Barclay, Eagle.. and Fishing 6/5/2010

I had spent the night before this trip pondering whether we should just take a hike, or spend the money on a pair of 1 day licenses to get some fishing in. Bottom line: I was dying to get a line wet and decided I should head back up to Barclay Lake and introduce Cassandra to the ominous Mt. Baring that resides on the south side. I don’t know if the lake is stocked or not but I figure if it is, there should be fish getting dumped in pretty soon and I want in on that first round.

We woke up around 8am, packed up, and swung into the the local market to grab some last minute items, including our licenes. Unfortunately we had some trouble getting out of the house and had done basically no preperation the night before, so it was nearly 9:30 by the time we actually hit the road. The only thing I don't like about Barclay is the drive to the trail head. It takes about an hour from North Seattle and frankly, I'm usually too excited to want to wait that long. I hike to get out into the woods, not sit in the car. But I digress...

Hit the trail about 11 with a rather chilly wind in our face, even though it was around 50 degrees and clear outside. Near balmy for mid-March on the west side! I was surprised to see that just a few steps in we noticed snow spots on either side of the trail. My last hike to Barclay about a month ago was on a cold, rainy day and there wasn't even a hint of snow anywhere. Apparently old man winder was insistant on getting one last cheap shot in this year.

A little over a mile in we came to what I call the "Stubborn Trees Doorway." Somehow a pair of trees on either side of the trail have decided that the best place to grow is on top of what I'd assume are old ice age boulderrs. As you can guess that doesn't lead to much nutritional value for the root structure, but as I've been shown time and time again; Nature Prevails. Somehow these tree roots have managed to grown over the top of these rocks and find theier wasy down into the dirt. The amount of time this took, and the struggle it must've been for these trees to survive at all is pretty amazing.

Just around the corner is the Barlcay Creek Crossing. Basically it's your typical woond log bridge, but pretty to look at nonetheless :)

We came into the lake around noon, feeling great and excited to fish. We could hear some people sitting down by the water, which is always disappointing to me but hey, gotta share the woods a little I guess. What was really disturbing was how frozen over the lake was! When I hiked in to Barclay a month ago probably only a third of the lake was frozen over, all in the shadow of Baring Mountain. This time about 90% of it was frozen! Make that two last cheap shots for old man winter... and so much for our fishing endeaver. Damn! Oh well. The kids that had been testing the echo of Baring (which really is pretty impressiver) had left so at least we had a little peace and quiet for a snack and some water.

I soon realized that driving all the way out here to sit by a frozen lake wasn't really what I had in mind, and began persuading Cassandra to make the trip a little more adventourous and see about continuing our hike up to Eagle Lake. I'd never been there but had heard there is an old cabin on the shore, and that the climb is steep and trail-less. Flags only! She must've had the same thought I did because it only took a few more handfuls of trail mix and half a tuna sandwich to get the official fiance green light. All she needed was a quick stop by the toilet and we'd be on our way.

Now we'd noticed a sign at the trailhead mentioning something about the toilet being maintained by one volunteer trail group or another and we figured because it was such an easy hike there must've been an outhouse at the top. I didn't ever really bother looking for it since there's always a tree nearby, but had noticed the sign for it at the east end of the lake. Hearing that the way up to Eagle was marked with flags near the toilet I figured what the hell, maybe I'll check it out. Well, it wasn't exactly an outhouse that waited for us. Sometimes pictures simply speak for themselves..

Relieved and ready for what may lie ahead we headed up the mountian. And I mean UP. The combination of no trail and gaining at least 1800 feet in just under two miles made this portion of the hike worth working up a sweat for, to say the least. It was definitely a little nerve racking at first because it takes a whilte before the flags even start showing up and you're basically headed out into the woods blind.

So being the experience woodsman I am, I pulled out my newly acquired iPhone, started up a GPS hiking app, saw that we should head northeast, spun the compass that way and prayed we weren't about to end up a news story. It was only a few minutes in though when we came to the "Entering Wild Sky Wilderness" sign and a few more flags starting show up along the 'trail'. The problem was there were orange flags, and there were pink flags. We figured they both followed roughly the same path and as long as we were in the vicinity of one of them, we were doing ok.

This thought process worked great untill we began running into snow that was steadily becoming less patchy, and more of a ground covering. Cassandra had made the unfortunate decision to skip the waterproof shoes that day and soon enough her feet were getting pretty cold, and leaning towards wet. It was also about that time the flags were becoming scarce again and the snow was making the trail harder to follow than ever. Oliver however absolutely LOVED the snow. I think it reminded him of his puppy days, since it snowed in Seattle just weeks after we got him.

I wanted to continue on regardlesss but Cassandra wisely persuaded me that it probably wasn't safe, especially considering the entire hike had been a two hour goat scramble straight up a hillside, and we still ahd God knows how much farther to go. I still argue we were no more than 500 yards away from the ridge, but let's not talk about that. It's still a bit of a sore subject. We decided (or rather Cassandra convinced me) that it really was better to scamper our was out on to an old rock slide, take a breather, and just enjoy the view for a bit.

This breather turned out to be a fantastic idea as the climb back down proved to be just as worthy an adversary as the climb was up. Between the terrain and the dog it's really a miracle I only suffered one minor tweak of the ankle. And you'd think that finding the way back down would be easier too since we'd just come up the hill, but boy did things look different. Turns out the flags are designed to be easy to see when you're going up... not so much on the way down. Between the compass and the everlasting view of Mt. Baring we would have done fine, but that wasn't good enough for Oliver. He put his nost to the ground and ensured we slid our way back down on pretty much the exact same path we went up. Before I knew it we were passing the same tree with bark missing on one side, and bing over the same log I had to help pull Cassandra up (as well as lift Oliver over)

Our attempt at conquering the wilderness had taken quite a bit longer than expected and it was nearing 4:30pm by now. The sun had dipped behing Mt. Baring and dusk was soon approaching so we high tailed it out of there, gettign back to the car in about 40 minutes.

As we drove back down the dirt road towards Index, knowing we bought fishing licenses and were yet to use them became more and more bothersome for me. Once again: iPhone to the resuce! We still had a good 2-3 hours of daylight and I planned to use every minute of them. We headed towards Gold Bar and Cassandra started doing Google searches like mad for lakes inthe area. The phone battery was getting seriously low by this point, about 20%, and if we were going to get directions we needed them in a hurry. The Google Map showd a place called Wagner Lake that was right near Gold Bar, open to the public, and more importantly year round. DONE! We bailed off on Woods Creek Rd and needled our way back into what appeared to be a scarce residential area. This made me nervous. There aren't a whole lot of public lakes in residential areas to my knowledge. I was expecting to hit a dirt road at the end of the last left turn. Yeah, not so much. Istead it led us to a dead end that was either a really nice house or some kind of resort. Figuring maybe the directions were wrong, we follwed a road we'd spotted that traversed the back side of the lake. Maybe there was a public dock on that side? And again we were lead through a series of turns and driveways that led nowhere.

Exceptionally frustrated at this point we both said 'screw it'. It was late, I was beyond cranky (thank you Cassandra for allowing me to vent through a series of yelling and incoherent mumbling. You're an angel) and we were both ready to be home.

Hooking back up with Hwy 2 we figured it'd be faster to take 522 back to Seattle. Never should have done that. Withing a couple miles of Gold Bar we saw an exit for Echo Lake, and again tried valiantly to get a hook out, even if it was only going to be for an hour, and probably n the dark. So once again we led ourselves back into a series of turns, and once again we didn't see anything resembling a dock. We were very clearly circling the lake however, and on our second loop we found the dock. And the locked gate in front of it with a sign proclaiming "This Gate Locked During the Hours of Darkness".

Flabbergasted I stopped the car, took a deep breath and pronounced "That's it. I'm done. Cassandra simply smiled and said to me sweetly "ok, that's good" and we headed home.

All in all a highly adventurous, if even a little frustrating day. We've since vowed to make the tripo back to Eagle Lake soon, this time armed with overnight packs and camping gear. We will get to that lake! I will sit on the porch of that cabin! And I WILL catch a fish! SO HELP ME GOD I WILL!

-BCnO