that this picture was taken less than 15 minutes after the “Spring in the Cascades” photo above.

Trillium

P.S. For some really nice pictures from this hike, see DJan’s Blog.

South Stewart Lollipop

A couple of months ago I wrote about the trails and roads on the south end of Stewart Mountain, east of Lake Whatcom (See Cub Creek). In the meantime we had a Trailblazers planning meeting where we talked about taking on a trail clearing or maintenance project of some kind, and I thought of the one I mentioned at the end of that Cub Creek posting:

Another improvement would be to find a route from this “new” summit back to other summit and back to the fork in the road, giving the trail a “lollipop” form, rather than just out-and-back, and cutting out even more of the road.

Before getting any other suckers volunteers involved, I wanted to go up and see what needs to be done. And given the gentleness of our hike to Goose Rock on Thursday and the forecast of a good weather window on Saturday, I decided to head up there and do some clearing and maybe some exploring.

Existing Roads

At the lower elevations there are some actual hiking trails, but near the top there are only roads, whether newly maintained, decommissioned, abandoned or completely overgrown. The inset map shows shows all the roads we have hiked on in the last few years with the actively maintained roads are shown in dark blue. Last month we came into this map from the upper left and made the big counter-clockwise swing around to the eastern and highest summit, which I’ve marked with an “E”. (You can click on the map to enlarge it.). From there we could see over to the place marked “X”, where a new road (too new for this map) disappeared into the woods.

A year or so earlier we had taken the left-hand fork and slogged mightily through deep snow and thick brush along the long-ago-decommissioned road represented by the red line that trends roughly west to east to a small pass (marked “P”) and on around to the western summit, marked “W”.

The goal was to find a reasonable path from P to E, making it possible to get to the great views at point E without spending so much time on the roads.

It looks tempting to just head cross country, since there isn’t a lot of elevation change, but last month we could see that the valley between the two summits is not only covered with logging debris (or “slash”) but also is densely filled with small evergreens, making the traverse both dangerous and difficult.

But f you look closely at the map you can see a faint dotted line running from point P to point X and on up to the north. These dotted lines usually represent old roads, often very old ones, probably deeply overgrown. So there may be lots of brush and even some pretty good-sized trees in the road bed, but if you can find it and follow it, at least it won’t lead you over a cliff.

By comparing this old USGS map with the much newer aerial photography in Google Maps and Google Earth, it looked like the portion north of the X has been rebuilt for the recent logging operations and the segment just south of the X runs along the edge of the clearcut. In addition, Google showed that a new road has been built from near the X over to the east summit. So if we could just get from P to X, I was sure we could continue on to E and complete the loop.

So I packed up my trusty little pruning saw, a good pruning shears and a small bow saw and set off up the mountain. I planned to start hacking at the brush on the decommissioned road (the red line) and if I made it as far as the pass I would poke around and try to find traces of the lower end of the “dotted-line”. It would probably be easier to find the upper end of it, but that is a very long walk.

When I got to the red line I could see that others had been there before me – quite a lot of clearing had been done, perhaps last fall, maybe even this spring. There were still a lot small shoots and saplings, so I worked at it for awhile; but then I realized that it was getting easier as I went along. Then I noticed what looked like traces of a wheeled vehicle, a narrow dual track in places – my guess is that ATV riders have been working on the trail.

The Pass

So I progressed more quickly than I expected, and got to the pass around noon. I expected to have to clamber over a bunch of medium sized trees that lay across the road there, but apparently the ATV guys had brought up a chain saw and cut a pathway. I sat down one of the logs to have some lunch and assess whether I had the energy for some serious bushwhacking along the old road.

There was never any serious doubt about that, however. I decided to leave my pack, take my GPS (which had about a dozen waypoints taken from the map) and pruning tools and just go a little way into woods in search of the old road. Leaving my pack turned out to be a small mistake (as always) mainly because I didn’t have my camera with me. I ranged along the (newer) road looking for anything that looked like it might have once been an intersection, but there was a drop-off everywhere except right where the logs were piled up. So I climbed over the logs and, sure enough, on the other side the ground was rather level(ish) in a roughly northeasterly direction. It was not at all easy to follow, though, and was leading a bit downhill and to the north, while the waypoints were telling me to more uphill and NE. I probably paid too much attention to the GPS and after a short while I looked down and saw a flat spot that looked very road-like. I dropped back down and followed it until it ran smack into a tree that was almost two feet in diameter – not the sort of thing you expect to find in a road. Maybe this was where the road switched back to the southeast to climb along the flank of the hill?

So I zigged back and kept on toward the southeast. It wasn’t particularly difficult traveling, since it was a pretty open, mature forest, with the occasional giant stump, but nowhere was there anything flat and wide enough to have been a graded roadbed. I was starting to get a little nervous and thinking it might be good to turn back. It’s not that I had gone terribly far, and the GPS batteries were strong, but I was alone and well off anyone’s beaten path.

But just as I was getting to the point where my GPS track zagged back to the northeast, I came up on a stream. (Streams are great when bushwhacking, since they are easy to follow and pretty much stay put.) And this one was coming down very near the old road – if there was a road here, it would have to cross the stream, and maybe there would be remnants of a culvert or bridge. And it was an unusual looking stream channel, almost semicircular in cross section, like a small half-pipe maybe six feet across. I could see quite aways up the channel, and it was headed in my direction, and I could even see a bit of light at the top, and the channel was pretty clear. I took note of a couple of big flat pieces of Chuckanut Sandstone so I could find this spot again, and set off up the creek.

After I had gone a couple of hundred yards up the stream, remarking to myself how straight and even it was, the semicircularity of the channel started to flatten out and widen and it finally dawned on me that this creek was not NEAR the road – it WAS the road! And sure enough, when I got near the top of the hill it was unmistakeable. Apparently they had just run the road straight up the side of the hill and it turned into a river when it was abandoned. In the steepest parts, where I’d come across it, the trees along the sides of the road had held their soil while the water scoured the road down to the sandstone bedrock, forming that odd half-pipe.

Success!

And sure enough again, in short order I came out into the new clearcut and a grand view of Baker and the Sisters and on to the new road at point X. There was even one of the “beaver lodges” that we found on the east summit. I walked along the new road just far enough to convince my self that it is the one that connects with point E; I didn’t go further because I didn’t have my camera, or my water, or my food, and the view here was actually a bit better than at the summit, anyways.

On the way back I hoped to find a flat spot where the old road turned to the northwest, but no such luck. When I reached the two flat stones, the road/creek kept on going down the hill, so I followed it on down. I didn’t want to end up in that logging slash aka Xmas tree farm in the valley, but I was now so close to the road (and my pack) that I wasn’t too concerned about it. (The second map shows the GPS tracks of my bushwhack as dashed red lines.) And soon it leveled out and became an obvious roadbed and suddenly was filled small weedish, sapling-like things. They were six or eight feet tall, but thin and reedy, so I could just plow through them without much effort. And as I came out on the road, right near the point where it spurs off to the west summit (W), I remembered noticing this intersection on our snowy hike and wondering where it went.

So I think we have a winner. I would feel comfortable leading a hike as things stand now, either along the zig-zag “road” or straight up the road/creek, but it would be nice to do a little trail work. The zig-zag would be nicer, I think, but would take more work.

Chuckanut Sandstone

Epilogue

I can’t resist a little bit of geology and another photo. A couple of miles from the trailhead There is a outcropping that I hadn’t noticed before, right near where one of the trails comes out onto the road. It is a textbook example of the Chuckanut Sandstone: the lower layers are the natural blueish-gray color of the stone and the upper layers show the light brown that results from the weathering of the rock. My guess is that this rock face was blasted out in the last two or three years to build the new road used for the recent clear-cutting, so the deeper layers have not been exposed long enough to turn brown.

Mounts Erie and Sugarloaf, and the Fidalgo Ophiolite

Last Thursday we were scheduled to hike to Mount Erie and Sugarloaf Mountain on Fidalgo Island, near Anacortes. For a change I remembered to check the geologic map and found that those “mountains” (merely 1300′ and 1100′ high, respectively) are part of a structure called the “Fidalgo ophiolite”. That set me to searching and reading up on ophiolites, and yes, you will be learning about them, too! (Fair warning.)

An ophiolite is not a kind of rock but a series or sequence of related rocks that pops up in a number of places around the world. While the Fidalgo ophiolite is certainly not unique, it belongs to a pretty rare family. An ophiolite sequence can consist of sedimentary rocks, various kinds of volcanic rocks, an intrusive igneous rock called gabbro, all piled on stuff like serpentine and dunite which are actually part of the earth’s mantle. We’ve run into most of those types of rocks (except the gabbro) many times on our hikes in the North Cascades, and most are pretty nondescript, but I was all fired up to see if I could find any of this stuff in real life. Especially the gabbro – I’d learned of it over fifty years ago when I was a freshman geology major at Notre Dame and seen pictures in books, but I’d never encountered it in the wild. [The big black cliffs on the flank of Mount Sefrit that tower over Ruth Creek and the Hannegan Pass trail are reportedly made of gabbro; I've intended for years to bushwhack across the creek to the base of the cliffs to snag a sample but haven't done so, yet.]

The Olympics over Admiralty Inlet

We had another beautiful day for our hike – sunny and chilly as we started out, but quickly warming into the fifties. The hike runs mostly through the woods, with no grand views. We weren’t going terribly fast, and I wasn’t leading, so I could pay some attention to the rocks as we went.

Another reason that I was glad not to be leading: I didn’t know where we were most of the time! The area is a virtual rabbit warren of intersecting and overlapping trails. It is all part of the ACFL, the Anacortes Community Forest Lands, which was acquired and retired from active forestry (i.e., clear-cutting) by the fine folks of Anacortes, who had the generosity and foresight to see that forest lands could have some value beyond that of the potential toilet paper in the tree trunks. It is a wonderful resource for which we should all be grateful, and a hiker might ask, “Can you ever have too many trails?”

I think the answer may be “Yes.” We had a pretty big group (18) so it was inevitable that, despite our modest pace, we would get a bit spread out; there were so many trail intersections that we had to be almost constantly on guard to see that the slower hikers came the right way.

Mount Baker

But still I could keep my eyes on the rocks much of the time. As usual, most of the lower-lying places were filled in with glacial till from the recent (geologically speaking) continental glaciers, and some parts of the trail were old roadways that had been built up with rock that might have been trucked in from anywhere, so the only rocks worth looking at, from my ophiolite-centric point of view, were bedrock exposures. And as usual, again, when there was a big enough chunk to be pretty sure that it had been around for more than a few thousand years, it was likely to be covered with enough moss and lichen to turn any kind of rock into a bland greenish-gray lump.

Actually, though, that’s what I was looking for. According to the geologic map, we would be moving across various kinds of volcanic (i.e., lava) rocks, which are themselves pretty pretty dull and nondescript. Now volcanos are certainly interesting, even exciting sometimes, in themselves (e.g. Mount Saint Helens, ca. 1980) and lava flow sequences can tell interesting stories, but the individual chunks of rocks are kind of boring. They were extruded onto the surface where they cooled very quickly, not allowing time for the individual minerals to gather together into the pretty little crystals that you see in intrusive rocks like granite. Has anyone ever tried to sell you a lovely basalt countertop for your kitchen remodel? I didn’t think so.

Gabbro makes a good bench

The map had promised, however, that if we went far enough south we would to get to the intrusive part of the ophiolitic sequence: that elusive gabbro. But would I find it before we got the the very steep cliff that drops off the south side of Mount Erie and attracts to hang gliders, parasailors and rock climbers to the area? It made sense that I would: the developed crystal structure of gabbro, like other intrusive igneous, gives it great hardness and durability – if anything could survive the scraping and gouging of the glaciers, this would be it. So as we neared the summit I was taking my time and peering closely at every outcrop. I saw nothing that would tell me that the rock wasn’t gabbro (it was pretty dark colored, but by no means black; it didn’t show any flat spots, like slate or schist) but the lichens continued to homogenize everything.

But just as I almost caught up to others at the lunch spot on the summit, I saw a spot that looked different. It was right near the edge of paved trail, and perhaps someone had broken off a piece when building the forms. (I should mention that there is also a road that leads up to the summit, and a big communications facility of some sort.) On closer inspection, I could see a dark, sort of greenish rock with a definite crystal structure – just what I’d been looking for! I stupidly forgot to take a picture of it – the nearest thing I have is one of Cindy and Janet sitting on the gabbro and gazing at the view.

Did I mention that it was a beautiful day? I had never seen the Olympic Mountains so clearly without actually being on the Olympic peninsula with them. But the big surprises were the views of Mount Rainier and Glacier Peak. The latter is always a special treat, since it is so far back toward the Cascade Crest, and so far from what passes for civilization, that you hardly ever get a good look at it. Indeed, the summit of Mount Erie is, to my knowledge, the only place anywhere where you can drive and get a good look at Glacier without a significant amount of hiking.

Glacier Peak and Whitehorse Mountain

On the way back we took a slightly different route, visiting the summit of Sugarloaf Mountain (if I dare use as grand a word as “summit” for the top of this hill). As you can see from the picture below, the exposed bedrock is a bunch of lumps. [Now, I am only talking about the rocks, to be sure.] They are typically lichen-encrusted and I wasn’t able to find any pieces with fresh faces [Really, just the rocks!] so I can’t say anything about their composition, but I’m betting that these are the pillow basalts that also a typical component of an ophiolite. That made it a very good day for me, geologically speaking.

Pillow basalt(?) on Sugarloaf (with hikers)

On the way back we ran slightly afoul of the “too many trail” phenomenon, but as always, Pat led us back to our cars. I really don’t know how he does it in places like this and in the Chuckanuts – I would be in deep doo-doo without my GPS

Epilog

And if you think that was a lot of geology talk, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Once I got started writing about ophiolites, the professor-that-refuses-to-die inside me took over and just wouldn’t shut up. Figuring that not everyone is enthralled by the niceties of orogeny and geologic history, I decided to split most of the ophiolite talk off into a separate posting with a clear “reader discretion is advised” warning.