Alpine Lakes Wilderness: a solo bike-to-backpack adventure:)

Alright. I said that maybe I would write about this later, and here I am, much later;)

But all summer, I’ve been jealously safeguarding a 10-day block of time I had off as my “sacred solo stasia time” — in part because last year I felt like I didn’t quite nail the balance of using time off to visit other people vs do my own adventure. I like both, and there’s only so much time, and I definitely didn’t end up feeling like I embarked on enough adventure fully of my own devising.

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(solo adventure in the mountains! — Make sure to notice Mt Rainier hiding back there looking like a cloud;)

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So, I had this 10-day block of time which, in true stasia fashion, I didn’t really decide what I wanted to do with until oh, the week before or so. But I did know that I wanted to bike, I wanted to be in the mountains, I wanted to go somewhere I hadn’t been before, and I didn’t want to spend a lot of time trying to get to where I wanted to bike and be in the mountains. (So, for example, I thought about going to Colorado, but I didn’t want to deal with logistics of getting my bike there or to take the time and fossil fuels to fly).

Alpine Lakes Wilderness was the perfect answer: I was able to take Amtrak to Seattle with my bike, super chill, then bike almost entirely on a variety of separated bike paths for over 90 miles to Roslyn, WA, close to where I wanted to access the wilderness. And there are no advance permits required for where I wanted to go, so it was perfect for a last-minute adventure.

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(The Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail featured heavily in my biking plans — this is a separated, unpaved path that, eventually, will go all the way across Washington:)

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This is my baseline map for any map nerds or if you’re interested in a visual. Red lines are biking (although I only drew it one-way, and it’s not a track of exactly where I went), blue lines are backpacking or day hikes, and red markers are mostly where I slept but some other random notes.

Here’s the general breakdown:

• Day 1: Amtrak train to Seattle, bike from Seattle to Cold Creek campground on the Palouse to Cascades Trail (about 69 miles (plus the 5 to Amtrak in Portland) plus some stupid extra miles of tomfoolery in North Bend when I lost — but reclaimed! — my wallet, and also a detour to see Snoqualmie Falls)
• Day 2: Bike to Deception Lake trailhead (about 42 miles), switch my gear over to backpacking and stash my bike in the woods, backpack in about 2 miles to Hyas Lake. Skinny dip before bed;)
• Day 3: Hike to Robin Lakes, set up camp, scramble up both Granite and Trico Mountains, come back, go skinny dipping again, love life. 9ish miles of hiking, some scrambling
• Day 4: Rain rain rain! I didn’t want to move on in the socked-in rain since I was mostly excited about the views as I hiked, so I spent basically all day reading and writing in my tent, plus exploring the area in between rainstorms. I also developed a river through my tent, but amazingly managed to keep most of my stuff mostly dryish. Mostly no hiking:) And very little eating since I didn’t really bring enough food to stay out for another day but had just big enough of a buffer that I thought I could do it.
• Day 5: Hike to Peggy’s Pond (9ish miles). The day started out rain still, but I hiked slowly and ate a million berries and by the time I got to places I hadn’t been yet it was starting to clear up.
• Day 6: Hike back to the trailhead (5.5 miles), switch back to bike mode and bike to Roslyn, absolutely demolish a near metric ton of vegan food (so delightful to find viable vegan options in itty-bitty Roslyn!); bike to Cold Creek campground (42ish miles)
• Day 7: Day hike day! Bike to the PCT trailhead, day hike to the Kendall Katwalk, but then I was unable to turn around because it was all so beautiful, so I kept going to Alaska Peak, and finally decided that for realz I really did need to head back if I was going to get back to my bike and be able to get to somewhere to camp that night before it was too dark. I think this was about an 18-mile hike and 17ish miles of biking. Camp at Carter Creek.
• Day 8: Bike to Rattlesnake Lake, day hike up Rattlesnake Ledges, swim in Rattlesnake Lake, bike to North Bend and get a hotel, a sweet, sweet shower, and a bomb vegan burger for dinner. 5 miles of hiking (plus a lot more wandering around North Bend); all told about 25 miles of biking. Lots of swimming too:)
• Day 9: Bike back to Seattle, Amtrak to Portland, bike to home. About 50 miles of biking with some bonus stops to find a smoothie in Seattle before I got on the Amtrak (it was so so so hot!)

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(just your average day in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness!:)

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I’m realizing that typing just a quick overview of a trip is hard for me, since it’s hard not to want to insert all the random stories and delightful pieces of this trip. Or terrible pieces, ha, like the road out of Roslyn that I almost fully bailed on.

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(this was a super cool thing! The Snoqualmie tunnel is THREE MILES long, long enough that you can’t see the end of it, and there are no lights. It was a wild experience to bike through it in complete darkness — save my headlight of course)

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(omg for realz, so, so, so many berries:)

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(Alpine Lakes is a very apt name for this place. This is from the top of Granite Mountain)

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(I very much enjoyed the critters:) That marmot above is definitely living its best lakeside life;) I also saw a herd of 50+ elk near North Bend while I was biking, and that was pretty neat too. Plus a million birds and on and on:)

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(random pathside art on the Palouse to Cascades Trail)

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Even though 9 full days doesn’t quite feel like enough time to totally lose myself in adventure mode — it’s not really long enough to fully lose track of how long I’ve been out and how long I still have left — it definitely did feel like an excellent adventure. When I was trying to decide whether to stay out at Robin Lakes for an extra day during my backpacking trip, I had this moment when I realized that damn, other than whether I have enough food, it totally doesn’t matter: I have no agenda, no itinerary, nowhere to be except wherever I want to be right now. And that was GREAT. I love that feeling so fricken much.

So, stasia solo adventure was a great success:) If I was going to do it differently, I would probably have taken a different way back to Seattle from North Bend — the I-90 path is nice (though frequently loud), but it would have been much nicer I think to take a different, longer route up to Kenmore and on the Burke Gilman Trail. (Though let’s take a moment to appreciate how rad it is to have multiple bike path options out of Seattle to the wilderness:) I also think that the hike up Rattlesnake Ledges would have been much more impressive if I’d done it before I’d spent a bunch of days in the full-on wilderness, ha. It was nice, but definitely a different kind of thing. But yeah, great success, and I’m so grateful to have this kind of thing so close to home such that I can “plan” it at the total last minute and still get out like this:)