nyone who lives in the Northwest and likes exploring the outdoors can attest to fact that a trip to the North Cascades in the summer is like traveling somewhere a thousand miles away. So typically inaccessible and fearsome is this conflagration of tempestuous mountains, that in the winter, whole roadways running through it are closed for an entire season. In 1974, the North Cascades Highway, a major thoroughfare, was closed from mid-November until the impossibly late date of June 14th of the following summer. With this sort of restrictive reality inhibiting travel throughout much of the year, when summer at last pierces the snowy veil of these dormant hinterlands, it’s “game on” for the adventurous hiker.

Probably the best part of moving to Seattle four years ago was being able to reconnect with friends I never thought I’d see again. One of these was my buddy Keith, whom I met in high school. We reconnected through tales told by my friends Marv and Bill, and sealed the deal through Facebook, making plans to bro down again for the first time in almost 20 years. One particular night earlier this year, on yet another disgustingly dark, cold, and rainy winter’s Seattle eve, Keith and I met in a bar in Ballard and threw down. Stories were told, lives were recounted, and spiritual sparks flew as we exterminated several lagers with extreme prejudice. In the midst of this conversational reverie, Keith and I discovered a common interest in challenging the wits of The Great Outdoors, so we made several potential plans for conquest when the clouds finally parted and the The Great Sun pounded through the ghastly solitude of this far northern hemisphere’s Dark Season.

After several months of infrequent but sincere internet communiques, we at last rounded up a plan that suited us both, surely just a mild prequel to the adventures that lay ahead: A simple overnight trip to the Hidden Lakes fire outlook in the North Cascades. About a month of mutual wrangling with our schedules went into inexorably solidifying plans that matched our individual realities, and then, off we headed into the Great Unknown.

Keith showed up at my place last month at about 9 am one summer’s morning. My alarm failed to wake me on time, but as it transpired, I was somehow able meet him ready almost the moment he showed up at my door. We headed off in my sturdy Land Rover very much on time for our conquest. Along the way, we talked about our lives and what had become of them since our bar blitz many months earlier. As we blasted along towards our destiny, a glance in my rear view mirror revealed the withering sight of a white cloud completely obscuring the traffic behind me. Engine trouble. I pulled over immediately, a microscopic poltergeist residing in a small part of my mind doing backflips, swearing to me me that what I was seeing was blue smoke, indicating scorched oil and a thoroughly cooked cylinder, equalling a completely ruined motor. A very decent amount of relief ensued as we soon found, after opening the hood, that it was simply a broken radiator hose belching white steam. Keith and I made many fruitless MacGyver-style attempts to patch this leak, and then limped, with the great help of Keith’s Garmin, to a service station about six miles down the road. Thankfully, their schedule was clear, so they took us in right away. Even so, the fix took about three hours out of our timetable.

A beautiful North Cascades afternoon luring us into our demise...

Maybe we should have known the cloud trailing my vehicle during this unfortunate event was a foreboding portent for things to come. Times ten.

At last on our way again, I remarked to Keith how this delay shouldn’t really be a surprise to me, because somehow, I’ve developed a strange habit of turning up at trailheads late in the afternoon. Neither of us was worried though, because our hike was supposed to be completely straightforward: about 4.5 miles of hiking and 3,000 feet of elevation gain, with a fire lookout staring us square in the face half of the way guiding our path.

Nearing our destination, we stopped at the local ranger station to ask some questions, and also popped off at burger joint to stoke up for the vertical strain that faced us. Keith’s Garmin led us straight to the turn-off from the main road, and with the blaring sounds of Kyuss proclaiming the way, we finally made it to the trailhead about 15 miles later. To our complete satisfaction, we found its small dirt parking lot empty. Given that it was so late in the day, we were sure to be the only ones on the trail. The fire outlook was all ours. Totally. Perfect.

We made our excited preparations and headed off up the trail. After signing in at the trail register, I said a brief prayer out loud, asking God for “extraordinary sights and extraordinary times.” Keith approved. As it turns out, God answered that prayer abundantly. Perhaps I should have kept on praying... for more mundane blessings like safety, good weather, and guidance.

Quite a stretch up the trail, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten my headlamp. I couldn’t believe the absurdity of this failure of judgment, but in my excitement to depart on our journey, I had only checked the trunk section of my ride for any remaining needed items, leaving the front and middle seats unsearched. I apologized to Keith, but he gracefully didn’t mind, remarking that there would probably be a candle at the lookout anyway. Still, I knew it was a horrible oversight. If things went wrong, I was screwed. A night plunged into complete darkness out in the wilderness would be nothing less than an David Lynch inspired nightmare. As I hiked, my mind echoed the image of my headlamp swinging from the peg I had hung it on next to the front passenger seat.

Glorious sights in abundance revealed themselves on the trail as upward we tread. A curious thing about the Earth is that, as it seems to me, every hundred miles or so, there exists a new ecosystem. Period. Sure, you can lump broad swaths of land together into generalized descriptions of ecological community, but from my point of view, there are tens of thousands of ecosystems; any given region is not exactly quite like the other, give or take a hundred miles or so. No words enough are available to describe it in detail, but this trail was again somehow totally unique from any other I’d seen. It was the North Cascades indeed, but this was the Hidden Lakes. Totally amazing.

It's a lot farther away than it looks: The ridge line on the horizon would be our stumbling ground.

As we hiked up toward the tree line, we encountered a ton of snow, so much so, that we eventually lost the trail. In our estimation, the best route available to our destination was straight up to the 7,000 foot ridge line, and then southward to our obvious destination. The map was completely clear, it seemed: To the ridge line. South about a mile and a half or so. Fire outlook. Food. Jack Daniels and tobacco. Sleep.

Hiking up the snowfield to the ridge turned out to be steep trouble, but we were making good time. I was stoked to see dark clouds moving in, thinking it would be completely great to get a little bit of cloud action into the mix. Up until this trip, I had always loved hiking in the strange, enchanting atmosphere of fog. We finally made it to up the top, and gloried in the sights that revealed themselves as we crested. The clouds were very close to submerging the entire ridge, but we were still able to look down on the lakes and unbelievable corridors of available mountainous terrain many, many miles beyond. It was right about at this time that I started to get cold, and another awful vision started to echo through my mind: My jacket, still laying on the backseat. Just a few moments of thought confirmed it.... I had forgotten my jacket, too.

I knew better than to panic. We would surely be at the fire lookout before long, no need to worry about the jacket. I had a few extra clothes in my pack, so if need be, I could just bundle up along the way and not be in too bad of shape at all. Still, it was another thoroughly stupid oversight, and I knew it.

A bit of discussion ensued before we both thoroughly agreed: To the south we would go. As we moved higher on the precipice of the ridge line, the clouds condensed steadily. We were thoroughly and fearfully socked in. At times, visibility was around 50 feet, and to make matters worse, we still hadn’t spotted the fire outlook. Just the sight of it from a distance would have been enough to calm our worries and push us onward toward certain victory, but no visual apprehension of it was claimed. We moved up and over several precarious rock summits and cornices of snow, judging that the only way out was up. Even though we couldn’t really see anything, if we gained elevation, according to our interpretation of the map, there was no other option but to stumble headlong into the fire shelter. So onward we climbed, through the thickening mist.

Stopping occasionally to assess our situation, I noticed tiny drops of water accumulating on Keith’s eyelashes from the thick fog that surrounded us. In my aggregate memory of mountain climbing and hiking over the last 20 years, I had never seen this before. I studied it closer, and sure enough, there were small drops of water condensing on Keith’s eyelashes. He certainly hadn’t been crying or anything of the sort. What I was seeing was a saturation of the water vapor held in the air. Wow. I remembered Bear Grylls admonition for cold-environment wilderness travel: “You sweat, you die.” Sweat or loads of water vapor, if you get wet and have to spend the night in the freezing cold, there’s no difference. We were both certainly accumulating this moisture all over ourselves.

On several occasions on this part of the climb, we were forced to ascend via a few sharp backbones of snow at the top of the ridge line in order to continue, which was kind of like walking on the apex of the roof of a house, on a weird-shaped, rounded, slippery surface. It was steep on both sides, and it made me really uncomfortable. To slip and fall to the right would mean a broken arm or foot. A fall to the left would deliver a broken leg or worse. We climbed for about an hour, with an ever present knowledge that our daylight was running out. Finally cresting a hilltop where we expected surely run straight into the shelter, we found that it wasn’t there.

A few hours later we would be searching for the trail on these steep slopes in the pitch dark.

After a solid stretch of confusion, interspersed with plenty of speculation, we decided, at the apex of this unknown peak, and in the darkening cumulus, to consult the mystical Garmin. We came to the decision that we would take a reading and hike back towards our original point of insertion on the ridge, and see what happened. As we began to trudge back, and to our utter surprise, the Garmin told us, compared to the GPS coordinates in our guidebook, that we had been heading the wrong way in the first place. The map and our mutual interpretation of it was in exact opposition to what the Garmin was indicating. Unreal. As we continued to sojourn, the readings apparently confirmed this conclusion, so we began to hurry, knowing we had to get back to our original high spot to even begin to figure out what to do next. Where I could, I started to run.

Our only hope on this stretch of the path was to follow our tracks back out, if we lost our original trail, we could get badly lost. For most of our downward descent, we had a good bead on our footprints, but then we lost them. We poked around for a bit, our visibility seriously compromised by the failing light and many rocky outcroppings on which we might have chose to skirt any steep snow we previously wanted to avoid negotiating. At a certain point in this search for our old footprints, I knew that we were lost. We had simply gotten lost.

This was the moment I’d been preparing for for years. I knew that if you ever find yourself lost in the wilderness, the only thing you can reasonably do is stop and wait for rescue; or, at the very least, visual proof of your exit point or path. We could find our way out in the morning. Stopping now was the only prudent thing to do. So many people have been reduced to bleached bones by not following this simple and wise advice out in the sticks. It was time to cease our explorations and bed down for the night. Keith inherently understood our situation as well, even pointing out a sheltered group of rocks we could sleep under. Despite my religious preparations for this unfortunate occasion and the confirmation of this reality by my wizened climbing partner, I once again abandoned good sense and stumbled around like a drunken sailor looking for the trail. Just like most of my days in real life, come to think of it. Even so, and thankfully, we somehow eventually found our tracks, and proceeded to vamonos. Eventually we found our insertion point, and further scrutiny of our worsening situation began.

Clouds moving in, just above our insertion point on the ridge.

It didn’t take long for us to ascertain that we couldn’t reasonably reach this Alleged and Sinister Fire Outlook due to the wicked terrain to the north, and because of the rapidly darkening conditions. Our boots were also completely soaked by this time, pretty much sealing the deal. We needed to evacuate altogether, and in a hurry. So then, down the bitterly steep snowfields we began, making great progress at first, again running wherever we could. At some point early on the way down, Keith turned on his headlamp out of sheer necessity, as I followed. About 15 minutes into the down-climb, we lost our tracks in the snow. Looking around in near darkness, what I feared most for our descent had indeed taken place. The late afternoon sun had, by this time, melted away our original footprints, blending them almost perfectly with the surrounding snow. Keith decided we should head downhill to the left, and since I wasn’t convinced about which way we should go, I followed him willingly. We hiked downward on even steeper snow, hacked through a patch of trees, and then ran into another thicket of trees just a bit later, on an even steeper incline. Keith began to descend through a separation in the compact shrubbery, and the next thing I knew, the only thing I could see of him was his head as he slipped almost straight down, one hand gripping a sturdy branch. The terrain was quickly heading toward vertical. We decided that we must have chosen on the wrong path, and started the arduous business climbing back up to our previous location. Upon arriving at this spot, it was effectively completely dark, and we still had hours of hiking ahead of us. Exploring for a good long stretch in the dim light of Keith’s headlamp, we finally found the trail on a swatch of dirt to the east. It was big relief to be on a solid ground again.

Shortly this good feeling would pass, because soon the switchbacks in the trail intersected with another indomitable snowfield, causing us to wander off into yet another white arctic wasteland as the submerged trail veered somewhere underneath us, 150 sharp degrees in the opposite direction. This was really bad news. If we couldn’t find the trail, we’d have to stay the night out there somewhere on any available ground. The alternative would be wandering around on glacial permafrost or the adjacent mud fields until dawn. We took turns searching for the trail with Keith’s headlamp, back and forth, here and there, with one of us standing on the original spot we’d lost the trail between the borderline of snow and dirt. Without a headlamp, I was feeling pretty helpless, as all I could do was watch the diminishing light of Keith’s light virtually disappear at times in the dreadful fog. A long time later, we finally found the trail again on some anonymous edge of the endless morass, and off we went again.

It didn’t take long, however, until we were confronted with the same empty situation. More standing around in the dark murkiness and waiting. Getting cold for lack of movement and being wet. Trading the headlamp and starting my own search. Hearing Keith’s voice behind me in the distance. The blur of featureless snow illuminated by bobbing halogen. Over and over, again and again. Searching. Nothing, all the same. Again and again. Cold. Nothing. Nowhere.

Keith pondering our fate under a cornice on the ridge line. It's starting to get dark.

As we bumbled about, I apprehended in plentiful measure that I was totally stoked to have Keith there. He never got discouraged, never complained, never gave up. There is no substitute for that, nothing. When trouble is deep and your climbing partner never gives up, you have won half the battle right there. We had both been through a lot already and were both toward the end of our reasonable rope, but there within him was an invisible light flickering inside, encouraging his way.

Finally, we found the trail yet again, and the death march continued. Not long after... lost again on the snow. More searching. And finally, a lot less time spent than before, we found the trail yet again, this time at a point where we were virtually assured there was only dirt trail left. We were quite happy about this. Quite. We also knew we still had a very long slog ahead of us to get down to the trailhead.

So we stumbled onward in the darkness, my gaze fixed fully on the dim, strange light of Keith’s bobbing headlamp ahead of me on the trail. So thoroughly soaked were my boots by this time that the many streams we had carefully negotiated on the ascent were slogged through without concern of any additional dampening.

As if we hadn’t been through enough, by some thoroughly strange twist of fate, over and over and over again we both slipped and fell hard onto the merciless ground via the super slick root systems that glared up at us, exposed from the wearing of many occasional footsteps on the oft-enough trodden path. Keith tweaked his knee on one of his flops. On another, I warped my abdomenal muscles horribly upon unique impact. I got up feebly, emitting a sick and lingering groan, apprehending that here was another encounter with the Great Deep that would never end. The trail somehow stretched interminably onward before us. Every tree and switchback became familiar. The sound of every gurgling stream and every large tree birthed a mental mirage... we were on the last 100 yards of the trail. I was stuck again in this strange movie, moving silently onward in the misery that rejects hope and just keeps going. Strathcona, Mount Jefferson, the Queen Charlotte Islands, Mount San Jacinto, Glacier Peak. All blurred together as I found myself here again. Just keep going. Maybe something good will happen.

At midnight, and at the end of this long weary trail, with no food intake for the entire journey, and hiking for the last eight straight dazed hours, many of them spent in darkness, we sighted the trail register podium, and sealed this wild journey with a joyous hug, vocally thankful to God that he had seen us through. I realized that here before me, as our stoked embrace disengaged, was among the very few of rare men, with whom I could trust my life. We signed the register to substantiate our exit: “Aliens above, and yetis below. Everywhere!” We collapsed at the back of the Land Rover with a laugh. Smoked salmon and bread and cream cheese and Milky Ways and Gatorade were devoured in the dark night. Just as we were finishing our feast, a final exclamation point of harrowing trouble started steadily down upon us: Rain. Had we been forced to hunker down in the rocks and snow at 7,000 feet with no considerable shelter, the Dark and the Cold and the Wet would have been our constant, deadly companions till daybreak.

Responses vary to almost having died. This one: "Thank you, Jesus!" Amen!

After our feasting and celebrations, I started the car and we rolled out toward Seattle. We were plenty stoked. Keith slept for awhile as the soft and ambient sounds of Massive Attack accompanied me toward home. I came to the conclusion that there is no such thing as summer in the North Cascades. There is also no such thing as making stupid mistakes up there, like I did twice in forgetting equipment. We got back to my place at around 3 am, said our goodbyes, and crashed hard. The next day, I looked at the map several times, and still don’t know what went wrong. I’m certain we’ll have to go back and find out.