Mile 2396 to 2655 – Snoqualmie Pass to the US/Canada Border (September 11 to 20)

After spending my 50th birthday in the place most sacred to me, high in the Goat Rocks Wilderness, I returned home one last time before running for the border, this time for a couple important reasons: Celebrating my birthday with my parents who were there the day I came into existence a half century earlier (with special admiration for my Mom that day, as I made the delivery a little harder and arrived via emergency C section), and Husky Football :). For the latter, I missed the home opener which landed the day before my birthday, but wanted to join my special community there for game #2 before returning to the trail.

I was home September 4th to 9th, enjoying catching up after being on trail for a month, feeling great and in the best shape of my life. The weather outside was absolutely beautiful during what is arguably my favorite time of the year, no matter where I am. After five days to recharge, Ashley was back with me for our final push north, the last 250 miles of the PCT from Snoqualmie Pass to Canada. My Dad again chipped in on this amazing adventure and gave us a ride to the Pass where we enjoyed dinner and a beverage at Dru Bru, linking to my arrival at the end of this segment about a month ago. I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by how much had happened since that day, even as I was approaching 1,000 trail miles way back then!

We finally got underway on the trail around 5pm, with our main goal to make Kendall Katwalk, dually poetic, given my Dad’s given name as we said goodbye to him at the trailhead. And, it was the very location of the last long alpine hike we did in 2009 before his knees made this style of hiking untenable. I did have a powerful surge of gratitude for everything, the history that inspired me, the friends made along the way, and that my wife has come to love the backcountry and thru hiking as much as I do, all under the glow of a late summer evening. We made it about a mile past the Katwalk that first evening, setting up camp in clearing just south of Ridge Lake. Here was another spot, a reasonable distance from Snoqualmie Pass/I-90 on a sunny September evening that we had all to ourselves, so peaceful!

The next day we continued north, rounding Alaska Lake on a section of the trail so close to home that I’d never set foot on, despite seeing this basin from many different vantage points, from the Gold Creek drainage below, and across the valley from the Alta Mountain ridge. It was a lovely lingering traverse, looking back towards Hyak and it’s ski runs, and over to Alta where a beautiful memory percolated to the top of my mind. Sitting there in ‘09 with my friend Loren as we were half way through this fabulous open-country Alta HiBox caper over boulders, up Cascade Crumble, and navigating avalanche alder. He shared a story about his Cascade hiking formation story as we looked towards Alaska Lake and the trail I was now on, feeling the love for these mountains, this specific corner of the world that gave us each such peace and contentment.

The true highlight of today however was my primary spirit animal: the pika. I have a special affinity for penguins and owls as well, but especially love the pika. Ever since I wrote a poem about this unique alpine creature in the 6th grade, writing the words around a picture I drew on the page’s center, I’ve felt this connection. I’d already done many backpacking trips with my parents by the time I wrote that poem and remain in awe how pikas power through 9 months of snow living among boulders, generally above 5,000 feet (in the WA Cascades at least). Enjoying every ‘meep’ as we sauntered up the trail, this particular time of the season was all about the instinctual drive to prepare the winter den. One friendly pika was dragging a rather big twig across the trail to its den and then dropped and ran as I approached. I moved the rest of the way to mouth of its den and then just sat back and watched the pika continue the den-building work after concluding I was not interested in it’s capture. Every moment like this where I drop the pacing, linger for some trail moment and take a little longer to reach the day’s mileage, was always glorious.

We finally bid goodbye to the Gold Creek drainage on the last sounds of I-90 and continued along the ridge above Spectacle Lake, before beginning a big drop in elevation again past the lake’s outlet waterfall, Delate, and on to camp at Lehmah meadow near the big walls topped by Chimney Rock and Summit Chief mountains, beautiful in alpenglow.

The centerpiece of the Snoqualmie to Stevens 70 miles is the big ascent from Lemah to high mountain meadows and a few alpine lakes, and then back down to Waptus Lake, then another big up to Cathedral Pass. For us, this was a day we planned to do 25 miles and take a side quest over to beautiful Peggy’s Pond. Instead, it was just one of those things that happens along this trail: my body decided to flame out. Walking in the late afternoon along Waptus, my pace dropped to about 1 mph and I couldn’t see straight. I ate an extra protein bar and then my reserve snickers, but nope, still shot. I sat with my head between my legs and then we decided to call it, ending up several miles short and a 1,000 feet lower at Deep Lake, where I was asleep minutes after finishing dinner that Ashley generously prepared.

We didn’t give up on Peggy’s Pond however, and took the scrambly trail the following morning, basking in the morning sun by the lake in the shadow of the aptly named Cathedral Rock. We thought about doing a scramble shortcut to regain the PCT down a drainage, but rather glad we did not after looking at it from below. It was one of those days where I felt inexplicably better after the previous day’s bonk and the weather was just pure perfection, right as we approached the ides of September. This time of year, the weather can be perfect, or you can wake to an early frost above 5,000 feet. We pushed on to dusk that day, setting up one of our most unique camps at Pieper Pass, putting our Hubba MSR tent on a ledge where we had one end hanging off the cliff, and no stakes (and of course no rain fly needed in this weather). That was awesome. But, less fun: as Ashley was getting her stove out to boil water for dinner, I noticed she was a bit close to the cliff’s edge. In slow motion, I watched her take the sleeve off the cooking pot, watched the lid hit the ground, bounce once, and then cascade over the ledge. Since the trail did a couple switchbacks below the ledge, we put in a noble effort to locate said pot-lid the next morning, but alas, no good fortune. So, we made a donation to the future geological record.

After this glorious night on the ledge, we completed our four-day push to Steven’s Pass, loving another day of perfect weather and chatting at a water stop with a couple from southern Washington up spending a week on the trail, enjoying hearing our PCT stories and embracing being back in our home section in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. It was another profound feeling coming into the Stevens Pass ski area, where I had skied my last runs of the season with my buddy Devon in March, 3 days before beginning the drive south to start the trail. Now here I was walking up the same hill under those runs we skied, bathed in early evening sun and plenty of fall color getting ready to take on a new season of snow.

We had yet another unexpected joy as we came into Stevens, running into Cindy from the Mountaineers, who sold us on staying at the organization’s lodge. For $60/person/night we got a mattress in the bunk room and a hot dinner AND a hot breakfast, always a paradise, even after a mere four days on the trail over this section! At the lodge there were a half dozen other PCT thru hikers, some new to us, some we had heard stories of for weeks, and then Glamour Puss, a pharmacist from Oceanside, CA who I’d met a month ago coming into Trout Lake in Southern WA. There were continued fire closures north of Steven’s Pass, so she made the tough call while we were there to call her PCT thru hike and book a ride back down Highway 2 to Seattle to fly home. We also had so much fun with Mountain Goat (Ruby) and Face ID (Andre) sharing trail stories from the whole journey. Face ID was Australian-Swiss as in born an Aussie but married to a Swiss woman and lived his adult life mostly in Switzerland. We decided to take a zero the next day after we concluded that there was no way we could cover the distance in time between Stevens and Rainy Pass with the additional fire closure detour, and so simply embraced the time with our trail-friends-of-the-day. We went into Leavenworth, packed on a sunny September Saturday, visiting a local brewery and watching the Husky football team notch another win.

Sunday began the grand finale as we kicked off the final 60 miles to the border, where my parents would be picking us up at EC Manning Provincial Park, 8 trail miles into Canada. First though we needed to cover a rather circuitous road journey from the Mountaineers Lodge at Stevens to the PCT crossing at Rainy Pass along Highway 20/North Cascades. We struck out with local trail angels, but Ashley’s Dad came through huge and gave us, as well as Face ID, a ride north to Mazama, and then on to Rainy Pass, spending his whole Sunday with us after driving up from his home east of Cle Elum. It was another really special moment to share with family as the journey wound down to the final few days. We grabbed a late lunch at the brewery in town and ran into the Italian couple that we had shared a trail angel ride with after PCT Trail Days a month earlier back to Santiam Pass near Bend, OR. It was so fun to see them again, and Ashley’s first chance to experience that side of PCT magic.

Ashley gave a particularly emotional farewell to her Dad, in part because the impact of what we had done these past 6 months, both hiking together, and the journey we went on separately as a couple while she was home and I was hiking really hit home. We climbed up to Cutthroat pass, surrounded by the larches beginning to to turn toward beautiful fall orange hues, with few other humans around. We kept going until after dark, finding a spot about halfway between Rainy and Harts passes at a place called Golden Creek.

We enjoyed our dinner that night, slept well and were going through our morning routines when I turned to hand Ashley a cup of fresh coffee, a minor motion that kicked off a ridiculously painful back spasm. Lower back pain has been a standard part of life for me the past 5 years, not uncommon at this stage of life for most. I manage it with a few key exercises, which I have been disciplined keeping up with on the trail. I’ve had a couple minor tweaks, but overall less pain during the 6 months on the trail than the previous 5 years, but here on Day T-Minus 3, one small random move sitting in camp left me almost unable to move! I dove into the Advil supply, lay on my back doing some of the trusty exercises and working to be functional enough to go within an hour. Meanwhile, I asked Ashley if she’d mind filtering water for our next 4 hiking hours from Golden Creek, just 50 feet from our campsite. She said no prob and took off to filter. About 3 1/2 minutes later I heard a loud splash, a crash, a loud yelp and then a screamed “ahhhhhhhhh!!!” My first thought was “Seriously, not possible”. The trail crossing over the creek is shallow and dead-flat.” So I went through the disbelief/denial phase, but shifted rather rapidly to alarm when I heard Ashley screaming my name. Yep, she slipped on a log and fell into the creek, smashing her right shin and knee, left thigh and hip. I struggled to my feet and out of the tent and she was stumbling back towards me, blood running down her right shin with a huge lump already visible from 30 feet away, less than a minute after hitting the rock. Backcountry hazards are real, and I was already thinking about the emergency options. We were in a heavy forest, 15 miles in both directions to the nearest road crossing. The forest made a helicopter landing impossible and the satellite communicator we each carry was slow to get a message out through the trees. But I did have Search and Rescue Insurance and I guess it would be poetic to have it and not need it until the last couple days of our journey… But first, time to diagnose Ashley. I ignored my back, had her sit in the chair, took off her soaking-wet shoes (both had been totally submerged in the shallow creek), and looked for structural damage. It looked really bad on the surface with multiple contusions, but maybe she made it without a break. When she calmed a bit, I asked her to slowly walk up the trail and back. She walked normally, and the pain was no worse. We broke out my seldom-used medical kit, used up all the gauze and then a bandage that Ashley had in her kit. We let her shoes dry for an hour, then packed up camp, her pain managed with more from our Advil stash.

The rest of the day was a special elevated kind of euphoria as we dodged the closest call of the whole journey with no lasting effects! Although not something I know from personal experience, it felt akin to being shot at but missed and escaping unscathed. Adding to our euphoria was the anticipation of the season’s first snow. The above-seasonal-norm sunny weather of the past week was flipping on it’s head this day and we felt the temperature drop viscerally as the hours passed, while the skies remained clear. The ridge coming in to Hart’s Pass was SO beautiful, I just slowed the pace way down and embraced every moment, thinking about what I’d done the past 6 months, in love with all the joy and suffering on this journey, the previous 24 a wonderful microcosm. We set up camp a couple miles short of Hart’s Pass, near one of the highest roads in the state (about 7,000 feet) at last light. No one was around until we were eating dinner at dusk and then a random car pulled up, a family out for some dusk owl watching – beautiful to watch!

The next morning we indeed did wake to a few flakes of light snow and temps right at freezing. We packed up and headed on to Hart’s Pass itself where there were some picnic tables where we actually paused to enjoy our breakfast. Then, the final push! The last 30 miles to the border, one more night on the trail and likely under the first real snow of the season. For those PCT thru-hikers who did not have Canadian entry approval (a whole separate process vs. the usual drive over and back), they all planned to tag the border, and then catch a ride back to Mazama from Hart’s Pass and then to wherever home was. So, the whole day we continuously passed people returning from their tagging of the border in a state of pure bliss. This was pinnacle of community, the magic of the PCT distilled into each interaction. My beard was as long as I’ve ever had it, but being part of the look finishing (even though I had trimmed it back two months earlier, so not carrying six months growth), making me look obviously like a thru hiker. Also adding another decade+ to my apparent age, such that I got asked by one weekend backpacker if I was Ashley’s dad… We spent the afternoon with a woman I’d heard referred to along the way several times, but never met: J Walker. She was one of the few hundred who had (or were about to) complete a continuous footpath journey in ‘23, having slogged through all that wet, deep snow over the summer in the Sierra. She broke off the conversation when she found a group from her Tramily, a reunion scene I never grew tired of the whole journey.

We continually passed all the oddly descriptive passes, that picked out a feature, which could be applicable to any of them at one time or another (Rainy, Cutthroat, Frosty, Windy, Rock, Foggy and finally Woody), all while feeling the storm brewing. We wanted to leave 10 miles or less to the border for the morning, so we could make lunch the next day and then meet my parents for dinner at Manning Provincial Park where they planned to be. That meant a 25+ mile day with daylight rapidly declining each day (this 10-day run we were on as we targeted finishing on the last full day of summer, covered a period when over an hour of sunlight came off the days). We ascended the last big pass of the trek, Woody Pass and had another 3 miles, or about an hour to push forward to the next possible flat spot to put up a tent. We were already into dusk, and the light flurries switched to real falling snow, quickly covering up the trail and more importantly, the unofficial campsites we were looking to put up our tent on. We thought we saw a flat boulder slab below the trail and scrambled down, only to find it was heavily sloped, a classic mountain optical illusion. In the last ounce of light, we did finally locate a flat spot, just up from the trail, before it began the descent towards the border, the local high point at 7,000 feet. We kicked the fresh snow out of the way, and had our tent up in 15 minutes. We left our wet shoes out to dry, heated up our dinner from the vestibule and then decided to celebrate our last night watching a special movie (to us) inside the tent as the snow fell on my phone: Arrival. No worries about conserving battery as tomorrow was it and I had half a charge on my power brick still! When the movie ended, the tent walls were bowing in and I kicked a solid 4 inches of fresh snow off the walls – what a way to celebrate the formal end of the summer season!

The next morning, we woke up to more fresh falling snow, a good 6 to 8 inches on the ground. We packed up our wet gear and began to hike downhill to the border, losing some 3,000 vertical feet and leaving the snow zone behind, spending a fittingly damp lunch at the border monument. We lingered for an hour or two, visited with a couple other thru hikers finishing up. More for another entry, but this was a hugely emotionally moment, standing there on September 20, 2023, 6 months and 1 day after leaving the border monument at the southern border. Ashley was with me at the beginning and the end, and what a transformation for us both, individually and as a couple. She had originally planned to be with me for about 10% of the miles, 250 of 2,650, but instead was along for 1/3 of fewer total miles, 1,600 for me and 500 for her. This journey was both entirely different from what I had originally planned, and completely what I expected when I treated this as a Walk About, rather than a rigid continuous foot path thru hike. Beautiful and profound, it will take me months or years to really absorb what happened and how it impacts the choices I make in daily life.

We eventually continued, now off the charts (a.k.a. The FarOut navigational map) and out of cell coverage, using the satellite communicator for the first time directly with my parents after having it for just communications with Ashley before along the way. The trail at the end was damaged from some floods, which we had to figure out the old-fashioned way, with our eyes and a pixelated Google map. But we did make and my parents were there in the room we had booked, so lovely once again to share this profound moment with the two people most responsible for creating this passion I have for the wilderness, the alpine, and the mountains of the American West! It was no easy drive for them either from Seattle and my level of gratitude for them was simply off the charts. We had a special final dinner there (with a whole menu of gluten-free options much to Ashley’s great joy) and then went to bed, in a bed. The PCT experience, a life time’s hope, a decade’s plan, a year away from work, and six months moving continuously north in fits and starts.

I’m finishing this final entry about the miles on the trail in 84F tropical heat above a coral reef in the tropical Maldives (5 degrees north latitude) on the Ides of November nearly 2 months later. We had several epilogues, both hiking and traveling planned before returning to work, but this chapter is also coming to end. About half the time here in the Maldives is set aside for reflecting on the trip, and I finish this post, half way into our week here, continuing the poetry and symmetry of this magical year. It’s the contrast, the joy and suffering, the cold and the heat, the peace and the strain, the full body euphoria from purely natural internal body chemicals and the full body pain from the same cauldron of signals to the brain that has made this experience unlike anything else I’ve lived through. Writing about that last snowy night in the tent, while sweating profusely in the shade, could not be more perfect…. I have a handful of topics about the trail as a whole for reflective blog posts, a couple of which I’ll write about while here by the tropical sea.

All I feel though right now, is gratitude, both that this happened and for those incredible people, without whom I never could have done this! Ashley, my parents, my daughters, my friend Erin who hiked with me in Northern California, my friends Lee, Jennifer, Tricia, and Gregg who made time in their schedules to spend time with me during trail crossings, my friends Tri and Asher who let us base out of their Palm Springs home for nearly a month at the beginning of this journey, and my college friend Ethan who I hadn’t seen for more than two decades and hosted me at his home in Santa Clarita with incredible hospitality from him, his wife and sons, and the many amazing trail angels and small business owners along the way! And also, anyone who spent even 5 minutes looking at a social media post or reading some of these words. Countless times as I thought about what to write or what pictures to include, I returned to famous line from Into the Wild and the tragic story of Chris McCandless “Happiness is only real when shared.”