#pnwanderlust

Today was the definition of a bluebird day.

We got a late start out of camp. It was frigid this morning next to the lake, but by 10:30 when we hit the trail again the sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud to be seen. 

The whole morning was spent walking up, and not just on switchbacks like yesterday’s hike: full-on scrambles from cairn to cairn up hunks of rock that jutted from the mountainside. Thank god we were slackpacking, with everything but food, water, and jackets left behind at camp. It would’ve been murderously difficult to get up the trail otherwise. 

At 12:30 we broke for lunch, having gotten up and over the first pass. We were on the shore of an electric-blue lake still mostly covered in ice, ringed by jagged peaks that made me think of cathedrals. It was as perfect a spot to stop and eat as I’ve found on any hike I’ve taken. 

After a doze on some sunbaked rocks our party of seven worked its way up and over a small snow-covered saddle. We trudged through the sun cups of the newly-slushy ground past two more alpine lakes of bright blue before calling it a day and heading back to the saddle. I led everyone through their first glissades, and seeing the rush it gave them was as good as the one I got myself sliding on my butt down toward our lunch lake. 

As if the adrenaline weren’t already pumping, we almost immediately happened upon a family of mountain goats on the trail. We’d trekked through their droppings earlier in the day but hadn’t seen one until the return journey. They’re mostly passive outside of their late fall mating season, but they had two babies with them (out of a group of nine), so we went extra warily past them. Two of them followed us up and out of the area, to make sure we were really leaving, I guess, and then it was back to regular old hiking, except for the double-time that everyone’s heart was doing. 

This was a day to rival anything I saw in the Sierra Nevada, if not in terms of accomplishment (the highest we got was maybe 7500 feet up, barely half the height of Mount Whitney) then in terms of sheer beauty. Gushing forest waterfalls, soft carpets of moss, ancient towering slabs of granite, snowcapped peaks--the view had everything I could possibly have asked for. 

In addition to the views I found something else today: that my confidence and competence in places like these has not diminished. I felt like I was thriving out on trail today, helping my friends navigate through the snow, spotting cairns and testing out the scrambles to them, and planning out our timing so that we didn’t descend as the slush was starting to freeze again. I felt like I knew exactly what I was doing, which is not something I feel often. This has been an incredible trip to share with my friends, but it’s also privately been wonderful in a way that I’m still having trouble describing.

The Enchantments come by their name honestly. 

I think maybe the best kind of tired is the kind where you stagger in the door after a weekend outside, sunburnt and smelling like lake water and pine trees. Little dots of sap stuck to your skin in places you forgot to look.

I am that good kind of tired. I ache everywhere, and it’s the good kind of that, too. This was the kind of weekend that barely feels deserved–that I should get to bear witness to so much awe-inspiring beauty is really something.

It was raining this morning and we took our time breaking camp. A goat wandered close by, though he didn’t seem particularly interested in us. Just seeing what salt the landscape had to offer. 

We picked our way down through the rock fields and switchbacks that we’d heaved and struggled up through on Friday. Uphill is hard on the calves and lungs; downhill is hard on everything else. At the same deep green alpine lake where we’d eaten lunch on our way in, a few of us flung ourselves in for a swim. It was breathtakingly cold, but the sun started to come out just as we were gasping our way to shore, so we jumped in again for good measure. As we sat on the rocks shivering ourselves dry, an otter cut through the calm surface of the water. In a very real sense our day-to-day lives are almost completely disconnected from the workings of the natural world, and moments like this one cut through that divide just enough to make you feel human again.

The sun stayed out for good once we’d cleared all the water features, so we were left to hike down an exposed (though still beautiful) trail in the dazzling brightness of the afternoon. Great for pictures, not so great for skin already blasted red by yesterday’s reflection of sun on snow.

One last long set of switchbacks put us down to the parking lot and out of that pristinely beautiful place. (It’s good that you need to win a permit lottery to camp there, otherwise everyone would go–it’s that dazzling. If everyone could go anytime it wouldn’t be dazzling anymore, probably.)

Like I wrote yesterday, it's still strange to me to feel so confident and competent at something. The PCT ended 9 months ago, but it's clear that I haven't completely lost whatever it is that you learn about yourself doing something like that. Any outdoor pursuit is a risk; the question every person must ask themselves is how much of that risk they're willing to assume for themselves. (If you let other people dictate it for you, you may as well stay home.) Helping lead my friends through their own journey on this spectrum of risk felt really special and made me glad (for the umpteenth time) that I stuck it out on the trail last year when I had so many reasons to quit. 

In the oppressive heat of Sunday afternoon we drove to Leavenworth, a Bavarian village lovingly maintained in the Washington mountains. I’m sure it is a place worth experiencing in full and I intend to go back. But for the moment all any of us could think about was a burger and a milkshake, which we sought out and destroyed with astonishing speed. Another hiking weekend well-spent.