Peggy's Pond, Cathedral Rock — Friday, Aug. 15, 2008

Snoqualmie Region > Salmon La Sac/Teanaway

We were sweating being even starting this hike on the hottest weekend of the year. However the climb up to Cathedral Pass was in the shade of a beautiful forest and not too bad. Swimming in Squaw Lake at the top was wonderful. Squaw Lake looks like decent camping, although too crowded. The small swampy lakes along the ridge are actually all quite pretty, and weren't unreasonably buggy. The trail to Peggy's Pond is dicey--slippery with long dropoffs. The mosquitoes were swarming at the Pond. Peggy's Pond is actually a rocky lake at the base of Cathedral rock, not at all swampy despite the name. Small fish were jumping. They were apparently too busy with the mayflies and mosquitoes to have any interest in spinners though. Swimming is not too cold and there are some nice places to get in. The main drawback is that there is only one good campsite, which was taken--the others are either dusty, sloped, on fragile meadows, or not private. I also wouldn't recommend the Pond for warm windless weather, like we just had, due to what might be the worst mosquitos in the cascades. The bugs only got worse the higher we climbed above the pond. We turned back on Sunday before climbing very high above the Pond due to what felt like imminent thunderstorms. There was lots of smoke to the east. Alpine blueberries still at least several weeks from being ripe. We found a few ripe ones in the woods.