Vintage Vagabonds

Some habits die hard, and many include an itch that needs to be scratched. With the passage of the summer solstice, the yen to hike and explore the backcountry of the Pacific Northwest is just too much to resist, particularly for those of us who once worked as wilderness rangers for the U.S. Forest Service.

The goal this time was to complete the trilogy of trails on the streams that comprise the headwaters of the Chiwawa River: Buck Creek, Chiwawa Basin and Phelps Creek. The three mountain waterways join together near the old mining community of Trinity. In 2011, we hiked into Chiwawa Basin; last year, it was the Buck Creek Trail.

This year, it would be the Phelps Creek Trail to Spider Meadows and beyond. So on Monday, July 8, longtime hiking and climbing companions Frank Czubiak and Steve Still joined me at the Phelps Creek Trailhead on the Wenatchee National Forest for three days of fun and frolic in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington.

The Phelps Creek Trail, part of my territory as a wilderness ranger, immediately enters a Douglas fir forest and follows the creek named after an Englishman who lost his life fording it. Phelps was one of many 19th century miners who had staked a claim to the copper, silver and gold buried in the rock on Phelps Ridge.

But we would seek treasures of a different sort on our sojourn. In “Mining in the Pacific Northwest,” historian L.K. Hodges fawns over Spider Meadows (below) at the head of Phelps Creek for its “flowers of every tint, form and texture: heather, buttercup, lupine, larkspur and deer’s tongue, which shoots its leaves through the snow.”