[mis]adventures

The story starts with a crisp, sunny Pacific Northwest fall day. Its ending is just as beautiful. The main characters include Erin and myself, two middle-aged Korean women from Olympia (Sunny and Shin), a middle-aged Korean man from Olympia (Mr. Chang) and many knights in shining armor.

The Enchantments are known for their stark beauty, unforgiving landscape, overly popular backcountry campsites, and blazing yellow larches come mid-October. The trail from Colchuck Lake to Snow Lakes near Leavenworth may be the most popular hike in Washington state. With good reason. Since permits for overnight stays require applications with deadlines in February, Erin and I decided to go after October 15th when permits were no longer required. Weather would be iffy, at best, but we had to see for ourselves what all the fuss is about. Two days before our requested time off from work, we decided that while it would be cold, October 20th-22nd would be a picture perfect time to go. There was not a single drop of rain in the forecast until the 23rd! The 20 mile one-way hike is arguably best done in 3-4 days, but we were willing to push it into 2 days to avoid rain/snow. This also fit with my plan to attend a very important funeral for a beloved patient of mine at noon on the 23rd near Seattle.

So we took off on Wednesday morning at 7am, both in separate cars so that we could do a one-way hike with a car shuttle. After stopping for breakfast and gas, driving the tremendously beautiful drive to Leavenworth, dropping Erin's car at the Mount Stuart parking lot, and driving back to our starting trailhead near Snow Lakes, it was already 1030. We divided up our gear and hit the trail at 1115.

Now, there are two ways to approach this hike. The more popular route seems to be to start at the Mount Stuart trailhead, with the hike beginning at Colchuck Lake and continuing straight up Aasgard Pass. I'm sure this situation does not legitimately apply the literal definition of "straight up," however by hiking standards, ascending almost 2300 feet in 0.9 miles allows for the use of the term. Once on top of Aasgard Pass, hikers reach their highest elevation of over 7800 feet at the Upper Enchantment Lakes, and the remaining 14 miles of the hike is downhill. While this route makes the most sense for a 2 day trip, as its total elevation gain is less and all gaining is completed at the beginning, we opted to follow the advice of a friend and a well-respected Pacific Northwest hiking legend by approaching the hike from the Snow Lakes trailhead.

(The previous sentence involves two separate people. We don't actually know a legend.) This route provides a progression of beauty, stark landscape and enchantment. It starts at a lower elevation and makes the gain to the Upper Enchantments over the course of about 14 miles, reaching the first of the "enchantments" in just over 10 miles.
So we opted for the "gradual" but grueling route in exchange for a rewarding progression. The grueling part was unexpected. Erin and I are both strong hikers, but we quickly realized that we were unprepared mentally for how difficult this hike would prove to be. Here are a couple shots from the first day's "gradual" ascent:

We intended on making Sprite Lake our campground at the recommendation of some hikers we met at the beginning of the trail. This, we thought, would get us to a campground just before sundown. However, at about 5:30pm, we had arrived at our first Enchantment Lake, Lake Vivianne and were totally out of juice. Those first 10 1/2 miles had kicked our butts, our legs were shaking, and the thought of going up another step was not approved by either of us. Not that Lake Vivianne was a bad place to call home:

It humbled us to be "defeated" by the day's hike. But we were happy with our spot nonetheless. We scoped out the place, found a spot for the tent by the water, a rock for food preparation, a toilet, and a perfect tree to hang our food from. Normally this is called a "bear bag," but I'm pretty sure the biggest threats up here were mice and mountain goats. The "kitchen" gave us an amazing view of the twilight sky over a valley with a full moon.

We bundled up and heated up some Indian food for dinner. A mountain goat approached us in the dark, a guest who under normal circumstances would be welcome, however after the previous week's deadly mountain goat attack in the Olympic Peninsula, we weren't taking any chances. It took only two claps to scare the poor guy away and it was off to bed for us. We stayed surprisingly warm and comfortable. I slept well, knowing that there was no threat of a bear attack. Erin, on the other hand, had mountain goat attacks on the mind and swore in the morning that a mountain goat had eaten our food and had come too close to our tent for comfort. How this supposed culprit got to our brilliantly hung bear bag up here...

I'm not sure...

The morning light was brilliant on Lake Vivianne

and I was eager to catch morning light on other lakes as well. We tried to make oatmeal and hot chocolate, only to find that our fuel canister was empty and no water could be boiled. Luna Bars it was. We pumped water, relatively unsuccessfully since I have very poor luck with backpacking water filters, and went on our way shortly after 9am.

By noon, we had made it past some absolutely breathtaking sights. We were fortunate enough to catch the larches in their bright yellow state at the Lower Enchantments.

Larches in the Upper lakes were past their prime, hence the length of the permit season when everybody wants a piece of the same thing. We were fortunate to see what we did and took the time to stop for pictures every few yards.

Walking past the sign for Prusik Pass, we realized that this hike would best be done over 4 days which would allow time to explore even more incredible backcountry areas. So we passed by the trail to Prusik Pass and trucked on, through boulder fields of granite, skirting around and above lake after lake, losing track of which lake was before us, behind us and beside us. As we entered the Upper Enchantments, foliage became rarer and granite became ubiquitous. The "trail" quickly became an exercise in cairn finding and boulder hopping. "Cairn!" became our favorite word to yell as it was a challenge to find the next stack of white rocks on top of white rocks surrounded by white rocks.

At one point we got lost for about a half hour. The map I had failed to show the trail moving between two small lakes just before Aasgard Pass so we wandered in a boulder field around frozen lakes for a while until we found a photographer who frequented the Enchantments and led us in the right direction. Since we had all day to get down the mountain and it was only about 1pm, we enjoyed talking with the photographer for quite some time. He shared many experiences of backcountry explorations which are chronicled here: http://www.panafoot.com/. He and his wife are living life with a "backpacker's mentality" as he calls it. The more stuff you have, the more weighed down you are. I wanted to live like this when I moved to Seattle; I didn't even have a bed. But when the people at work found out about that, I was practically forced to buy a bed, then came a couch, and the rest is history. His name was John and he shared a bit of route advice for descending Aasgard, "When in doubt, stay right."

Somewhere around 1:45 we started down Aasgard Pass, but not before taking a moment to relish in the view ahead of us. We were looking at the entire Cascade range from the East, with Mount Baker in the middle. The views were expansive, and utterly breathtaking.

Two day hikers were ascending Aasgard and we shouted, "Have you turned around?!" Their response: "Every five minutes." Their next comment was a bit of sound advice: "Be careful," they said, "the rocks are really loose." We began our descent and quickly became exhausted. I didn't want to do any more one-legged squats with a pack on my back! I looked at Erin and said, "I just need a break." We sat on the trail for a bit, resting our legs and taking in more of the view. We chatted with a couple of older men ascending for a day hike. The two friends had lost one another; the experienced one was on the trail, the stubborn know-it-all was proving his point by ascending his own route, up the icy creek to our left. They were cardiologists, neither willing to admit the other knew what he was talking about, experienced or not. Eventually they merged paths just above us; after watching the separated hiking partners reunite, we decided to start down again. We heard a strange noise at that time. It almost sounded like metal crashed. A noise that didn't belong, like the time I "heard" children jumping into a pool in rural Tanzania. There are places where certain sounds just don't exist and crashing metal in the wilderness is one of them. What followed was what made this adventure a little more memorable than any other.

We had heard a man yell, a "crash", a man yell and then silence. Looking at each other, Erin and I were clueless. Is somebody in trouble or is somebody really excited about the view they are experiencing? Then a woman yelled, a man yelled, a woman yelled, a man yelled.... We couldn't tell what they were yelling or where their voices were coming from. It sounded like it was on the other side of a ridge. Erin yelled and got no response. Probably just two friends trying to find each other. But then it continued, back and forth, one word screams. We began to have a sense of urgency, that something was not OK. Maybe a hiker was scrambling Little Annapurna just over the ridge and fell. We decided the only thing we could do was get to the trailhead as quickly as possible and call a ranger. Hopefully we wouldn't be making a big deal out of nothing.
As we descended, we saw a person waving her arms and running down toward the lake screaming. We could see where this person had come down from: the treacherous Left Side of Aasgard Pass. Erin dropped her bag and scrambled up. I kept my bag on, in case my pathetic first aid kit could be of any use. Probably 10-15 minutes later, Erin popped her head over a short cliff and yelled, "He's got TWO broken legs!" My first thought was, "how does she know they're broken?" Two minutes later, when I laid eyes on the man she was speaking of, there was no question he was suffering from two very badly broken legs.
We found a middle-aged Korean man on a flat rock, on a very steep section of the boulder field, next to an icy creek, soaking wet and shaking uncontrollably. Both legs had what we would later jokingly call "extra joints," below the knees. We had to assess him further, but how? We decided to check first for bleeding in case he needed a tourniquet. Erin held his ankles while I removed his hiking boots. We unzipped his removable pant legs and precariously lifted his legs to remove his wet clothing. Erin ran down to retrieve her bag so we could use her knife to cut off his wet socks, which were now tightening around his quickly swelling legs. Somehow, there was only a small amount of blood on his right shin from a superficial cut. This man was lucky. While his bones were protruding in places they shouldn't be, they were not braking skin which would cause severe risk for hemorrhage and infection. He didn't hit his head, he was alert and breathing fine. His pulses were strong. However he was cold and his left foot was the color of a cloudy sky at dusk. We knew the person we saw running down went to get help so our goal was to stabilize him until rescuers could come. We had to keep him warm. It was quite cold at 7500 feet. We got off as many wet clothes as we could and covered him up with everything we had to offer. My sleepingbag and liner, Erin's fleece pants were wrapped around his feet. He wore my bright pink beenie, we rolled him onto my sleeping mat to get him off the cold rocks. At this time another member of the man's hiking group came up with a couple of jackets and gloves and a little food. He had apparently been leading a hiking group from a Korean church in Olympia. There were 10 in total, 7 at Colchuck Lake and 3 who had continued on to Aasgard Pass. This is when we realized that the person who went to get help may not actually know where we are; all they knew was "Colchuck Lake." What we should do now was a huge question mark. It took us until 3:30 to get him to stop shaking. We laid our bodies on and around him to insulate him. At this point, Erin and myself, Mr. Chang, and Sunny and Shin were growing anxious as we had nothing to do but wait for help to come. Sunny asked me if I go to church and when I said yes, her face lit up. "Can we pray together?" she asked. Of course! What a neat picture, the four of us holding hands in a circle around Mr. Chang on the side of a mountain, praying in two languages, Sunny and Shin singing Amazing Grace in Korean.
Erin and I silently agreed that we would wait with them until help came. By our estimation of how far it was to the trailhead, a helicopter would surely arrive by sundown. From all the episodes of Rescue 911 I watched as a kid, I knew that a search and rescue would come by foot as well as helicopter to assess the situation. Then we could hike out with the hikers while the helicopter rescued our guy. However a couple hours later, we realized that maybe we should try to let more people know about our situation in case the person who went to get help didn't know where we are, so I went back to the trail and sat there for a while hoping to see one of the day hikers on their way out, but I saw nobody. I returned to our guy where Erin and I revisited our plan to stick around. We realized that the sun was starting to set and there was no sign of help. If all of us were stuck overnight up there, we'd probably have a much harder time staying warm. And at this point, we figured search and rescue wouldn't come until sunrise and finally realized that 4 hours after finding this guy, we should get ourselves out. We piled every extra piece of clothing onto Sunny and Shin, as they would be staying the night on an exposed, windy, icy cliff with Mr. Chang until help came. The forecast called for rain so we gave them our rain fly to cover up with, our jackets, rain and fleece pants, extra socks, Erin's sleeping bag, and our turtle necks. They gave us phone numbers of their loved ones so we could call them when we regained cell service. We took off down the boulder field, our goal being to get to the lake before dark, where we thought the trail would then just skirt around the lake and out. Estimated time for this endeavor: 2.5 hours. Actual time for this endeavor: 11.5 hours.
We started our descent off-trail, thinking we could shoot straight down where the person who ran for help had descended. Then we would meet up with the trail and skirt around the lake. We went down, but not as quickly as the sun did. It got dark extremely fast. Erin's headlamp was dying. Mine was still kicking, but it made boulder hopping at night a bit sticky. At one point, I looked up and was surrounded by bushes, and apparently had been for a while. There was a lot of backtracking, turning, and backtracking again. This was the most unforgiving landscape to be lost in! We were out of food, out of water, cold, and absolutely exhausted! Over an hour after leaving the scene of the accident, we had finally found a cairn! "Cairn!" quickly became the most beautiful word to ever leave our lips. I wanted to hug each cairn we saw. The elation lasted about 30 minutes when we suddenly realized there were no more cairns to be  beacons on our path. They simply ceased to exist. We were at a corner between the lake, a boulder field and a forest on a hillside. I reread our route description (backwards... as this was written for people beginning at Colchuck and finishing at Snow Lakes) a million times and concluded that this is where we needed to go up into the forest in order to get around the lake. I should have read that more carefully earlier. This was not going to be the simple "skirt around the lake" trail I thought it would be. We went up into the forest, met a dead end and turned around. Is that a cairn or did those two rocks just fall on top of each other? Who knew. In the dark it all looked the same. We went back to the last true cairn we saw, turned around and tried again. This time up and to the left in the forest. No luck. Back to the cairn. Again, up into the forest and to the right. No trail where there for sure had been a trail two steps before. Discouraged, scared, and fearing impending injury, we returned to our cairn. OK, we thought, at least here, we are not lost. We are on the trail. But now what? Erin said she was feeling like she was so tired she was going to hurt herself if she continued trying to find our way out of these boulders. I whole heartedly agreed. We were spent. The decision was made at that point to hunker down under a boulder until sunrise. Then we could see the trail and get the heck out of this place. We knew it would be cold, but at least bears weren't a threat up here. We knew we'd be fine, but the 8 or so hours until sunrise may make for the longest night of our lives. I cannot describe the discomfort of trying to sleep on frozen rocks in a small crevasse under a boulder with a rock as a pillow, wearing a couple of long sleeve shirts, a vest, hiking pants and gloves. But when I started feeling sorry for myself, I thought, at least I don't have two broken legs. Erin and I cuddled like we've never cuddled before, shivering when a centimeter of skin became exposed. We covered ourselves with the remaining part of our tent. As I tried to fall asleep with the fear of suffocating myself with the plastic of my tent, all I could think about is how terrible I would feel to miss the funeral the next day at noon, the funeral I told family members of the patient, "I wouldn't miss for the world."
It was a miserable night, my feet falling asleep, but my body not being able to as every time I fell asleep, my head fell off of my rock pillow. Erin and I were so sandwiched between rocks that for one of us to move, we had to ask the other to move first. It was miserable. I kept dreaming about how great it would be to be led out of this place, not having to think about where each next step should be, not having to worry about whether or not we were on a false trail. Then I'd be brought back to the present by the sight of mice crawling above our heads. I tried to tune out the sounds of the critters around us. Erin tuned in to them, as she had done the previous night when she "heard a goat eating our food." Suddenly she said, "I hear voices." "No you don't" I thought. "No, really" she said, "listen."

"Heeeeeeeyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!" I yelled at the top of my lungs as I leapt out of our rock cave. The sight I saw confused me for a bit. What I saw was a couple of crazy college-aged guys going for a night hike. Not our knights in shining armor we had prayed for. Oh wait, they were one and the same. The first two guys were 20 years old, in shorts and tee shirts. Following were at least 7 other men, all here as part of search and rescue en route to save a guy with two broken legs. Instead, they stumbled upon us. We filled them in on our story and their response was, "you know you're only 25 feet from the trail, don't you?" YES WE DO. This is where we say we weren't lost, we just couldn't find the next step.
We decided to wait until they returned from Aasgard Pass and hike out with them.  We would have someone to lead us out of the Enchantments after all! AND, I would make it to the funeral! I said this out loud and one of the guys responded, "Did you just say you get to go to a funeral?" "YES!" I excitedly replied,  "This is a very important funeral!"
They made our rock their meeting place and convened with 4 other men, medics and EMTs who had come to treat the injured hiker. The others had come bearing extra clothes, sleeping bags, food and water. They gave us food and sleeping bags and it was such a joyous moment. No more worries! Help was here, in the middle of the night. It was such a beautiful thing to know that these guys had come out here in the middle of the night to help someone they had never met. The uncle of our co-worker who called himself "Grumpa," two college students who laughed the whole hike out with us, and many other busy people taking time out to help someone who had gotten themselves in trouble. THANK YOU all! It's a helpless feeling to just wait for someone to rescue you, as it felt while we were waiting with Mr. Chang. But it's amazing to know that someone will come.
Erin and I took a warm nap while the guys took some much needed morphine to Mr. Chang. It was Midnight when they met up with us and it would be a couple more hours before most of the men returned with Sunny and Shin in tow. A couple of them were prepared to stay behind with Mr. Chang until he could be lifted out of the mountains by a helicopter. We heard the group approaching and rose from our sleep to be reunited with Sunny and Shin! Sunny said the most beautiful thing to me. She said, "Cara, it was so beautiful up there. The sky and moon. We were so warm and peaceful. We prayed and sang songs and laughed." Incredible. More than I could ask for.

The first helicopter had attempted to come around 3am, but aborted due to sub freezing temperatures. The second had the same problem. Around 6am as we were nearing the end of the trail, a helicopter still had not been able to make it over the pass. We would later find out that it wasn't until 10am on Friday, almost 20 hours after Mr. Chang fell, that an Air Force helicopter was able to lift him out of the Enchantments.

It turns out, the hike out of the Enchantments is not the easy trail we had imagined as we headed down the boulder field at dusk. We had underestimated the amount of time and energy it would take to get to the trailhead, and had therefore severely underestimated the amount of time it would take for help to arrive. This may have been our biggest mis-judgement of the event. However, when all is said and done, it ended as well as it could have and we are thankful to have been able to help.

Sunny and Shin have named us their "angels." "You are our angels sent to us from God to save our lives. Without you we would surely have died up there." This is the message I received on my phone on Saturday. The following Thursday, Erin and I were able to visit Shin, Mr. Chang, and Mrs. Chang at Harborview Medical Center. He had just come back from his 5th surgery in 6 days and was a little groggy, but not too groggy to wake up and, in his thick accent, say, "thank you, you are my angels. Thank you." It makes me happy in a very significant way to see him in that hospital bed, with two legs, his wife standing next to him with tears in her eyes. She thanked us for saving her husband's life. We will never know if we played a part in his survival or not, but to know we had a part in imparting peace on that cold and scary mountainside during a time of such uncertainty is a priceless thought. Our lives will always be intertwined due to that night on Aasgard Pass. And what a night it was!

I made it home in just enough time to attend the funeral. It was a beautiful celebration of a life well lived. I hope I make you proud, Vern!