Hiking The Enchantments Is Beautiful Agony
I wasn’t an “outdoorsy” kid. I didn’t play sports. Instead, I played in the orchestra. It wasn’t until college that I realized there were people who grew up hiking and camping in national parks with their families. When I moved to Seattle, a city defined by its surrounding nature, I felt like The Foreigner in many ways. Did everyone here spend every weekend in the mountains? Like many Seattle newcomers, I started with Rattlesnake Ledge, a 4 mile out-and-back trail. Now, if someone asks me if I’m a hiker, I don’t know what to say. “I’m not a hiker, but I have hiked a lot.” How many times do you have to do the verb before you can identify as the noun? After hiking The Enchantments this weekend, I’m still wondering.
In Seattle, The Enchantments are famous, regarded as “the crown jewel of hiking in Washington.” They’re so popular and pristine, the state has a strict permitting system for camping in the region. The chance of winning the permit lottery for The Enchantments is about 6% — roughly the admissions rate for MIT. The only way to go through the “core” zone without a camping permit is to do it as a day hike. The trouble is that the point-to-point hike is about 20 miles long with over 5,000 feet of ascent.
Instead of taking two cars to drop at each point, we boarded a packed van at 5:00 AM to shuttle us from Snow Lakes Trailhead (where we would end) to Stuart & Colchuck Lake Trailhead. There were at least eight vans and dozens of cars at the trailhead. During the hellish, 20-minute ride, jostled by turbulence worse than a crash landing, I realized I was surrounded by lunatics eager to hike 14 hours before dawn—and I was one of them. Just as I wouldn’t consider myself “outdoorsy”, I also wouldn’t consider myself a “morning person”. Unfortunately, those identities seem correlated, judging by the crowd of hikers bursting with excitement at the trailhead. Operating on four hours of sleep, I donned my headlamp and took my place in the caravan of people trudging up to Colchuck lake.
However, as the sun began to shed first light, and my body threw off the veil of sleep, I saw my first glimpse of the peaks surrounding Colchuck Lake. The rising sun painted the mountainside red. I began to get excited. A little while later, we arrived at the lake, and I started laughing out loud. It was so stunning it shocked me. It was so gorgeous it made up for the morning’s torture. We ate some breakfast and continued to hike around the lake. The beauty bolstered me for the next challenge: Aasgard Pass.
Looking up from the bottom of Aasgard Pass
Aasgard Pass has been described as “punishing”. It’s a Sisyphean task to climb 2,300 feet in about 0.9 miles over loose gravel and giant boulders. At first, it was just physically difficult, but as I climbed higher and the terrain got steeper, it also became technically challenging. Other hikers intuitively scrambled to the top, while I deliberated over every foot placement for fear of starting a rockfall or throwing myself backward off the face of a mountain. After I got to the top, looking down I couldn’t believe what I had done. My calves had seized up, my legs were shaking, and my nerves were shot. But I did it. And the reward was spectacular.
The top of Aasgard Pass
The next six or so miles of the hike were as beautiful as everyone had promised. This terrain wasn’t especially steep, and we enjoyed a brief respite from the slog as we admired the scenery. The sun was out on a perfect fall day, and all the larches had turned golden yellow, making the whole landscape glow. There were several lakes, but each one was special, and we exclaimed at the beauty of each one, like receiving one heartfelt gift after another on Christmas morning. The most precious gift of all was seeing a mother and baby goat wandering around the lake.
Larches in full sunlight
Mountain goats in The Enchantments
The last six or so miles of the hike were the hardest. Not only does the eye candy dry up a bit but also our bodies were already smashed to pieces from the 14 miles that came beforehand. Plus, most of this last bit was on a downward slope. As I butt-scooted down some of the larger rock faces, my partner quipped, “You haven’t reached mountain goat status yet”. Having lost all agency over my legs, my toes kept crashing into rocks, and my knees were screaming in agony from absorbing my weight distributed over thousands of downward lunges. Real “hikers” continued to pass me on the trail, taking me back to an era when the athletic kids lapped me on the track at gym. The sun was beginning to fade, and we knew that we would be finishing the last couple of miles in the dark.
After 13 hours and 49 minutes, having covered 20.77 miles, we arrived at the car with a sense of relief and accomplishment. I may not have reached mountain goat status, but am I a hiker yet?
