Galene Chain Lakes, British Columbia-Not!

The weekend of August 1^st through 3^rd was going to be a short one in the mountains for me. I wanted to be back to at least help clean up after the annual salmon barbeque, one of the main fundraisers that keeps the hall going.

I decided to take Friday the 1^st off work, run a few errands and try to get into Galene Chain Lakes which are just north of the Canada/US border in British Columbia. There are four lakes, one right after the other, and they drain to the Skagit River just north of Ross Lake. Through a series of mistakes and flawed assumptions on my part, I failed in the attempt.

I got a good early start but there was about half an hour delay at the border. By the time I got to the jump off point, it was 2:00 p.m. There is a trail of sorts that leads to the lakes. This trail isn’t regularly maintained but people work on keeping it open from time to time.

I wasn’t really sure about how long the trail was. Ten kilometers (or kilometres, as it is spelled in Canada and the other English speaking countries of the world) or 13 kilometers or 26 kilometers or 10 miles, or 13 miles I couldn’t remember. The various distances and conversions had gotten jumbled in my head. I read an account of a party going in there in 2012 and I think it said something like 25 or 26 kilometers. At about .62 kilometers to the mile, this would be about 16 miles. Doable in a day but I would need all day, not just an afternoon.

Never mind, I figured. There was a trail there right? If the distance was farther than I could go that evening, I could just stop and camp for the night. Right there I made two sloppy mistakes. First, I assumed that there would be a reasonably obvious trail. I have walked many way trails, fisherman’s routes and climber’s routes. Usually there is an easily followed way that allows you to make decent time even though you occasionally lose it and spend a lot of time crawling over or under windfalls and brush piles.  Second, since I assumed there would be a relatively obvious way that I could backtrack on to find a camp, I assumed the distance wasn’t as important because I could camp when I got tired or ran out of daylight and resume the trip the next day. I have done a lot of off trail hiking where I didn’t know the exact distances involved. However, this calls for a little more planning and strategy than just walking a trail.

The online account I read while trying to figure out the trail distance indicated crossing the Skagit River near Nepopekum Creek. I hadn’t heard anything about that route, though I did hear about it later from another source. If I had taken the time to do a little more research, I am sure it would have been quite obvious.

Instead I decided to do it the hard way. I did know there was a trail that led that way from Chittenden Meadows which is downstream or farther south than Nepopekum Creek so I figured I would take that route. I knew the trail had been opened up fairly recently from that direction. I had walked it for some distance several times in the recent past while I was at Hozomeen for work, and it had seemed to be in decent shape and well marked. I assumed that, since it had been opened up, there would be enough people using it to keep it fairly open, even more so if it had been worked on occasionally.

Sure enough, at Chittenden Meadows there was a sign that said that it had been opened up in 2006/2007. And it said that it was 10 kilometers to the Galene Chain Lakes trail. I read this to mean 10 kilometers to the lakes. What it really means is 10 kilometers to the trail that starts up the ridge to the lakes. This trail up the ridge is something like 15.5 kilometers (about 9 miles) or it is 2.5 kilometers and change (something like 1.5 to 2 miles). The sign also read “Galene Chain Lakes 25.5 kilometres return”, which I took to mean round trip, though I don’t know if it meant to Chittenden Meadows or the trailhead to Chittenden Meadows.

Again my attitude was to go for it. I would find out how far it was soon enough. What I found out was that the trail from Chittenden Meadows evidently hadn’t been worked on since 2007 past the junction with the trail to International Creek, both of which follow old logging roads.

I pressed on, dodging numerous windfalls and sweating profusely. It was hot, probably in the high 80’s or low 90’s Fahrenheit and very humid. It felt kind of like a mild sauna. And to top it off there was the usual cloud of Hozomeen mosquitoes. They are especially bad when Ross Lake is a full pool, which I think it was, or very close. I think I have been in the area when the mosquitoes were worse, but still this was pretty bad.

The trail easy to follow in upland areas but it all but disappeared in wetland areas. Other people had been using it but it was still hard to follow in a lot of areas. Red osier dogwood (Cornus stolonifera) seemed to exhibit particularly vigorous growing. These shrubs probably put on several feet of growth a year and then the new stems get laid down in the trail by windfalls or winter snow. This doesn’t kill them. They simply continue growing, often rooting where they touch the ground (these horizontal spontaneously rooting stems are called stolons, hence the species name stolonifera). The horizontal stems send up new vertical shoots, the overall effect being a fairly impenetrable mass made even more difficult when it is all leafed out. The red osier dogwood was intermixed with plentiful devil’s club (Oplopanax horridus) and Salmonberry (Rubus spectabilis) which contributed some nasty thorns to the mix.

It wasn’t as bad as going without a trail at all but it was close. I lost the trail several times. One of these times I spent better part of hour looking for it. This was all quite frustrating as I recalled the account of 2012 which said trail was fairly open and well marked. Obviously I wasn’t on that trail. This was the first inkling that I was on the wrong route.

At one point decided to heck with it, I would just start up the ridge and pick up trail, if it still exists. After going a short distance, I decided not to do this. It is not a big deal to go off trail up a ridge or stream course but, if I was going to do that, I would need to plan my off trail route a little better. It was really hot and I didn’t know about any water sources. Also the maps I had didn’t show a lot of detail as to what I might run into as far as cliffs and I hadn’t looked the ridge over with an eye to going up it. If I had gone on it probably wouldn’t have been end of the world. But, from past experience, this was a recipe for spending miserable night somewhere on the ridge with an extremely dry mouth because I was sweating profusely and would probably run out of water at some point unless I got lucky.

I picked up trail again. It followed old logging road and going was good for a short distance. Then it dropped back into river bed and turned back into jungle. I was still able to follow the track but I had to pay close attention and I was spending a lot of time figuring out where exactly trail was. I was also spending a lot of effort going through all the brush.

Finally at about 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. I decided to abandon the trip. My clothes were soaked through with sweat and, at this point, I hadn’t even gotten to the place where trail started up hill. My chance to get into lakes on this trip was probably shot. I hate giving up. It usually feels like I am wimping out. It is hard to make decisions when you are uncomfortable and the mosquitoes are surrounding you in great black swarms.

Since I was already in the area, I decided to research some other areas while I was there. The trail was cleared to International Creek which branches off the trail from Chittenden Meadows to Galene Chain Lakes Trail and the initial part of the International Creek Trail appeared to be in good shape. I decided to check that out in one last shot attempt to get into Galene Chain Lakes. The border cut is pretty close to the lakes and it had been logged out in about 2008. I was hoping there were some access trails for the cut.

I rapidly discovered that the International Creek Trail was in just as bad of shape as the one I had just attempted. I didn’t have my pack with me and could travel fairly easily so I decided to go to the border cut just to look. At the border there were no access trails that I could see and everything had grown up quite a bit. And, looking up the hill, it was obvious that, though you could take the border cut up to the lakes, it would be easier to take a more direct route up the ridge.

It was getting pretty late by the time I got back to my pickup. I stopped at Nepopekum day use site and walked to the Skagit River from there. There was a very good area to ford the river and I was pretty sure this is where everyone was crossing to go up the Galene Chain Lakes Trail.

It was nearly dark when I got back to the pickup. I still hadn’t found a place to camp and the idea of stumbling around in the muggy, mosquito infested darkness looking for a place to pitch my tent didn’t appeal to me. I have done this on numerous other occasions.

I decided to check out the road up Maselpanik Creek. There were some lakes I hoped to access from there. I would sleep in the cab of my pickup if I had to since I hadn’t been smart enough to throw a sleeping pad in the back so I could sleep under the canopy, just in case I didn’t get a chance to pitch my tent. Of course, to my mind at the start of the trip, this situation would never arise. So I thought about it but didn’t do it.

The lower end of the Maselpanik Creek Road was in great shape, smooth with very few potholes. Then at the first switchback, a mile or less in, it rapidly deteriorated. I put the pickup in four wheel drive and got through one rough spot, then another. The third rough spot was hard to evaluate in the headlights. I wasn’t sure if I could get through without high centering and getting stuck. So I backed down the sketchy part of the road in the dark.

At the switchback there was an overgrown spur road and I just backed into that. At this point I was pretty beat. I didn’t want to try to pitch my tent in the dark and I didn’t want to cook. So I ate some of the stuff I had brought for lunches, which didn’t require any cooking. I looked over my maps for a little bit and wrote some notes and then tried to get some sleep.

My pickup seat reclines quite a bit but it was still hard to get comfortable. Mostly it was just too hot and kept the windows rolled up to keep out the bugs. I considered crawling back under the canopy but I figured that would be absolutely too hard to sleep on. I don’t ordinarily carry a sleeping pad when I am backpacking, relying on being able to find a soft enough place to sleep where I camp.

Finally it cooled off enough halfway through the night and I got some pretty good sleep. I actually had to break out a blanket I keep for emergencies in the pickup because it got a little cold. I ended up sleeping in until about 9:30 in the morning, a rarity for me.

After a quick breakfast, I walked up the road and scouted it out. It looked like I would be able to get through the one rough spot I was worried about. I threw some rocks in a particularly deep rut. I walked about a quarter mile past that spot to make sure the road wasn’t getting progressively worse. I turned out to be in really decent shape above that point.

So I went back down to the pickup, put it in 4-low and crawled up through the rough spots. I was able to get another mile or mile and a half before the road started to really brush in. This was just a little shy of some of the jump-off points for some of the lakes I wanted to go to. It looked like I could have gone farther but I had seen enough so I turned around and headed back down.

It looks like I will have to move these up on my list of priorities if I want to use this road for access. Even if the road became impassable in the rough spots, it wouldn’t be too far to walk in. The important thing to think about is the brush. There is a lot of willow and tag alder growing along the upper road and, once it grows over a road, it is miserable stuff to try to walk through. It’s funny. It seems that in natural settings, red osier dogwood is one the shrubs that forms some of the more impenetrable thickets while on roads, it is willow. Tag alders and vine maples are pretty miserable to get through in any setting. It looks like for this road, unless something changes, there is only going to be relatively easy access for a few more years.  

I went back down to Nepopekum Bar and crossed the river and found the Galene Chain Lakes Trail. It was in pretty good condition for the distance I followed it. It was in an upland area and it looked like it was seeing a good bit of use which would serve to help keep it, if not more open, more visible and easy to follow. I still don’t know the distance but, judging from the maps 12.5 kilometers or about 8 miles seems about right. I will hopefully find out how long it takes to get there before too long.

I next headed to a road that looked like it was in good shape that ran on the other side of the ridge from the Maselpanik Creek area. This one had a large slide across it about a mile in. On Google Earth it looked like this road system connected to a road system on Paleface Creek on Chilliwack Lake. I decided to go check that out. From the satellite photos, it looked like there had been some recent logging activity so I figured whatever roads they used for that were probably still in pretty good shape.

I drove all the way around to Chilliwack Lake to discover that the road system up Paleface Creek had been converted to trail, part of the Trans-Canada Trail. So either the logging units I was looking at on the satellite photos were older than they appeared or I had missed a road somewhere.

I had planned to camp out one more night but I decided to head home. I got back at about 9:30 p.m.

Sunday morning I went up the South Fork Cascade Trail a few miles to see what kind of shape it was in. I have several trips planned up there this year. It was rough but fairly east to find and looked like it had seen some use. The real kicker with this trail is if anyone has worked on the avalanche tracks above the Box Canyon. I was going to do that last year and also this year but never got around to it. They will be some pretty miserable traveling if they are brushed in.

I spent the rest of the day Sunday doing chores and at the annual Salmon Barbeque Fundraiser for the Marblemount Community Hall. This is one of the most important events for the Hall every year because it represents one of the best opportunities all year long to raise money for the Hall. Again, I have to hand it to some of those folks who put so much of their time into these events. Several people where there for 12 hours or more, handling hot food on a hot muggy day. I just helped clean up, a pretty insignificant contribution.

I have a finite number of precious weekends every summer to pursue my project. This year it will be about eleven. With this trip, I am down to eight. It seems like I had completely wasted this weekend. But in a lot of ways I hadn’t. I learned a lot about access. If a road is closed I don’t mind walking but it means that I need to budget more time to get a trip done. Also if it has brushed in, I need to budget more time or try to figure out another route in.

Sacha didn’t seem to be pleased that I didn’t make it into any lakes this weekend. I don’t blame her. She has to ride herd on two young children pretty much be herself, no small task, while I am out gallivanting around in the mountains and the longer it takes me to get done with my project, the longer she has to go it alone during the summer. I am really lucky that she lets me do what I do.

Also the logistics of traveling all the way to Canada (433 miles on my odometer by the time I was done) means I need to budget more time for trips and come up with different strategies, like traveling in the evening after work and sleeping in the back of my pickup so I can get an early start the next day.

I also learned lot about road and trail conditions and how much time I should budget to make trips into given areas and I became aware of some spots that I might want to get into now because if I wait too many more years, it will be much more difficult. Also, I noticed that there don’t seem to be any Green Trails or the equivalent for this area. Something like this would be handy because it would take some of the guess work out of trail distances. I have done plenty of cross country trips where distances and times have to be estimated so it isn’t the end of the world, just not as convenient. The trail distances at trailheads seem to be hit and miss, so far as I can tell. Some are marked, some are not. And the distances on some, like the Chittenden/Galene Chain Lakes are a little confusing. Word to the Wise Green Trails.

Another thing I noticed that I found quite interesting is that there is a lot of burdock (Arctium minus) along the abandoned logging roads, more than I have seen anywhere else in my travels. Burdock is an non-native species introduced from Eurasia. In Washington State, curly dock (Rumex crispa), which, despite the similarity in common names, is not even in the same family as burdock, has a similar abundance. Curly dock is also a non-native species from Eurasia.

I don’t know the reason why burdock is so common on the parts of the Canadian Skagit that I went to. Maybe it is something cultural. People encouraged its growth because it has a number of uses. Or maybe it is the climate or some animal not found farther south that encourages its spread. I just recently found out that burdock seed is a very important food for finches, I’m assuming the introduced finch species and possibly our native finch species as well. I will have to be careful to check my pack to avoid spreading a lot of seed if I visit any of these places later in the year.    

It would have also been nice to do most of the scouting earlier in the year before the snow melted off the higher areas. Five or ten years ago this is what I would probably have done. But, as anyone who has been reading this blog to this point should realize, that is not really a possibility in my life these days. This is okay by me but it means I have less time overall to put to my high lake project.

It could be pointed out that I could have done a lot more research in books and online. This is true but I also like finding things out for myself. To this point, I have pretty much ignored guidebooks and online accounts. Some that I have read have offered critiques of areas that I am familiar with and most of these critiques have been way off the mark in my opinion. I liken it to movie critics bashing shows that I happen to have liked. It was entertaining to me and I really don’t care what someone else thinks about it. I like to approach my adventures in this manner, preferring to, as much as possible, form my own opinions. Of course, this also means that I quite often reinvent the wheel and end up spending miserable hours bashing into a place when I could have followed a pretty good trail. I have been very few places where I didn’t see something that made the trip worthwhile that I otherwise wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t made the trip.  

This also spares me from taking a completely dry, clinical approach to my project. If I every hope to finish it, I will need to be pretty efficient in the use of my time to get into as many places as possible in a given year. It is kind of a sad state that I have to look at this project in large part from the standpoint of efficiency. Some day, if I get the project finished, I would like to go back to many of these places, especially with my family, and spend a lot more time just relaxing. 

A burn on Maselpanik Creek. This burn is right next to an avalanche track and it appears part of it has been logged or maybe salvage logged after the burn. 

Close up of a patch of large diameter Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii)  that apparently survived the burn. Douglas-fir is fire adapted and large diameter trees often have bark thick enough that a fire won't kill them. The reason I think this might have been logged or salvage logged is the lack of large living trees or snags in the foreground where there are only small, live trees. Numerous snags and a few live trees are visible in the background. Also there isn't a large patch of trees knocked down by an avalanche in this area. I didn't crawl up in the brush and look for cut stumps. The forest here was an interesting mix with western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), Douglas-fir, western red cedar (Thuja plicata), Alaska yellow cedar (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis), Pacific silver fir (Abies amabilis) and Engelmann spruce (Picea engelmannii) being some of the species I observed. I think this is kind of a transitional area between west side conditions and east side conditions. I would not be surprised to find Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) and Rocky Mountain juniper (Juniperus scopulorum) in this area as well. There is a lot of grand fir (Abies grandis) in the river valley below but I didn't see any here, unless I mistook the grand fir for Pacific silver fir. I didn't look that closely but will do so if I am ever here again. 

Looking down Maselpanik Creek valley at Silvertip Mountain. 

Looking up Maselpanik Creek valley at the Glacier at the head of Maselpanik Creek. Henry Custer and company passed through this area during the border survey of 1857 to 1859. I have read an account that, up to that point in time, no one (at least of European descent) was aware that there was a glacier at the head of the creek. 

Looking south up Chilliwack Lake and the Upper Chilliwack Valley.  The mountain is probably Red Face Mountain or possibly Whatcom Peak. Mount Challenger and its glacier are just visible in the background. 

Looking north down Chilliwack Lake. The mountain in the foreground is not named on the maps that I have and the mountain in the background is off the edge of my maps. 

Barred owl (Strix varia) along the abandoned section of road up the South Fork of the Cascade River.  This is one of two owls that I saw in the same spot. I know this is a barred owl because we only have two owl species with black eyes, the spotted owl (Strix occidentalis) and the barred owl. The markings on the breast of the owl pictured are enlongated or are bars rather than the rounder spots of the spotted owl. Finally, the barred owl is much bigger than the spotted owl. The bird pictured is close to two feet from its talons to the top of its head, much bigger than a spotted owl. Barred owls are native to eastern North America and have migrated on their own out here. They have been implicated in the decline of spotted owls because they outcompete spotted owls for resources and also interbreed with spotted owls. The two owls I saw didn't fly away very far and remained close to me squawking, either at me or to each other. They were in the same spot when I returned about an hour later. I would guess that maybe they have a nest nearby though I don't know anything about their nesting behavior.