Backpacking to Pasayten Airstrip
Matthew with some larches near Center Mountain
Eric and Matthew, Oct 2-4
67 miles
Matthew flew in from California for the weekend and our goal was to maximize time in the wilderness but minimize driving time. The Pasayten Wilderness is one of the most remote places in washington, so that seemed to fit the bill. We decided to access it via the Canyon Creek trailhead, since that was only a 2.5 hr drive away instead of Slate Pass, which is closer to 5 hours away. Originally we’d planned as our objective to reach the most remote point in the pasayten, but we later switched objectives.
The route
Friday evening we left the Canyon Creek trailhead and hiked in for an hour before we found a nice campsite near Boulder Creek at sunset. The next morning we hiked farther up canyon creek, past an old cabin in the ghost town of Chancellor, and then up the ridge to sky pilot. The top of the ridge had excellent views from the open meadows. Surprisingly there was hardly any snow on the surrounding peaks, despite it being October.
We dropped down to cross the PCT and met a hiker who had just finished and was returning to Harts Pass. Below the PCT we reached the West Fork Pasayten trail, which unfortunately has not been maintained in quite a while. We spent a lot of time negotiating blowdowns before reaching the intersection at the Middle Fork Pasayten around 4:30pm. We took a short break, then continued hiking around to Lease Creek, chatting with a few other hikers along the way coming down from Ptarmigan Peak (somehow they guessed my name was Eric!).
A tricky bridge crossing near Canyon Creek
Once we crossed Lease Creek we were expecting a trail to continue up the creek towards Lease Lake, but it
didn’t seem to exist. We started hiking up the Tatoosh Buttes trail looking for the intersection, but that trail didn’t match the one on the quad. This was the edge of a burn zone from 2006 and I suspect the Lease Creek Trail was likely abandoned after that fire. There is certainly no sign of it anymore. Unfortunately the terrain was very thick with blowdowns promising to slow down progress if we bushwhacked.
We estimated a few more hours bushwhacking to our original objective, and most of that would be in the dark. That didn’t sound too appealing, so we modified our objective to go check out an old landing strip a few miles away that is mysteriously located in the middle of a wilderness. We hiked back to the middle fork pasayten river and then hiked north a mile to a surprising clearing in the forest. It was a long meadow that appears to be an abandoned landing strip, but is still in good enough shape planes could probably land there. I later read it was built in 1931 to help with fighting forest fires.
Colorful larches near Slate Pass
Now it appears to be a staging area for trail crews. There is a cabin with bunks, an outhouse, and a tool storage shed. I suspect packers let horses graze in the meadow to keep trees from growing. We had the place to ourselves, so set up our tent next to the meadow and went to bed around sunset, having hiked about 30 miles that day.
Sunday morning we got up and started our hike out shortly after sunrise. We wanted to avoid the blowdowns of the west fork pasayten trail, so decided to do a loop hike on trails that would likely be cleared out. I knew the middle fork pasayten trail was cleared out from a trip to climb Rolo and Wildcat in May, so we hiked back up that trail all the way to Slate Pass. From there we walked down the road for a few hours all the way to the road’s end at Chancellor. We had to pass through a gate, but a sign said pedestrians were allowed on the road. At Chancellor there were a few old mining buildings and a pickup truck parked there. I suspect it was someone with a mining claim in the area.
After a short break we met back up with the familiar trail in canyon creek and followed it out to the car by sunset for a 34 mile day. We made it back to Seattle that night and Matthew flew back to California early Monday morning.
© 2020, egilbert@alum.mit.edu. All rights reserved.
You must be logged in to post a comment.