I hiked the Chain Lakes trail in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and I was blown away.

Epic natural beauty

It is hard to describe the awesome landscape of this North Cascades region. There are bleak, rocky outcroppings with huge rockslides and fields of snow. There are lush green spaces with spruces, pines and wildflower meadows. Then there are alpine lakes that are turquoise in hue and unbelievably clear and inviting despite being frigid.

The best comparison I have to mention is fantastical western landscape paintings from the 19th century or the scenery in the video game Red Dead Redemption 2. But there’s no substitute for being in it.

Companions

I went with a group. I have an increasingly well-founded and realistic fear of encountering disaster out there so it’s reassuring to go with others instead of solo. Among the many things that can go wrong are flat tires, falling down a cliff face, car crashes, getting lost, and having a bad reaction to a plant, bug or the elements. I read with horror about a family of three and a dog who died on a hike recently from simple dehydration. Other recent cases involved underprepared solo hikers who suffered days of delirium and hunger before being found only a short distance from the trail.

One companion was a Philippines-trained medical doctor who helped me a lot with an eye problem that was bothering me throughout the hike. She was a natural leader and kept everyone safe and organized. She told me about the protracted process of passing the medical boards in the US and how it’s not worth the time away from her family and the rest of the great life she’s living. I am often struck with the compassion, attentiveness, and helpfulness of some people. I contrast it unfavorably with my own behavior, which tends to involve not getting involved. But I am learning and following good models like her.

A dip in the icy lake

Despite the cold water, I really wanted to swim in an alpine lake that day. I jumped in just as the sun mercifully came out and I enjoyed the surreal nature of it. Treading in clear, deep waters on a mountain under even higher peaks was visceral yet unreal and I felt in touch with natural elements and the grand, inexorable forces that shaped the lake and mountain over the eons. I looked up and wondered if a suited-up explorer would take a dip in a liquid methane lake on another moon a few centuries from now and feel something similar as the cold creeps into his limbs. Of course, I am a tourist taking well-beaten trails with active maintenance and crowd control. But one can relish a taste of being an explorer.

Trampling versus enjoying nature

Throughout, I noted the interesting tension between human access to nature on the one hand, and destruction and trampling on the other. The parking lots were full. The shitter was putrid and had a long line. The trail had a lot of people on it (though it was not bad for a weekend).

Overall everyone was considerate. I did not see flippant disregard for habitat such as littering and making fires. We discussed Leave No Trace principles. However, the impact of crows is undeniable. This includes the gasoline that’s burned driving from Seattle to there and then up the mountain.

I walked my favorite city trail in Seward Park, Seattle the next day and found it less crowded than this remote wilderness trail at Chain Lakes. Perhaps there is something about driving a long way that makes it appealing. But awesome natural sights are close by. I spend more time walking old-growth forests in the city than I do in far-flung old-growth forests. I want everyone to be able to enjoy natural spectacles like that and understand why they are worth preserving. But if everyone were to go there, it would be destroyed. The true way to connect people with nature while preserving habitat is to create green spaces within cities, where most people actually live.

I noted the giant adventure vehicles in the parking lot. One was a huge German tank. Another was an actual short school bus. There were about 100 Mazda Miatas that made it up the mountain (must have been a gathering). I cannot judge people for choosing rugged vehicles in rugged terrain. But I wonder if some of these are excessive (especially when they return to circulate in the city).

The Magic Mountain

I read about awesome landscapes more often than I experience them firsthand. In The Magic Mountain, a foundational book of my adulthood, Thomas Mann describes a mountain landscape being drenched in snow (as this lush green space soon will be):

Laden with snow, the greenish-black pine forest marched up the slopes, and between the trees every inch of ground was cushioned soft with snow. Above the forest, mountains of rock rose into whitish gray, with vast surfaces of snow broken occasionally by dark, jutting crags and ridges gently dissolving into mist. Snow was falling silently. Everything grew more and more blurred. Gazing into cottony nothing, eyes easily closed and drifted into slumber, and at just that moment a shiver passed over the body. And yet there could be no purer sleep than here in this icy cold, a dreamless sleep untouched by any conscious sense of organic life’s burdens; breathing this empty, vaporless air was no more difficult for the body than non-breathing was for the dead. And upon awakening, you found the mountains had vanished entirely in the snowy fog, with only pieces of them, a summit, a crag, emerging for a few moments and disappearing again. This soft, ghostly pantomime was extremely entertaining. You had to pay close attention to catch each stealthy change in the misty phantasmagoria. Freed of clouds, a huge, primitive segment of mountain, lacking top and bottom, would suddenly appear. But if you took your eye off it for only a minute, it had vanished again.