Knapsack Pass, Spray Park — Sunday, Jul. 23, 2023

This post is for us intermediate hikers, the 10 mile, 2500 ft EG types, who navigate by GPS track (I use AllTrails). It's a bit of a warning.

Looks pretty innocuous from the stats, 6 miles, 2K elevation according to AllTrails. Knapsack pass section unmaintained but supposedly reasonably well trodden. Stats by the time we finished were ~8 miles, 2100 ft EG (net, but this hike has some significant ups and downs), 6.5 hours, and we didn't stray off the track.

Not many trip reports for this loop -- but most remark on the boulder fields you need to traverse coming down from Knapsack pass into the Mist Park basin. Not sure why I discounted the difficulties people mentioned, maybe because they were delivered in typically understated fashion ("The trail down the east side of the pass crosses some tricky loose talus and a few easy snow fields." "We lost the trail 10-15 mins in, due to snow, but just kept going straight across the boulder field" "The rocky stretch east of the pass is a doozy", "Once you clear this monster of an obstacle you have a pretty easy route"), anyway, I should have paid more attention.

We took the clockwise route because it was said to be easier to navigate the boulder field this way, but we still found it very challenging. The trail is not marked through the boulders, this stretch is pretty long, through ups and downs, and the connection with the trail beyond the boulder field is not visible from where you start. The boulders are sharp and not always stable, there are loose scree fields to avoid and the small remaining snowfields seemed untrustworthy and best to avoid as well. If you stop and listen, you'll hear the sounds of talus and scree falling around the basin, which gives you a different perspective on the field you're crossing.

The whole time I kept thinking what a mess we'd be in if either of us got injured in this section. It was a beautiful day, but there were no hikers here. We had passed only 2 other parties, at the beginning of the hike over on the Mowich side of Knapsack, going the other way. We were roughly in the middle of the hike, and both forward and back would require a lot of effort.

We made a number of false starts, following what looked like cairns and social trails. And by the end of that section we were pretty rattled. Parts of the subsequent trail through the basin were very clear, other parts not so much. As my traveling companion said, longest 3 miles she's ever hiked.

And then ... the AllTrails track took us up the Mt. Pleasant ridge (rather than the less challenging route down over the saddle into Spray Park). But the section down from Mt. Pleasant to the saddle before Hessong Rock was incorrectly tracked on AllTrails. The actual trail, which descended off on the Spray Park side, was very obvious so we were able to follow it, but since this was our first time on this trail, and we couldn't see more than a few feet ahead at any time, we didn't know for sure that it would take us to the right place.

The steep trail down from Knapsack into the basin, and the equally steep trail down from Mt. Pleasant to Spray park are filled with loose scree. There was a lot of sliding. I was glad we came down these, rather than up from the other direction.

So, just a heads up that this is a glorious trail, but it's more than a typical day hike, and much more challenging than the stats suggest.