12.15 miles of hiking • 5500' elevation gain •
The Wolverine fire impacted my plans to check out some hikes with larch trees at the end of Entiat River Road. With that area closed and maybe even burned, we decided to try out some hikes in the eastern part of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. We decided to climb up the Chatter Creek trail and go over the ridge on the Icicle Ridge trail to Lake Edna. Once we gained the ridge, there were a ton of larch trees in the basin on the other side. The trail meanders through them and through beautiful meadows. The larch trees were getting golden, but many still had some green in them. This is actually my favorite time to see them, when there are all kinds of variation of yellow and green out there. When combined with the red huckleberry and oranges in the dying vegetation in the meadows, it was perfect, even though there were clouds out and lighting was poor. We continued on to Lake Edna, where it was incredibly windy and cold. We decided not to continue to Cape Horn and Ladies Pass, since it was so cold and there were probably no views at the pass. This was a pretty steep hike with a good amount of elevation gain. We only saw one other group of day hikers. The other few folks we saw were backpacking. I thought we were having a difficult time because we had taken some time away from hiking for a few weeks but, when I saw the elevation gain on our gps track, I could see why we felt a little tired. But, it was well worth the sweat!
