East Fork Foss - Necklace Valley — Saturday, Sep. 3, 2016

Central Cascades > Stevens Pass - West

For Labor day weekend I explored the Necklace Valley with four friends. This was the triple backup plan…we applied for an Enchantments permit, after getting rejected decided Ice Lakes, after the fire decided Hart’s pass, after the rain forecast decided Necklace Valley. Given that it was the triple backup it was still a freaking awesome trip. We heard a lot of rumors about the hike such as “you have to want it to get in” and “Necklace Valley involves a ton of bushwhacking” and “after the river you climb straight up a boulder field”. None of these were particularly true…although we did really want it, there was no bushwhacking involved to get into or around the Valley, and although it gets tough after the river the grade is ~1000’/mi and is not exactly “straight up a boulder field”. The trail was in great shape, the bugs are basically gone (too cold?), and there was no snow (although snow possibility will increase in the coming weeks, esp. in the upper valley). It took us ~4 hours of hiking with full packs to get to Emerald lake (2 hours to the river, 2 hours up) and ~3.5 hours out on Monday. Once we got into the valley, it took a little while to find a nice campsite since there were quite a few people looking for one at the same time (due to the holiday?) and lots of places were pretty soggy. We eventually asked these three dudes camped near IIswoot if we could set up close to them and they said no problem. Later one of us overheard them saying, “Dude, I think they are staring at us”. Although our relationship was off to a rocky start, they later offered us Fireball and we had good times. We ran into the 3 Fireball Dudes several other times throughout the trip. I believe the 3 Fireball Dudes also lost their GoPro, and we saw a note at the trailhead on the way out said someone found a GoPro, and left the following number: two-zero-six-eight-eight-three-six-two-eight-eight. The hardest part of the trip was figuring out what the name of the lake we camped at was. The map says “IIswoot”, which is unhelpful because the first 2 letters are ambiguous, are they Is or Ls or one of each? To avoid confusion, we renamed this lake Liliswoot (please spread the word). In any case, Lake Liliswoot has the most unique lake color, and we thought our campsite was the second most beautiful campsite in the entire valley. On Sunday we went for a day hike/run from our basecamp at Liliswoot. Our goal: go to all of the lakes. We ended up missing a couple (Jewel and Tank in particular), but that just gives a reason to go back! Jewel looked a little challenging to get to (unless you swim across Locket). My favorite part was looking down at the Chain Lakes from close to La Bohn gap; check out the gpx track from our day hike…what we lacked in navigation skillz we made up with unique route finding. The most disappointing thing that happened on the trip was passing two trailrunners who told us about a secret waterfall. Although we then saw many waterfalls, we didn’t know if any of them were the secret one, and will likely never know. Why tell someone about a secret water fall without telling how to decipher secret vs. un-secret waterfalls? I dunno what their motive was.