Let’s get this out of the way, the larches have yet to fully turn – mid to late October will be a better bet for that spectacle.
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We wanted to see larches, and badly. And so we packed up (late) and drove out to Blewett pass, stopping only for watery gas station coffee and, later, an Americano. We are city-slickers after all.
The road to Tronsen ridge was long and bumpy and full of all kinds of characters that I don’t see much of these days. There were folks cutting up fallen trees, presumably for their wood stoves back home. There were hunters fully engulfed in camo and trucks large and almost military-looking that hurdled around the corners like they did, in fact, own the place. But we made it without issue, admiring the colors along the way.
The trail begins as a 4x4 track through a burnt-out forest that creaked and squealed in the wind. We wondered aloud how eerie it would be at night and determined the answer to be very. Reaching a sign that seemed to prompt the beginning of the trail, we headed downward along the northern slope of the ridge, catching here and there a yellowing larch and the stalks of long-dead wildflowers. You reach the first of several landings along the way pretty quickly, which open up the landscape around you. To the east, the green slopes of the cascades tumble and fall into the bald and sun swept hills of Eastern Washington, and to the west the serrated edge of the Stuart Range tears its way through the clouds.
That’s the trail, in a nutshell. It slowly dips along a golden spine, revealing views along either side and weaves in and out of pine and larch clusters. There are a number of standout places along the way, but my favorite came maybe 1.5 miles in. It was a hilltop meadow full of dreamy golden grass, yellow-green larches, and me, standing there daydreaming about building a cabin on that very spot. Later we found ourselves standing on narrow rock spires, reminiscent of Bryce Canyon on a micro-scale. The panorama from here was astounding. As was the wind, which blasted us the entire day and made me take to a knee on several occasions from more, um, precarious vantage points.
It was also quite cold. We layered and delayered like it was a competition.
We came across several groups of day-hikers and, more surprisingly, backpackers along the way. Most of them stopped to tell us how handsome my friend’s husky was. Sometimes we play a kind of “what will passersby say” bingo when we go out hiking with him -- “is that a wolf?”, “do you race the Iditarod with him?”, and “please get that beast away from me” are a few of our favorites.
Most of the ascent happens on the way back to the car, just FYI. Since we weren’t accustomed to descending first along a trail, this modest climb back to car was not particularly well-received. That said, it was more gentle than I had made it out to be in my imagination, and many parts of it reminded me of the autumns I spent as a kid hunting with my dad in the Okanogan. The smell and crispness of this country in October is special, and not to be missed.
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