Upper Crystal Lake: A 9.4-Mile Sunrise Hike, Mt. Rainier

Still green water at the upper lake, rock ridge reflected, a sunken log in the clear shallows

Some mornings I plan for. This one started without me. My flight had gotten in last night, and at four in the morning my body announced the day was already underway, which left me doing arithmetic in the dark with the sunrise still a couple hours out. So I got dressed, found my boots, and left the house without a plan. That part sorted itself on the road. What I did not see coming was how much of it I would spend thinking about a brick. Upper Crystal Lake sits in a rock-walled basin near Mount Rainier, up a few miles of switchbacks from Highway 410. I had walked to it once before, in completely different weather, and I drove out assuming I knew what was waiting.

Upper Crystal Lake

I crossed Crystal Creek on a single log in the first minute of the hike and again in the last one, and everything in between goes up. Fir and hemlock, roots, dust, an old boardwalk with water running somewhere underneath it. The forest breaks partway up and the mountain is right there, lit before anything else is. Two lakes after that, one small and grassy, one wide and walled in. Then a notch of rock at Sourdough Gap, and one other hiker arriving from the opposite direction at the same moment. It was the quietest morning I have had on a trail for some time, and not for the reason I would have guessed.

Mount Rainier white against blue sky above a dark rocky peak, yellow lichen on a bare snag below

The brick belonged to a castle wall in Ireland, a couple of weeks and five thousand miles from any of this, and I had stood in front of it long enough to feel a little silly about it. Why does a wall I will never see again get that kind of attention from me, while a mountain I can see from my own neighborhood does not? Familiarity was the obvious answer, and I spent most of the climb becoming less sure it was the right one.

Two rocky peaks and a line of firs mirrored on the flat surface of the upper lake

The Journey…

The hike started and ended on the same single log bridge over Crystal Creek. I stepped onto it within a minute of leaving the car, placing each foot carefully in the dim light while water ran white through the mossy boulders below. Sunrise was at 6:36, and I had timed it closely enough that the headlamp stayed in my pack. From there, the trail got right to work. Switchbacks climbed through fir and hemlock, with roots and rock underfoot, followed by an old boardwalk where I could hear water moving beside me but rarely see it. The air was cold and smelled of damp trees. I had forgotten how much that smell belonged to this part of the country, and nowhere else.

Mount Rainier with the first sun on the summit, dark forested ridges below and a lone fir in front

Partway up, the trees opened and Mount Rainier appeared with the first sunlight on it. The summit had turned pink while everything below remained in shadow, so I stopped and let that scene have its moment. Somewhere in those first couple of miles, I climbed more than I had on all three of my hikes in Ireland put together. I am still not sure whether that says more about Ireland or me. Lower Crystal Lake came first, calm and low, surrounded by tall grass and reflecting the forest upside down. Upper Crystal Lake was larger, sitting in an open basin with rock on three sides. I arrived just as the sun cleared the ridge and struck the water in a hard starburst. Logs showed through the shallows, a band of yellow lit the far shore, and Crystal Peak rose above it, reminding me of a hike I had taken from this same trailhead some time ago.

Farther on, Three Way Peak had a rock window near the top, a clean opening with nothing but sky on the other side. Higher up, I turned to see the lake far below and Rainier rising bright behind the ridge. The slopes beneath me had already turned red. Sourdough Gap was mostly broken rock and open air. Another hiker came up from the far side at almost the same time, and we traded a few words about the morning before turning around and heading back down our own trails. A few chipmunks worked their way through the rocks. The birds were the strange part. An occasional chirp, then silence. I guess they did not have much to say today. The clouds I had anticipated never showed up either. A quiet morning from beginning to end, finished exactly where it started, with those last few careful steps across the log bridge.

Gratitude…

I landed last night, and although the clock said it had been a two hour flight, my body knew better. By the time I got home it was evening, which meant early morning to me. Jet lag had stopped being an idea and became a fact, so I went straight to bed. At four I was awake. Not the kind of awake where you roll over and hope for another hour, but the kind that tells you the day has already started. I lay there for a while doing the math. Sunrise was at 6:36. Going back to sleep was not happening. So I got up, grabbed my pack and boots, and got in the car without knowing where I was going.

I did not have to wonder for long. Out here, the choices sort themselves by direction. West takes you toward the coast and rainforest. East opens into desert and coulees. South leads to the Gorge, and the mountains sit in the middle of it all. I turned toward Chinook Pass, partly because I had been thinking about that trail, but mostly because I knew my window was closing. The road would shut for winter in a matter of weeks, and once the gates shut, those trailheads would be out of reach until late spring. Everything else on my list would still be waiting in December. This one would not. I pulled onto the shoulder near the trailhead at 6:30, six minutes before sunrise.

Every time I come home from somewhere else, I notice how much is already here, and how much of it is close. People plan for months and fly across an ocean for a morning I can reach before breakfast. Washington Trails Association lists more than four thousand hikes in this state, and over the past year I have walked through desert coulees, along an ocean spit, beneath old growth, and into rainforest, and slept in my own bed after every one. My gratitude is not really about the number. It is that on a morning I did not plan, with a day I had not asked for, the hardest thing in front of me was choosing, and there was no wrong answer.

Reflections…

My trail-thought this morning had been forming since Ireland. Taken for granted. In Ireland I stood in front of a castle wall and looked at the bricks, and I mean actually looked, long enough that I started wondering what a single one of them had seen. Every brick in that wall was older than my country. I gave that wall more attention in ten minutes than I have given most of what I drive past every week of my life. Somewhere in the first mile of switchbacks this morning, with the light still low and my legs not quite convinced about the plan, the question turned around on me. Why did a brick get that out of me? When was the last time I looked at anything close to home the same way?

The easy answer is familiarity. I have seen Mount Rainier from my own neighborhood more times than I could count, and somewhere along the way it stopped being an event. That is true as far as it goes, and for a long time it was all I had on this topic. I used to solve this with distance. If home had worn out, go farther. Get on a plane, find something that was new and unfamiliar, and come home with photographs of somebody else’s ordinary. It works, and I am not sorry I have done any of it. But it never touched what was underneath, because I always came home to the same ordinary version of the same view, and by then the next trail or trip was already on my mind.

Sun clearing the ridge above the upper lake, light reaching the trees on the far shore

What I landed on, during my climb, is that two different problems have been wearing the same jacket, and I have been calling both of them taking it for granted. One is the worn-out kind, the mountain in the neighborhood. The other is not that at all. I know people who have lived here their whole lives and have never been up the Space Needle. That is not something wearing out. That is something never experienced. And it’s not that they don’t care. A trip has an end date. Seven days and a plane, so a list gets made and the list gets done, which is exactly how I ended up standing in front of a brick. Home has no scheduled end date. The chores have one every week.

Then this morning argued with me. I hiked this same trail last October and it was under the first snow of the season, everything soft and muffled. Today it was dry and the switchbacks were dust, and what stopped me was not snow but a sunrise, and the mountain standing in a gap in the trees. Same trailhead, same miles, and only a few pieces of it familiar. Two hikes, two different kinds of wonder, and the trail did none of the work of arranging that. Which makes me think the worn-out kind is partly a story I tell myself. The place does not sit still and wait around to become boring. Either I stop showing up, or I show up already knowing what I am going to find, and then I find it.

So today I am not planning a vacation, and I am not planning a staycation, which never works anyway because a week at home has no plane to catch and I end up doing chores by Wednesday. What I want is smaller and odder than either one. I want to go be a stranger where I already live. I cannot do that here, on this trail, not anymore, and I would not trade it, because knowing this place is the only reason I could tell that something was missing this morning. But there are thousands of places within a day of my front door that I have never opened once, and every one of them is still sealed. It turns out I have been saving them without meaning to. The path continues.

-Ken