Lost In The Right Direction

While our home town mountain...Billygoat as we call it...proper name....Goat Mountain was burning up this fall...we decided that to get away from all the smoke we would have to venture out a little ways...Cascade Pass/Sahale Arm trail has been on my list of trails that I wanted to explore and with some careful planning we managed to make it.....4 hours is a long drive...up at 4 AM and out the door...no stops for a morning iced coffee, not much open in the area that early....so it was a tough drive without caffeine in the system....I am always just a tad bit nervous trying to locate trails and spend entirely too much time mapping them so I wont get lost.... this one was pretty easy to find...long drive on a dirt road, that sometimes can be just a little rough but nothing a passenger car can't handle....When we dropped down onto the Rainy Pass side of the mountains we had left the smoke that was creeping up the pass and entered fog.....which we traveled through all the way to the t

I am a glorified babysitter.  A hiker that sits behind a desk 5 days a week and dispatches service technicians for a living while she dreams about the next trail.  As a child growing up my family would go for drives on the weekends through the Okanogan Valley, most of the time a snack or an ice cream was involved and that pretty much summed up my interest in the surrounding area.  As I got older and had my own car, a drive once or twice a year up the Methow Valley, possibly all the way to the overlook on highway 20 was something that I enjoyed.  Snap a few pictures and that was it till next year.  On August 8, 2009 my baby sister and I piled into a suburban with 6 nieces and nephews.   We had plans to picnic at a high mountain lake...short hike...eat lunch...simple plans.  As we headed up the Methow and reached the North Cascades overlook on highway 20 we decided we would stop and eat our lunch there. The weather was chilly and slightly breezy.  From there we headed farther down the