Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Maxine Takes Me & Madame McNutty On Virtual Washington Hike To Stehekin

The past couple months Madame McNutty and I have been being tormented by photos on Facebook making us homesick for Washington.

Both myself and Madame McNutty currently live in non-scenic American locations, with me in North Texas and Madame McNutty near where Lee surrendered to Grant.

Yesterday the Washingtonian known as Maxine emailed some photos of this year's hike over the North Cascades to Stehekin.

One can get to Stehekin via one of two ways. Either hike in or float in on Lake Chelan, via boat or float plane.

The first paragraph of text in Maxine's email explains, I think, the first picture, which shows Maxine crossing a chasm on a foot bridge...

I had an excellent hike to Stehekin this year, the weather was perfect and there weren’t any scary drop offs. The only unnerving part was on the hike out Bridge Creek Trail; the North Fork bridge had collapsed last winter from snow and was replaced by a swinging bridge.  I worried about this crossing for most of the summer and it ended up being a piece of cake.

Continuing on let's see some more scenery with some more explanatory text...


I believe the above must be Lyman Lake. I believe this because of the following text from Maxine's email...

We hiked to Lyman Lake our first night, the 2nd day we hiked a portion of the Pacific Coast Trail that goes thru Plummer Basin (we hadn’t done this piece before, last time we took the unmaintained trail which was a huge mistake), spent a 2nd night on the trail and then hiked the last 12 miles to High Bridge on our 3rd day and made it to the Stehekin Valley Ranch in time for dinner. 

I have had dinner at the Stehekin Valley Ranch. You can see that via the Stehekin Eating webpage I made following the Stehekin visit. These are primitive webpages made a long time ago. Hence the small photos of low quality. And for some reason Google seems to flood the pages with ads.

Continuing on with another scenic wonderland photo...


Some more text from Maxine which contributes to the feeling that I'd really like to go on a real hike...

I haven’t got the Lyman Lake area out of my system yet, I’d like to go back and spend a couple of days at Lyman Lake and day hike to Upper Lyman and Spider Gap. So remote there, we only saw 2 other people on that portion of the trail. I didn’t get as much hiking in this year as I would have liked. 


Some final words from Maxine...

I didn’t get as much hiking in this year as I would have liked. I hope to get to Cutthroat Pass this weekend for the Fall colors. The Seattle Times did an article last weekend about Fall hikes off of Hwy 20 and it’s always a nuthouse on the trails after that. We’ll see...

I was hoping to go hiking with Maxine this past summer, but COVID postponed going to Washington, again, two Summers in a row.

The first time I ever hiked up the slopes of Mount Baker it was Maxine who led the expedition. I have photos of that expedition, but I don't remember if I ever digitalized them. They are likely in an old-fashioned photo album stored in a big box in my closet.

No comments:

Post a Comment