When I first moved to Seattle, I bought a map of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness at REI and was so spoiled for choice that I barely looked elsewhere. But in summer 2023 some friends regaled me of their failed attempt to climb Gilbert Peak in the Goat Rocks Wilderness. Now, my personal goals trend more towards the “scenic snacking” and less towards the “high-risk-terrain mountaineering”, but their photos immediately had me scheming about my next trip. The Goat Rocks were initially overshadowed by Mt. Rainier in my imagination. But a guidebook entry describing the area as the guts of an ancient volcano? Absolute catnip for this geologist.

This is Part 1: Hiking Adventures. Part 2: Geology Nerdiness will be a separate post. Stay tuned!

You know the drill, time for orientation maps:

We drove Highways 410 and then 12 around the eastern flank of Mt. Rainier and turned south onto Forest Service Road 21 on a sunny September morning. Just as we thought the potholes couldn’t get any worse, we were surprised by a grading crew on a hairpin turn and waved as we squeezed past them on the gravel shoulder. We parked at the Snowgrass Hikers Trailhead and struck out on a deceptively easy path until we hit the halfway point at Goat Creek and started to climb… 1,200 feet up. At least it was shady under the trees. Our goal was the cluster of campsites at the junction of the Lilly Basin and Snowgrass Trail. Hikers can’t actually access the sensitive Snowgrass Flats meadow ecosystem that the camping area is named after – just know that all the campsites are further uphill. 4.5 miles from the trailhead, I was relieved to pop out of the woods at the meadow plateau with the “truffala trees”/ pasque flower seedheads waving in the breeze. The campsite area is at that uneasy level of popularity where social trails are threatening to turn the meadows into bare dirt, so we tried to choose our paths strategically as we poked around in search of a place to call home for the night. The pale soil in the meadow paths crunched underfoot like beach sand. All these little plants are just doing the best with what they’ve got to work with.

The next morning, we woke up under a high ceiling of clouds to start our Major Adventuring Day. We had planned a 6.5 mile counterclockwise loop along the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) to Goat Lake and back along the Lilly Basin trail. We climbed up the Snowgrass Trail to the PCT where it wound among the rocky alpine meadows at elevations between 6,200 and 7,000 feet. Mt. Adams dominated the view to the south as we wove between stands of conifers in the shelter of alarmingly house-sized boulders that had obviously bounced down from higher slopes. Ground squirrels squeaked warnings to each other as we approached their territory. As we climbed even higher, Mt. St. Helens’ rounded summit came into view above the horizon to the southwest. We had the trail practically to ourselves on the cold and windy morning.

Mount Adams on the left, Mount St. Helens on the right… and chipmunks in between.

The landscape was beautiful in a moderately forbidding way. We were past the wildflower season, and the red tint of the huckleberry bushes matched the red tint of the rubbly volcanic slopes high above our heads.

Two miles and one slippery snowfield crossing later, we reached the junction of the PCT and the Old Snowy trail. The views were AMAZING. Seriously, a highlight of the trip. The clouds had parted to give a view of Rainier with blue skies in the background, with the gorgeous rocky ridges of Goat Lake, the Tatoosh Range, and Chimney Rock in the foreground.

We made it up to 7,600 feet on the Old Snowy Trail, and the last turn before the summit ridge, when the wind really started bullying us – slapping against our coats and backpacks and carrying our voices away before they could cross 10 feet to each other. We decided we didn’t care about the summit enough to deal with those winds on a trail with massive exposure on two sides only to get to a volcanic neck with massive exposure on four sides. However, I had my eye on the view and persuaded Kyle to not go back down the relatively sheltered way we had come (Old Snowy Trail), but instead straight down along the same ridge along the Old Snowy Alternate trail to a lower elevation to catch the PCT again. So still the massive exposure on two sides, but (I hoped) at elevations where the wind didn’t have as much bite. Plus, the multicolored rocks were singing a siren song.

To go up?

Or go down?

Well, I’m lucky she had already agreed to marry me, but this decision turned out to be fruitful conversation for premarital counseling regarding our respective desires for adrenaline and a slight mismatch in our personal calibration line between “Type II fun” and “a bad judgement call”. The wind still shoved us around. I enjoyed the thrill of staying upright while Kyle looked at me incredulously and chose to crabwalk. At certain points, she insisted in keeping a firm hold on my pack as a more firmly anchored buddy system. The trail clung to the very pinnacle of a ridge of red, orange, brown, and gray volcanic rocks while a view of Elk Ridge, Upper Lake Creek Valley, and Mt. Rainier spread out in front of us. (I later found out that this section of the PCT is called “The Knife’s Edge”.) We made it down to a saddle and started traversing south along the base of the ridge we had just descended, where the risk calculations flipped and I was more sketched out than Kyle.

According to the map we were supposed to be crossing Packwood Glacier, but in this modern day and age there was no glacier to be seen. In its place, we had an over-steepened talus slope that the former Packwood Glacier (may it rest in peace) had chewed into iPhone- to toaster-sized chunks. The landform is called a glacial cirque (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirque), and we were crossing the “headwall”. This is a zone of intense “glacial quarrying” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plucking_(glaciation)) where the immense weight of ice caused enough friction to cause melting and refreezing at the interface of the glacier and mountain. The expansion of the water as it refreezes acts as a wedge to shatter the rock, and the downward force of the ice rips that weakened rock away, creating slopes much steeper than those created by water. This particular slope was in that awkward stage where the glacier was no longer present to buttress it, but gravity hadn’t quite had enough time to finish pulling down all the unstable bits. Instead, our boots were doing that dirty work on that tenuous stretch of the PCT. I don’t have any photos because I was busy trying to stay upright.

We made it back to the safe ground of the saddle between the Lake Creek and Goat Creek valleys and had a safety debrief and snack break while huddling by a low stacked rock wall. Seemed like a “campsite of last resort” to me. We then sought the unmaintained Packwood Glacier Trail that shortcuts between the PCT at Old Snowy and the Lilly Basin Trail to Goat Lake. I say “sought”, because I don’t think we ever found it. In retrospect, hikers need to stay closer to the cliff overhanging the former Packwood Glacier. But we scrambled down the boulder fields in the vicinity of the trail and envied pikas their low centers of gravity.

Looking back up the “trail” we took down from the Old Snowy Trail/PCT Junction

Finally on the Lilly Basin Freeway!

When we reached the Lilly Basin trail, it felt like turning directly off of the sketchiest 1-lane forest service road onto a 4-lane freeway. It was so luxuriously well maintained in contrast to everything we had hiked on for the past 3 hours. Crickets made their clickity clackity noises in the brush along the trail; a few bold ones even hitch-hiked on our clothes. It felt like they were cheering us on as we hiked to Goat Lake for the crowning “snack and reading” break of the day. We were also badly in need of water, as there were no flowing streams at the elevation of the PCT. Goat Lake itself is geologically interesting but not so visually interesting, not to mention very popular by the afternoon. In search of solitude and a view, after filling our bottles we rock-hopped past the rambunctious local marmots to the outlet of the lake where we could oversee the entirety of Goat Creek Valley and Mt. Adams, shown below. It was peaceful except for the occasional marmot shrieks that sound like a murder scene.

When the clouds rolled back in and a few raindrops dampened our books, we packed up and headed off on the downhill home stretch of the day. The Lilly Basin Trail runs parallel to the valley at a lower elevation than the PCT, and crosses broad meadows that have a friendlier vibe than the rugged high alpine landscape of the PCT. We noted a few promising campsites for future visits, maybe during wildflower season. Fat marmots waddled through the turning leaves of the huckleberry bushes and we even spied pikas in their rock piles. Our legs were seriously sore when we finally made it to our campsite, where we found gray jays ready to mooch our dinner.

The hike out the next day was sunny and delightfully downhill. The road grading crew had done beautiful work on FS 21. We rolled through Packwood Brewing and then on to home, showers, and a cat who was wondering where the heck we’d been.

We both really enjoyed the trip, even with its sketchy moments. I think I sold Kyle on multi-day backpacking trips (the cat is less of a fan, as she likes her human butlers to open a can of wet food each morning despite her automatic feeder). The fantastic views left me with some questions…

• Where were these old volcanoes that produced the volcanic deposits we hiked on?

• How old were these volcanoes, compared to our present-day favorite stratovolcanoes such as Rainier, St. Helens, and Adams?

• Why were the rocks so many different colors?

• Why did the andesite break into so many little plate-shaped pieces?

• And more..

Kyle was an excellent sport about being my “human for scale” in rock photos too.