Birthday Trip

I took the day off and went into Slide Lake on Wednesday the 7th, my birthday. This area has a lot of history for me and my family. My grandpa and great uncle ran a trap line in this area around the turn of the last century. When they first went into that area, Illabot Lake, the lake that Slide Lake drains to via Otter Creek, was about 70 feet deep throughout most of its basin which is over half a mile long and about one thousand feet wide. At some point during the years that they ran this trap line, Illabot Lake filled in overnight in one huge landslide event. The story goes that they went by the lake on their usual rounds and everything was the same as usual but the next time they came by several days later, the lake had been filled in by a big slide.

I have heard and read accounts of Illabot Lake from later years after the turn of the last century, and I have air photos from the U. S. Forest Service from the late 1940’s that show standing water in the lake basin near the outlet, so evidently the lake didn’t fill completely in. But, judging from the air photos, what remained of the lake was only a small fraction of the basin and I can imagine that to my grandpa and great uncle, it had been as good as filled in. Over the years, Illabot Creek filled the remainder of the lake basin and all that now remains is a large wetland flat with a lot of side channels and beaver ponds.  

As far as land forms created by glacial activity, the Illabot Creek valley is quite interesting. During the last ice age, the mouth of Illabot valley was cut down to the same level as the Skagit Valley in that area so the lobe of ice that occupied it must have been comparable in size and force to the ice that occupied the Skagit Valley. I was on a crew that surveyed Illabot creek for the U. S. Forest Service in 2005 and we encountered several kind of strange deposits in the creek valley. One that I remember in particular was a pile of boulders maybe 4 to 6 feet in diameter stacked maybe 50 to 100 feet high in the middle of the valley with old growth trees 4 to 5 feet in diameter growing on it. Illabot Creek splits into two channels around this deposit for about three quarters of a mile. There were one or two large boulder piles in the valley as well, though not as impressive. While on personal explorations and hunting expeditions I also encountered several moraines at about 5000 feet in elevation. These were well down below the timber line and had old growth timber growing on or around them, so they are not of recent origin.

Another interesting feature of this valley is a stand of Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) around Slide Lake and along the trail, extending well up Otter Creek past Slide Lake. Engelmann spruce is more typical of drier climates and is more common in the mountains on the east side of the Cascades. The stand in this area is probably a relict population that has survived from the last ice age when conditions here were much drier.

I have heard that Illabot (Ill-ahh-but), is an anglicized Indian word that means “run them around” because local bands of Skagits hunted goats on Illabot Peaks by running them around some cirques until they got tired enough to get close enough to kill.

I remember my dad taking me up Illabot Creek when I was 7 or 8 and I have spent a good bit of time in this area. Slide Lake was one of the first places I went after I had gotten my driver’s license.

Slide Lake gets a little trashed because it is so close to the road but it also a nice higher elevation place that is relatively easy to get to for folks who otherwise couldn’t experience places like this. I brought my daughter in here when she was only a little over 7 months old and I brought here again at 1 year and 7 months. I also remember running into some older folks on the trail just after the road had been reopened in 2010. You could tell it was all this guy could do to get up the trail but he had his fishing pole and a smile on his face a mile wide. I didn’t use to think so, but I now think it is worth a place getting a little trashed for the sake of letting a more diverse group of people experience backcountry places. I hope the road doesn’t end up getting closed.

This year the trail looked like it had seen a lot of use. There were several rigs in the parking lot and we ran into two different parties of people. It looked like the trail had been logged out late last year. There were a few windfalls that made the going a little difficult, especially one that had fallen down the middle of the trail near the bottom but overall, it was in good shape.

As I walked the trail, I realized that the trail itself goes through huge piles of boulders that are not unlike the ones that I mentioned earlier in the channel of Illabot Creek. I also noticed that, along with the Engelmann spruce, there was subalpine fir (Abies lasiocarpa) and mountain hemlock (Tsuga mertensiana) growing in the boulder piles. Most reference books will tell you that the elevation range for these species starts somewhere around 4000 to 5000 feet but it is not uncommon to see subalpine fir growing at much lower elevations especially in larger talus slopes. The lowest growing population of subalpine fir that I am aware of is at about 1600 feet in elevation.  

View of Sauk Mountain and Skagit Valley in Rockport area from logging unit on private forest land on Ilalbot Creek Road. This photo was taken in the fall of 2010.

View of the Picket Range in North Cascades National Park from a logging unit on private forest land. Some of the best views one can get of North Cascades National Park are from areas on the periphery of it where you can get up higher and there are openings in the forest. There are not many views like this that can be driven to within the park boundaries.

Snowking Mountain in the Glacier Peak Wilderness from Illabot Creek road. 

Mount Chaval and the former Illabot Lake. At the turn of the century, or so I have been told, all of the flat area pictured was a lake about 70 feet deep that was almost completely filled in by a huge landslide event. At the time there were no roads in the area, only trails. This photo was taken in about 2008 in the fall from a part of the Illabot Creek road beyond Otter Creek that is now closed. 

Mount Chaval from the former Illabot Lake. Illabot Creek and Otter Creek flow through the flat where Illabot Lake used to be. There are a number of beaver ponds in the area. This photo was taken in the fall of 2010.

Boulder pile along the Slide Lake trail. There are boulder piles similar to this with old growth timber growing on them in the channel of Illabot Creek and on the ridges above Illabot Creek. 

More boulder piles. 

More boulder piles. 

Several years ago, a windstorm blew through that had some small, intense microbursts of wind that caused a lot of damage in the lowlands. One of these microburst also hit along the Slide Lake trail, blowing down a patch of old growth. The trail was cut out last year I believe. 

Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii). This tree is more typical of drier forests on the east side of the Cascades but it is quite common along the Slide Lake trail and on up Otter Creek to the Hamar and Enjar (Otter) Lakes area. 

If you have any doubt if it is an Engelmann spruce, grab a bough. The sharp needles are stiff enough to actually be painful to grab and hold. 

The slide that forms Slide Lake. The lake itself is just on the other side of this pile of boulders. I have heard my dad and others talk about the slide that created the lake like it had happened recently i.e. within the last hundred years or so but this pile of boulders is the only slide that I can identify in the area and the trees growing on it are hundreds of years old, just like all the other boulder piles in the area. So the lake must have formed well before European Americans ever appeared on the scene. The flat in the foreground is a pond or small lake five or six feet deep early in the season when there is a lot of snowmelt runoff. It has dried up every year that I have ever been in the area. 

Slide Lake. The "mountain peak" in the distance is actually just the shoulder of a ridge running off Snowking Mountain. 

Sacha and Vashti at Slide Lake. Note all the bare ground. Slide Lake typically goes down many feet every year from a full pool elevation created by snowmelt runoff. By the end of the summer, it is often more stream than lake. 

Leathery grape fern (Botrychium multifidum). This was growing in the dry lake bed. Botrychiums are not true ferns and they seem to be fairly uncommon though they are also easy to overlook. 

Coastal cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki clarki). It is hard to tell from this photo but the maxillaries (upper lips) of these fish extend past the eye socket. All had deep red slashes under the jaw like the upper one. Also note the relatively small (fine) spots that extend below the lateral line running down the fishes sides and the lack of deep red stripes down the lateral line. These are all characteristics of coastal cutthroat trout, particularly the fine spots that extend below the lateral line,  which are native to the coastal Pacific Northwest. These fish could possibly be hybrids with either rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) or westslope cutthroat trout (Oncorynchus clarki lewisi) but the only way to know this for sure is to do genetic analysis on them. For many years the fish in Slide Lake were westslope cutthroats. I think many high lake stocking programs are now trying to use native stocks that occur naturally in the area so as to not introduce species that could later become problems.