(this page is best viewed at 800x600 at least!)
It started out OK, there was this creek right at the trail head. |
June 4, 2000 I have been hiking every weekend since April 30, six weeks in a row. Feeling kinda tired, and running out of places to go, Annette lake was one that I was going to do on a Saturday a while back, but forgot my boots and had to cancel. It was also on the list of places to go, and it is actually an easy one. Not. Things turned bad quickly. I was tired. Knee hurt initially. Snow showed up. We got lapped by a group of 4 people who were going at a good pace, so that made me think I was a slow goober. Moods turned icky. Note to self: If you are tired and bitching about things one mile into a hike, and your knee hurts, and you partner is being a doo-doo head, just quit. It is better than pushing the issue and continuing the hike. Anyway, the trail is actually about as wide as I-90, and is not really that steep, or that long.
It turns out that there is a damn good reason why it is so wide. |
||
| This is Humpback Mountain. Can you see why? |  |
||
| We
did not take many pictures on the way up, partly because
there was not much to see, but mostly because we were
just trying to finish the damn thing, and grumpy people
don't take pictures. There were some views from the
boulder fields, but they were still snowy and it required
attention to make sure we did not end up swimming in
Humpback Creek 2000ft below. We pressed on to the lake, and the groups of people who were already there. |
|
When we got to the lake, it was snowy and windy. Clear, but not the best. The lake was still frozen. There is a trail that leads around the lake, and it connects some nice little camping spots. It would be a great place to camp, if it were not for the 12 million other people who would camp there as well. On the picture below, you can see the waterfall that drains into the lake on the left. It was very loud. It helped drown out the bad attitudes.
From this point, the hike got really bad. The lake was a nice stop, but certainly not worth the trouble. The peak below is Abiel Peak. It is right on the border of the Watershed.
We probably spent 45 minutes here. People started showing up here every 5 minutes. That was a very bad sign. We had to decend, and I feared that it would be busy. It was a nice day, and usually I-90 hikes are packed. I remembered my Granite hike last October, and I passed 64 people on the way down. That was nothing.
NO decent from ANY mountain pissed me off as much as this one. We stopped every 20-40 feet to allow other goobers to pass. Some I would say were hikers. Those are the ones who are typically quiet, don't bother you, don't chitchat and yell the whole way, don't let their children bang rocks together on sloping boulder fields and gullies (I would almost say that hikers don't BRING their small children, but that's too much to ask), and certainly don't travel in packs of 10 or more. And they don't trample the forest, either!
During a rare opportunity of solitude, we did manage to have fun and have a snowball fight. But that was it.
(This is not a racist statement) The Seattle Asian Hiking Society's 20 members or something, loud obnoxious teenagers, everybody & their gramma was at this fucking trail. When we got back to the trailhead, I counted 76 cars in the lot. 76! Out of curiousity, we stopped by the Mt. Si trailhead to see how many there were. I guessed 150. Sunny guessed 130. Both wrong. There were right around 200 cars. That's just disgusting. How the hell can you hike when you have to pass or get passed by at least 200 people? It was probably more like 400... Ick.
I'm done with the I-90 hikes this year, with the exception of Granite & McClellan. Just too damn many people. If I have to do Squire Creek for 3 months waiting for the places on my GottaGo list to melt out, it would be better than repeating the Annette Experience. ICK!
Go back to the main hiking page!
