The Trip
The Pacific Northwest in early October is not a guaranteed thing. The weather window narrows, the days shorten, and the forecasts carry more asterisks than usual. What you get, if the timing works, is something the Cascades reserve for people willing to show up in the shoulder season: the larches. Western larches are the exception in a range built on evergreens — they turn gold in fall and drop their needles, which means for a few weeks in late September and early October, certain slopes in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness look like someone set them on fire. We had two days. We used them well.
Five of us gathered for back-to-back hikes on October 2nd and 3rd, starting with Colchuck Lake in the Enchantments and finishing with Cashmere Canyon, about twenty miles east of Leavenworth. On paper they are simply two hikes in the same region over the same weekend. In practice they might as well be different planets.
Day one: Colchuck Lake. The trailhead sits outside Leavenworth at roughly 2,800 feet, and the trail follows Mountaineer Creek up through dense Cascades forest — the kind of old-growth cathedral that keeps you in shade until the terrain opens up. The approach is honest: roughly four and a half miles of steady climbing, bridging a rushing creek and threading through boulder fields before the lake appears. Colchuck is one of those destinations that earns its reputation every single time. The water is a color that photographs can’t quite reproduce — a vivid, almost unreal teal, fed by snowmelt and cold enough to rethink most decisions. Dragontail Peak rises nearly three thousand feet above the far shore, its dark granite walls dusted with early October snow. And on the slopes between the treeline and the snowpack: the larches. Stands of gold against the gray rock, glowing even under the overcast sky we’d brought with us.
We ate lunch on the boulders at the shore, which is the correct thing to do at Colchuck Lake. And then, because five grown adults in the mountains are apparently incapable of passing up a bad idea when it presents itself, we swam.
“The water temperature at Colchuck in early October is somewhere between ‘inadvisable’ and ‘briefly clarifying.’ We got in, we got out, we felt extraordinarily alive for about forty-five seconds.”
Day two brought a complete reversal of everything day one had offered. Cashmere Canyon sits in the Cascades rain shadow, east of the crest and out of reach of the moisture that defines the western slopes. Where Colchuck is granite and snowmelt and vertical relief, Cashmere Canyon is dry rolling hills, bunchgrass, ponderosa pine, and the wide-open blue sky that the east side of the Cascades does better than almost anywhere in Washington. The contrast from the day before was hard to overstate. We’d gone from looming clouds over glacier-polished rock to blue sky, golden meadows and ridge walks with views stretching out toward the Columbia basin. Different elevation, different ecosystem, different world — and yet both unmistakably the Cascades, just showing two completely different faces.
The Cascades reward the people willing to explore past the famous destinations. Colchuck and the Enchantments draw crowds for good reason. Cashmere Canyon is the kind of place you find when you’re already in the area and willing to ask around. Between the two days we got a version of the range that most visitors never see: the alpine heart of it, and the dry country along its eastern edge. Five of us, two days, two different Washingtons. The timing was right.
