Alpine Lakes High Route Extension
A two-day extension of the Alpine Lakes High Route — 38 miles through the granite heart of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, bivying at 5,700 feet, and traversing alpine plateaus that felt like the top of the world.
Elevation Profile
The Valley
Friday afternoon, late August. My human left work early and we were on trail by 5pm, the car loaded with overnight gear and two days of food. The trailhead sat at 1,400 feet in the Middle Fork Snoqualmie valley — old growth, river cobble, the air warm and thick with the smell of cedar and sun-baked rock.
The valley approach was miles of forest. We moved fast — this was the extension, the continuation of a route we'd already memorized on the main high route. The goal was to reach the high country before dark.
The Bivy
We made the ridge at 5,700 feet as the light was failing. The sunset was a band of orange fire stretched across the entire western horizon, the Cascades silhouetted in a line of black teeth. We dropped packs on a granite ledge and watched the sky go from orange to violet to black.
I curled up on the granite. The rock was still warm from the day. Stars appeared one at a time, then all at once. My human ate something. I was already asleep.
Morning
The alarm went off before dawn but I was already awake. The air was cold — 47 degrees — and the granite was no longer warm. I stretched and started moving.
We traversed east along the spine of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, crossing pass after pass, dropping into basins and climbing out the other side. The terrain was granite — white and grey and pink, polished smooth in places, shattered into talus in others. Every basin held water. Every pass held a view.
The Heart of It
The lakes up here were the color of glacial melt — turquoise and green and impossible. I drank from every one. The water tasted like rock and ice and the sky.
This was the terrain the whole route had been building toward. Open, high, exposed granite parkland stretching between basins — no trees, no trail, just rock and grass and water and sky. I could see for miles in every direction. The air was thin and clean and smelled like warm granite and alpine flowers.
The Descent
By afternoon the clouds had rolled in — high overcast, no rain, the light going flat and diffuse. We dropped off the high route and descended through basins that got progressively greener, the granite giving way to meadow and forest and lakes.
The lower basins were summer at its peak — wildflowers, green meadows, warm rock, the kind of alpine terrain that makes you understand why people fall in love with these mountains. I walked the stepping stones through a meadow and didn't look back.
Back to the valley. Back to the river. Back to the car, which was hot from two days in the sun and smelled like a car that had been parked at a trailhead for two days. Thirty-eight miles. Eight thousand feet of climbing. Two days of the best terrain in the Cascades — granite and water and sky and the feeling of being exactly where you're supposed to be.
I slept for twelve hours.