Enchantments, page 1

Fall foliage along Snow Creek trail.

October 8, 1977

I went up to The Enchantments again. Micki (on loan from Marj) and I left Seattle early on a Saturday morning and headed east over Stevens Pass towards Leavenworth.

My first trip to this glorious area had been a few years back with college pals P&B. At that time, all I had was a cheap sleeping bag and a borrowed camera. We slept shoulder-to-shoulder under the stars, and what I mostly remember is that I seemed to have plopped my sleeping bag down over some burrowing critter's exit hole.

But now, I was a seasoned hiker with real hiking equipment (a tent, sleeping bag and foam pad for starters!) And with my 35-mm Pentax camera, I was really looking forward to the trip and anticipated taking lots of photos.

I was prepared for rain, snow and just your general foul Cascades weather but the reality was quite different. The skies were clear and blue, with just a few clouds on the way in.

Snow Creek trail.

On the way up to Nada Lake (5000'), I met up with a guy who was a member of Mountain Rescue and ended up hiking all weekend with him. He was really nice, a bit older than me, and looked exactly like you would expect a Boeing engineer to look (which is what he was).

We made pretty good time. I left the parking lot (1600’) at 9:30 AM and was eating dinner at our Leprechaun Lake camp (roughly 7000’) at 6 PM. Mr. Mountain Rescue (I’m sorry, I don’t remember his name and will hereafter refer to him as MMR) was a wealth of information on the way up, at one point indicating a rock formation on the far side of Snow Creek that he said is unofficially called ‘the MX missile’ by his cohorts.

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