I hiked the remaining 150 miles of Washington all in one stretch. Between White Pass, WA, and Cascade Locks, OR, many hikers stop in Trout Lake to resupply, but I didn’t want to have to bother with hitching or getting a ride off trail, so I planned for a single long section.
Every NOBO hiker I’d met had told me that their favorite section of the entire PCT so far was Goat Rocks, a section shortly after White Pass known in part for a bit called the Knife’s Edge, where the trail runs atop a ridge for awhile with sharp drops on either side. I was excited to see it for myself, and planned a low mileage day to give myself plenty of time to enjoy the area. It did not disappoint.
Just south of the Knife’s Edge, there was an alternate leading up a peak called Old Snowy. Everyone had advised me to take it – “there’s actually a trail right to the top!” said the one hiker I’d met on the Knife’s Edge – so when the trail split, I took the path climbing up. The tune to ‘On Top of Old Smokey’ looped as an earworm in my head.
Was there a path all the way to the top? Well, a sort of user trail, sure, in the choose-your-own-adventure type of way. Did reaching the very top involve a small amount of unexpected hand-over-hand vertical scrambling? You’ll never know, because my parents read this blog.
By the time I reached the top of Old Snowy, smoke was starting to settle in the distance from a wildfire to the east, but I stayed long enough to enjoy the hazy but incredible views, and eat a package of cheese crackers, before returning to the PCT.
The landscapes and colors at this time of year were truly out of this world. It’s difficult to accurately convey what it’s like to walk along through a forest floor covered in the brightest scarlet blueberry bushes, or to climb a hillside feeling like I must be walking in the footsteps of King Midas with how brilliantly the golden grass shone. Pictures will never do it justice, but here are some anyway.
I did in fact see goats in Goat Rocks as well, but they were far away – a herd of maybe twenty or thirty grazing quietly up on a far-distant hill.
In subsequent days after leaving the Goat Rocks wilderness, I passed under the shadow of Mt Adams, and eventually the landscape slowly changed from higher elevation evergreens to the denser, lower-elevation forests mixed with oak and maple and alder. Occasionally I’d end up in a sort of wild-tangled forest so dense and enormous that anything seemed entirely possibly. Fallen trees sprouting entire ecosystems of their own, ferns taller than myself. The sort of forests to sprout fairytales along with the thick moss.
The PCT in Washington culminates at the Bridge of the Gods, which spans the Columbia River, aka the Washington/Oregon border. I made my way down to the bridge to find the center of the bridge was grate – no separate sidewalk for pedestrians. I walked the long length of it slowly and carefully, hugging the side guard as cars passed, occasionally glancing down at my feet and the river far, far below. It was an exhilarating finish to my hike this summer.
If I had to describe my time on the WA PCT in one word, it would be ‘joyous’. The scenery was nearly always breathtaking, the trail easy to follow, and all in all it was just an incredible section to hike. It may have been a shorter hike than I originally planned (although since this year CA closed all their national forests due to fires, I wouldn’t have been able to finish anyway), but the time on trail this summer was fantastic anyway.
I plan to write a gear review post in the coming weeks to cap off this year’s hiking, but for now, let me finish with a few more of my favorite photos.
