In the Pacific Northwest you must choose your travel surface, but choose wisely as the right travel surface will bring you enjoyment and adventure, and the wrong surface will take it from you.
You can choose maintained trails. There will be people. Discarded poop bags. Bluetooth speakers.
Or you can choose to forge your own trail. There will be brush. Navigational challenges. Cliffs.
Or you can choose rocks. Rocks are somewhere between being on a trail where you can move quickly with a minimum of brush, but a rocky route retains the adventure and navigational challenges of being off-trail. Definitely fewer people, too.
So of course, we chose rocks. Again. To be transparent, we did have to use one of the most popular trails in the state for the first mile of the day. We could have taken the same route as the previous week, but that would have been an adventure in itself. Starting early avoided the crowds, though I knew we'd be with them on the way back.
We split from the main trail to move through an area I'm coming to think of as Pika Paradise. It's a huge boulder field with great proximity to food sources and it's buried (BURIED) with snow in the winter. Pretty paradisiacal, huh? There were plenty of pikas and even a grouse not intent on trying to give me a heart attack by flapping its attack wings as we walked past.
The unofficial trail continues to join the main trail, but we split off where fresh rock tumbled down to the sub alpine meadow. When you look closely, you can see where others have gone. There are a few cairns, but not enough to effectively navigate the route. Instead, you look for where the rocks have been pushed level or where the easiest line is. Worst case, you forge a new path across the unyielding landscape. Our feet made hardly any impact.
Each time I've been up this way in the late summer, the few other adventurers are all skiers looking to get their monthly turns. September and October are hard times to find snow off the volcanoes. Here, there's a patch that lasts beyond the others. It might even make it to fresh snow on big snow/cool summer years.
Tink was stoked to get on the snow and I took a break for a few minutes to sit. Poor Shane, the new adventure partner put through the wringer a few weeks prior, looked at me with a mixture of confusion and tolerance. He even took a few pictures. He's a keeper.
Of course, we didn't come all this way just to sit in the snow. (Though I'm not beyond doing that.) There's a steep gully that gives access to the ridge just above the basin. I wanted to see if we could connect it to the valley just to the west where I frequently visit for its late season snow. (Can you sense a theme for my destinations?)
Like the steep rock field on our last adventure, this gully was the crux. It's straight forward, but there's a move at the top that stymies even Tinkham. I gave her a push and she made it up. I followed and Shane did, too.
Big views abounded including looking down on the destination of that super-popular trail albeit from a vantage point few see. We pushed up the ridge to where it might be possible to connect to the next valley, but alas, it was a little overly sketchy for this trip. While I'm prety sure it goes, it would have taken at least another hour to get to where we'd be able to say for sure and that was more than I was up for.
We returned the way we had come, spotting another side adventure for another time. There were more pikas and more rocks before we rejoined the trail and swam against the current of late-arriving hikers heading for the lake. Once again, I was happy with the decision to start early and go where others don't.
