Devil's Loop

Friday Evening — Harts Pass

We left Harts Pass at 6:17 PM on a Friday in late September. The sky had been drizzling all day but by the time we parked it was clearing — patches of blue between shredded clouds, the air cold and clean and smelling like wet subalpine fir. The plan: a full loop through the Pasayten Wilderness. North on the Pacific Crest Trail to Devil's Dome, down to Ross Lake, and back. Forty-six miles. Three days. I had my pack on and I was ready.

The first miles rolled through high forest — subalpine fir and spruce closing in on both sides of the trail, the light fading fast. The air was still. Everything smelled like wet bark and crushed huckleberry and the sharp sweetness of fall at elevation. I moved ahead, nose working, reading the trail the way I read all trails — with every sense I have. My human followed. We didn't talk. We didn't need to.

We pushed eight and a half miles before making camp somewhere around 10:30 PM. Dark by then. The temperature had dropped into the low forties. I curled up and listened to the silence of the Pasayten, which is a different kind of silence than anywhere else I've been — bigger, emptier, like the mountains are holding their breath. I was asleep in minutes.

Saturday Morning — Into the Color

I woke to overcast skies and the smell of coffee and frost. We were back on the trail by 9:15 AM. The clouds sat heavy and low, the kind of morning where the forest looks gray and close and everything is damp. Then we climbed.

Within an hour the trail broke above the tree line and the fall color hit me like walking into a painting. Huckleberry bushes had gone nuclear — scarlet red, blazing crimson, the kind of color that makes you stop and stare even if you're a dog. The trail wound through it in a thin brown line, climbing toward ridgeline.

We passed an old shelter — a collapsed wooden structure tucked into the trees, its shake roof sagging, timbers dark with age. I nosed around inside. It smelled like decades of wood rot and pack rats and the faint ghost of campfire smoke. Someone had built this a long time ago. Now the forest was slowly taking it back.

Jackita Ridge

By late morning the trail had climbed into the alpine and the views opened up. Golden larches scattered across the hillside like someone had lit candles in the forest. A rocky summit rose ahead — open and brown and treeless on top, flanked by subalpine fir and those burning yellow larches. Blue sky. Wispy cirrus. The kind of day where the Cascades remind you why you keep coming back.

The ridge dropped me into a rocky creek drainage. I stood on gray shale and stared down at the water while my human filled bottles. Tall spruce rose on both sides. A mountain with snow on it appeared through the trees. I was at about 5,800 feet and the water was ice-cold and tasted like glacial runoff and minerals and absolutely nothing else. I drank until my teeth hurt.

Below the ridge I found a small waterfall tumbling through yellow-leafed deciduous trees and mossy rock. The spray caught the afternoon light. I came down the trail toward it, ferns brushing my legs, the sound of falling water getting louder with every step. Water running over stone is one of my favorite sounds. I don't need a reason.

Then the trail brought me face to face with a granite spire. It rose straight up out of the forest — sheer gray rock, vertical cracks, snow in the shadows at its base. I stood in a meadow of golden brush and looked up at it. Sun was filtering through the trees behind me. This is the kind of thing that makes the Cascades different from everywhere else. The mountains here don't ease into it. They just suddenly appear and they're enormous.

The High Traverse

The afternoon was all ridgeline. Trail threading through basins of crimson huckleberry and scattered subalpine fir, mountains rising in every direction. I moved ahead on the narrow path, pack on, head up. The color was everywhere — red and orange and gold against the dark green of the conifers and the gray of the rock above.

The hillsides were streaked with color — bands of red huckleberry running through the green like rivers. I climbed through it with my nose full of the sweet, slightly fermented smell of overripe berries. The bears had been here. I could tell. The scent was everywhere — musky and rank under the sweetness. I didn't mind. This was their pantry before it was my trail.

The views from the high traverse went on forever. Deep green valleys dropping away on both sides, meadows turning gold at the edges, and mountain ranges stacking up to the horizon in every direction. I stood on a rock outcrop and looked south across the whole drainage — forests and ridges and haze and the faint outline of peaks I couldn't name.

By mid-afternoon the clouds were building. I stood on the ridge and looked north toward the big peaks — a prominent summit with snow in its couloirs and dark rock faces, flanked by more peaks fading into haze. The light was flat. The wind had picked up. The mountains looked serious. I looked serious too.

Devil's Dome

The trail crossed a broad subalpine meadow — golden grass, scattered fir, and a massive peak rising behind it all. The kind of meadow that makes you feel small in the right way. I stood in the middle of it with my tongue out and my ears back and the whole Pasayten spread out around me. The clouds were dramatic. The mountain was dramatic. I was just happy.

Then the final push. The trail steepened and the trees fell away and I was climbing through rock and thin grass toward the summit of Devil's Dome. At 6,749 feet I could see the full sweep of ridges behind me — layer after layer of Cascades peaks, getting bluer and fainter until they dissolved into sky. I was getting close.

Devil's Dome. 6,969 feet. The top of the Pasayten. I stood on the broad grassy summit with the whole world visible in every direction — mountains and valleys and ridges fading into blue haze all the way to the horizon. The wind was steady and the clouds were low and heavy and dramatic and I was the highest thing for miles in every direction. This is what I come for. Not the distance. Not the stats. This. Standing on top of something enormous and smelling wind that has touched nothing but rock and sky for a hundred miles.

I did what any reasonable dog does on a summit. I lay down. Paws out front, chin up, mouth open. The grass was cool and dry. The wind pressed my fur flat on one side. Behind me, mountains. In front of me, mountains. I wasn't tired. I was content. There is a difference.

The Descent

We left the summit at 5:30 PM. The descent from Devil's Dome drops over 5,000 feet to Ross Lake — one of the biggest continuous drops in the North Cascades. The first section crossed alpine terrain, skirting the base of a rocky face with a small stream trickling through. I looked down at the water and out at the mountains. Lenticular clouds were stacking over the peaks to the west. The light was going gold.

By sunset I was deep in the descent, pushing through dense brush on a narrow trail — huckleberry and mountain ash and vine maple in full fall color, orange and red and green closing in on both sides. The sun dropped below the cloud layer and the western sky lit up in bands of orange and gold. I kept moving down the trail toward it, the light on my fur, the whole forest burning around me.

We dropped below tree line. Below the color. Into dark forest and the smell of cedar and dirt and the sound of Devil's Creek getting louder in the drainage below. We made camp somewhere around 9 PM, in the dark again, the temperature in the mid-thirties at the higher summit but warmer here in the trees. My second night in the Pasayten. I was twenty-four miles into the day and I slept like something that had earned it.

Sunday — Ross Lake

Morning at Ross Lake. I stood on the gravel shore and looked out at the water — milky green-blue, stretching between forested mountains that rose straight from the shoreline. The lake level was low, exposing a band of gray rock and dirt and old stumps. A dock sat tilted on the exposed shore. The clouds were broken, light coming and going. The air smelled like lake water and wet stone and the faint industrial tang of the dam somewhere downstream. Ross Lake is man-made and massive and beautiful in the way that big water always is, even when it shouldn't be.

The trail followed the lake south and crossed Devil's Creek on a suspension bridge. But first — the gorge. I looked down into a narrow slot canyon carved deep into dark rock, sheer walls of gray stone dropping straight to turquoise water. Conifers clung to the clifftops on both sides. The water reflected the sky in a thin bright line at the bottom. This is what water does given enough time. It cuts through anything.

The suspension bridge stretched across the mouth of the gorge — wooden deck, steel cables, the lake opening up on the far side. Forested mountains rose behind it. The bridge swayed when I walked across it. I don't love bridges that move. But the view was worth the discomfort.

The last miles followed the East Bank Trail along the lake — low elevation, conifer forest, the trail cut into the rock above the water. I walked along a ledge with the lake stretching out beside me, mountains rising from the far shore into overcast sky. A few red-leafed vine maples clung to the rocky slope above. The air was cool and smelled like rain coming. It did come, eventually — a light drizzle that didn't bother me at all. I've been wet before. I'll be wet again.

Forty-six miles. Three days. Eleven thousand feet of climbing. One summit above everything. I walked every step of it and I would walk every step of it again. The Pasayten doesn't care whether you come or not. It's going to be there — the color, the ridges, the silence, Ross Lake sitting in its canyon like it's been waiting for nobody. I'm glad I came anyway.