Park Lakes: 8/5/2022
I’d long wanted to head up the Mineral Creek trail. As a sort of shortcut into the Cascade Crest, it cuts at least 10 miles of hiking to a granite cathedral called the Stone Kingdom, but the prospect of a lacerating, interminable bushwhack had always led me (and a lot of other folks) elsewhere. But this particular summer, I’d read that the kids* at WTA were throwing a work party on this very trail, and so it was time to go.
They’d done good work; the trail was wide and passable, and several cyclopean blowdowns had been bucked (handsaws only, this being Wilderness) and moved off the path. Heroes! But you can’t tame switchbacks, and black flies chewed the shit out of our legs on the way up. We looked for a campsite at the first of the Park Lakes, of which there were none. All but one were occupied by those pesky kids, but on our second pass a family of five seemed to be striking their shaded, lakeside camp. We confirmed their departure and set down our packs, waiting them out and guarding our good fortune. Who would choose to leave this eden so late in the afternoon?
A clear, mild night. Mosquitoes came, mosquitoes went. Jason and I impressed V. with tales of our wild youth. Later in the night two white-tail deer stormed out of the darkness and through camp. “Ayyyyyuuuuuughhh! Get out! Arhhhh! Go!” Neither Jay’s cries nor his spastic arm-waving moved the animals.
Bedtime. We returned to our tents to find one side of each (the panels facing away from the lake) turned to black under a blanket flies—not the biting flies of earlier, but a new glossy kind crowded together on the nylon, for warmth or for love, who the fuck knows. This was mostly a problem for me, the one who had pitched his tent with the door facing away from the lake. I brushed them off, they resettled. I aggressively brushed them off, quickly unzipped the door, and jumped in. Some came with me, and they paid the ultimate price.
* This isn’t a dig at WTA. It’s that only young people would be foolhardy enough to volunteer for this project.
August 6, 2022
Morning. Jay farted in his tent, somehow polluting the entire camp. A third kind of fly manifested: millions of gnats rising in a golden fog from the surrounding heather. Why would anyone leave this place?
By mid-morning, we were on our way up the hill toward the PCT. An option during planning was to drop down to Glacier Lake and into the Stone Kingdom, but a mood assessment led us instead to Upper Park Lake, and then NOBO on the PCT to an overlook far above Spectacle Lake, just before the trail begins a steep, switchbacky descent skirting the shoulder of Lemah Mountain. Magnificent views of the lake and the Crest north to Dutch Miller Gap and Mt. Daniel. On the way back down we watch paragliders riding updrafts over Chikamin Peak and the Gold Creek valley. It’s exciting, and I mention it to everyone we meet coming up the trail; after the third passerby gets the news, Jay gets annoyed and glares at me as if I’m the one who farted.
We endure one more gnat blizzard in the morning and pack out.
