Rachel Lake Hike

Labor Day weekend has rolled around once again; summer’s almost over.  Kim worked Saturday and Sunday, and the Weather Service issued a bleak forecast for the Seattle area.  So Bonnie and I packed lunches and trail mix, grabbed our boots and our cameras, and headed to the east side of the mountains for a hike!

We drove ten miles east of the Snoqualmie Pass and turned north approximately 13 miles past Lake Kachess to the Rachel Lake trailhead.  The skies were mostly blue and the conditions perfect for a hike:  cool and dry!The early going was a tad confusing — there was a tricky to spot the “Y” in the trail only a minute from the start, and we encountered two hikers who missed it going up and doubling back.  But our GPS pointed us in the right direction, and we began the gentle rise at the start of the hike.  We wandered along the creek for much of the early going and encountered lots of old timber, wild raspberries, thimbleberries, huckleberries — mostly picked clean by birds and bears — and a few wildflowers clinging to late spring in the mountains.

But about half way in, the politeness of the trail ceased abruptly and the path steepened sharply, often with big rocks and large roots to step around and over.  Soon, we were rather sweaty.  Views of the valley below opened up expansively.  We noticed that descending hikers were bundled up smartly, a sure sign of a chilly lake area.

About 1800′ later and 3.5 miles later, we arrived at beautiful Rachel Lake, largish for a mountain lake. We found some exposed slabs to rest on and ate our lunches and some trail mix.  Local chipmunks provided comedy entertainment, one nearly climbing on a motionless Bonnie and another boldly digging into my pack until I shooed him away.  We’d hoped to warm up and dry off in the sun at the lake, but periodic chilly gusts swept across the lake too frequently for us to warm up, so we only hung around and enjoyed the views for about thirty minutes.

On our trek back to the car, we encountered some hikers who found a slow, anaerobic burn in the woods, an underground channel of very slow combustion underneath where some bozos had a bonfire near the stream.  The ‘ground fire’ may have burned for days for all we knew, and given opportunity, could have erupted into a forest fire.  With a trowel and sticks for wedges, we dug a hole about 18″ deep to a layer of hot, white ash and doused the area with water from the creek.  One large rock was so hot that a hiker burned her fingers trying to move it out of the way.  Evidently, some people think it’s a good idea to smother a bonfire a with fir needles and a bit of dirt while the bed of red hot embers smolder away atop a foot-thick layer of dry, combustible forest matter.

After loading our gear back in the car, we drove about twenty minutes further east to Roslyn to refuel at Village Pizza.

Click photo for photo gallery.

Rachel Lake

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