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Ice Lakes
My friend Gary arrived at my place near Seattle on a Wednesday afternoon and we set off for the 3 hour drive toward Entiat, Washington in the east-central Cascades. We spent the night at his sister's house and left early the next morning for the Entiat River trailhead, elevation 3144'. It was warm (low-80s) and cloudless. The trail starts out wide and dusty. Motorcycles are allowed for the first 4.5 miles, until it enters the Glacier Peak Wilderness. It's a gentle grade and we didn't see any bikers, only a few horse riders. The trail was still quite dusty after we entered the wilderness due to the churning of horse hooves. We reached the junction of the Entiat River Trail and the Ice Lakes Trail, 8 miles from the trailhead, elevation 4363'. We had made pretty good time reaching this point, a little more than 3 ½ hours. We rested for a bit but the bugs were really thick. We crossed the river and headed up the Ice Lakes trail and our pace slowed for a couple reasons. The trail becomes steeper and brushier and the views kept getting better. We were heading up a valley with the Entiat mountains on one side and Spectacle Butte on the other and occasionally breaking out into small meadows. We passed several nice campsites and saw no one so we decided to continue on to the campsite at the head of the basin. This last stretch to the camp seemed to take forever!.it took us 3 ½ hours to do these 5 miles, but we finally arrived at the most beautiful campsite I've ever had the privilege of using, elevation 5500'. High snowy peaks surrounded us!.waterfalls crashed off the walls of the valley. There was a cool stream not 50' from our cooking area. We ate a great dinner, drank some wine and waited for the moonrise. The sight of the valley at night under the stars bathed in almost full moonlight was incredibly awesome! We awoke the next morning to cool weather and clouds. We warmed up with hot coffee then donned our daypacks and headed for the lakes. We saw signs of bear and saw a few deer on the way up the narrow waytrail. It took us over an hour to cover the distance to the first Ice Lake, elevation 6800'. The lakes are set in a cirque against 9000' Mt. Maude and the shores are covered with pumice, leftover from an ancient eruption of Glacier Peak. We saw one tent at the lower lake and none at the upper lake, elevation 7200'. We walked around the lakes - they are incredibly beautiful- and looked for the route up Mt. Maude, but the clouds began to lower, then opened up and began raining on us. We stopped at the uppermost lake and ate lunch, admiring the views of granite, snow, and crashing waterfalls. The temps were low enough that there was a bit of snow mixed in, so even though we had put our raingear on, we decided to head back to camp. The way down was slow, cold and treacherous. The trail was steep and slick and we were slowly getting soaked. We eventually arrived back at camp at about 4 and made some hot coffee and fortified it with whiskey. Ahhhh! The clouds eventually had a few sunbreaks so we could hang our wet stuff, but there was also a cold breeze blowing down the valley which made it really uncomfortable. We got into some dry clothes and had some more liquid nourishment, then made another great dinner. A solo hiker plodded up the trail at about 8 PM looking for a campsite (it was nearly dark!) and we invited him to throw his tent down on a flat spot at our camp but he said he'd try to make it to the lake using his headlamp. He looked well equipped but still. Gary gave up and crawled into the tent before it was dark. I stayed up as long as I could stand it then crawled into my warm bag. It rained a little during the night but for the most part just the wind blew (gusts were like 40 mph). The next morning was again overcast and chilly, so we wrung our stuff out and packed it up and headed down the trail at about 10 AM. We were still planning to go further up the Entiat valley to Entiat Meadows if the weather cleared, but it never did. The rain had helped with the dust, so that was a nice change. We covered the 13 miles back to the trailhead in less than 5 hours and our feet were killing us! All in all, a teriffic hike.
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