Joel and I have been talking about wanting to go hiking ever since spring, but something seemed to be happening every weekend!  This past weekend wasn’t anyone’s birthday, I didn’t have a wedding to shoot (although I did have one last weekend – keep your eyes here for more), and it was probably the warmest day we’ve had yet this year:  so we finally planned a hike!

When picking where to go for our hikes, we refer to a handy Northwest Hiking guidebook.  Somehow, I always manage to forget, that the author is much, much more athletic than me!  Every time I go for a hike, all I keep in my memory is how much I loved the scenery:  not how much sweating or how many breaks I had to take.  When the author of this book rates a trail 3 out of 10 difficulty:  that doesn’t mean easy.  So when I selected a Mount Pilchuck hike, thinking three will merely be a nice workout,  I really wasn’t thinking rationally.  Classic Katie

I was familiar with the route to get there from a year and a half ago when we hiked Lake 22.   Head North to Everett, East to Lake Stevens, North to Granite Falls, then 11 miles or so on Mountain Loop Trail to the Northern Cascades.  I was overly excited because I had Joel pull off on the first stop, which turned out to be the trail to Heather Lake.  Upon realizing we weren’t to the Mount Pilchuck trail, we continued on the switch-back dirt road awhile farther to our destination.  Just getting out of the car revealed a grand view of the nearby mountains:

The trail itself was, as expected, a fairly steep ascent.  I imagined taking a lot of water breaks, and getting to the top slowly but surely.  Starting off, the trail was very muddy, but soon dried out.  Our next, far worse issue then appeared:  bugs!  They were trying to bite us like crazy (especially Joel).  After what felt like a ton climbing, we approached the one-mile marker.  We were bummed to find that we were only 1/3 of the way up, and things were looking to get more difficult upon finding a steep hill made up of all rocks.

But the good news that made me want to continue was that we were finally getting a sneak peek into the spectacular views this hike is well-known for.   I declared:  if we can’t continue, at least we didn’t drive all this way for nothing!

But my excitement was short-lived, because around the bend, a mother carrying a young girl warned us that there was a steep patch of snow & ice that they kept slipping off — it sounded very dangerous (the author of our guidebook claimed ‘the snow rarely poses a problem’).  It was at this point that I thought of all those scary stories you see in the news, and decided to be honest with myself:  I wasn’t physically ready for this hike.  We agreed that we’d head back the way we came, and that’s when I got out my cameras (lets face it, the real reason I like hiking).

Mount Baker as viewed from Mount Pilchuck @ 100mm (cropped sensor camera)

I created several panoramas in order to portray just how vast the view is (not quite atop) the mountain.  For the horizontal shots, click on the thumbnails to view full size.

(This one was actually from the parking lot, if you’re not a hiker!)

Well, Mount Pilchuck, you’ve won this time.  But we’ll be back for another try this fall when your snow has melted from all of the sun we’re finally going to get in August *fingers crossed*.