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Cascade Pass/Sahale Arm Trail....Beautiful North Cascades National Park

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 trail head...With a little bit of encouragement at the trail head from two other hikers we headed out in hopes of clear sky's after we reached the pass...It's a nice hike...fairly easy to the top...we didn't get any views but the color was brilliant with the low wet fog.....at the pass the wind was screaming and the fog was rolling over the top...at this point we still had zero views and were considering turning back...but the wind was blowing hard enough it started to blow some of the fog clear out of the pass.....and we had a glimpse or two or the mountains and decided we had come to far to turn back...on up the steep...rocky slope we hiked...picked our way through the rocks...stopped to watch for pika's and on up.....what a view when we popped over the top.....picked ourselves a rock and ate some lunch with a view of Doubtful Lake below and back down the mountain we headed....we didn't continue all the way to the arm this trip...the smoke was pouring in the backside of the mountains and decided we would be returning some day with hopefully clear sky's ..beautiful trail...can't wait to see all the views on a return trip that we missed this time....will make it seem like a brand new trail.





















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