Some Desolation Peak Logistics

A friend and I just hiked Desolation Peak in the North Cascades.

A lot has been written about the summer Jack Kerouac spent there in 1956 and the book Desolation Angels that he subsequently wrote about that time. While there's also a fair amount of information about the hike and different ways to that you can get to the hike (example), there's little that's consolidated into an end-to-end plan or that takes a stand on which approach to take.

Here's what we did, why we did it, and why we liked this approach.

The Plan

This three-day plan worked really well for us:

• Day 1 -- Thursday (July 24, 2014)

• Drive to the Marblemount Ranger Station (at or sometimes also called the Wilderness Information Center) -- Get a free backcountry camping permit for Thursday and Friday nights at Lightning Creek Campground. You can only get them at this ranger station, only in person, and only the day of the first night of a stay, and they're given out first come, first served. There's a bathroom here.
• Drive to the Ross Lake Dam Trailhead, further east on WA-20 at milepost 134 -- Park your car here. You don't need a pass.
• Hike the mile and a half down to the Ross Lake Resort pick up -- Detailed directions are described in Option 2 here (Note: The phone is down near the water, not right on the road, and the short path to it cuts hard back to the left).
• Take the water taxi to Lightning Creek -- You need reservations, and we made them for 5PM, as late as they would make them that'd still give us time to set up camp comfortably in daylight. The water taxi is $210 per boat roundtrip.
• Setup camp, and camp for the night

• Day 2 -- Friday

• Pack a light day pack, and leave everything else in camp
• Hike to Desolation Peak and back
• Camp again at Lightning Creek

• Day 3 -- Saturday

• Take the water taxi back to the Ross Lake Resort pickup -- We made 9AM reservations.
• Hike the mile and a half back up to the Ross Lake Dam Trailhead
• Drive home -- It's about three and a half hours to Seattle, including a stop for lunch somewhere.

Options and Why We Liked This Plan

To get to the Desolation Peak hike, we had two main choices:

• Hike 15.8 miles from the large trailhead parking lot WA-20 near the Panther Creek Bridge; or
• Take a boat from Ross Lake Resort

We didn't want to take the extra two or three days to hike in and out, and we didn't want to schlep a lot of gear all the way to Lightning Creek and then all the way back to the car. We also could have rented a small motorboat or a kayak at Ross Lake Resort, but we didn't we didn't want to take the extra time or effort. We took the fastest and simplest route: the Ross Lake Resort water taxi.

Even with the water taxi, we still had two options:

• Get dropped at Desolation Landing; or
• Get dropped at Lightning Creek Campground

The first cuts 4.2 miles off the roundtrip hike, but means you have to hike the same day you take the water taxi and probably get picked up the same day to come back out. In other words, you probably have to take the water taxi, hike to and from Desolation Peak, and then take the water taxi again, all in one day.

The hike is relatively strenuous--13.6 miles roundtrip; 4 miles of it relatively flat, but 9.6 miles of it fairly steep; nearly 4500' elevation gain--and takes roughly 9 hours, if you leave an hour to rest, eat, and explore on top. So, we decided not to try to take a water taxi in either direction on the day of the hike--we'd just do it as a day hike and leave everything but light packs at camp. This is also why we discarded Colonial Creek Campground as an option for the camp before and/or after the hike: we would have had to take the water taxi the same day as the hike.

Because we wanted to make sure we got a first-come, first-served backcountry permit and because we wanted to avoid some of the crowds, we also opted to get to Lightning Creek Campground on a Thursday night so we could hike Desolation Peak on a Friday instead of on the weekend.

There's no camping on Desolation Peak itself, but another option that we quickly discarded was camping at Desolation Camp which is just a mile down the trail. There were two reasons. First, you have to hump all your gear and all your water up the 3.8 miles and ~3600' of elevation gain to the camp and then later back down. There's no water at Desolation Camp. Second, it's a much smaller camp than Lightning Creek, so it can be harder to get a permit. We didn't want to get all the way to the ranger station and not be able to make the trip. 

Lightning Creek boat campground is right on Ross Lake and has half a dozen or so 1- or 2-person sites and one group site (8 people?). For every two camp sites there's a doublewide bear box, a picnic table, and a fire pit. There's water from the lake (which you need to boil or purify). There are two vault toilets, one men’s and a women’s. There's a boat dock, for the water taxi or if you rent a motorboat at Ross Lake Resort. And there's kayak access on a beach. It makes a great base camp.

There are actually two camps at Lightning Creek: the boat camp where the water taxi drops you and a stock camp on the other side of the bridge and creek.

The Hike

Since there's no water on the hike, we drank a lot of water the night before and morning of the hike to hydrate.

To catch the trail to Desolation Peak, you actually start to hike south out of Lightning Creek Campground. After a 100 yards or so, the trail north to Desolation cuts 135 degrees back and up to the left heading north as you'd expect. If you get to the bridge over Lightning Creek before this turn off, you’ve gone too far.

You hike two miles on a relatively flat trail to the turn off for Desolation Peak, about 45 minutes from camp. Most coarse-grained topo maps make it look like you then turn right and head straight up the mountain. However, the trail has lots of switch backs and is similar to Mt. Si (though longer and with greater elevation gain).

Desolation Camp is 3.8 miles up the trail, a mile from the top. There is a pit toilet there but no water.

We left camp at 7:45AM and made it to Desolation Peak at noon. On purpose we didn't try to set any speed records, as we wanted to conserve water and not sweat too much. A lot of the hike is relatively covered by shade which is nice when you're working hard humping up in the morning and nice if the sun is out in the afternoon when you're coming down. The day we went up, it was also mostly overcast in the morning which made it extra cool--perfect hiking up weather.

By the time we reached the top, the skies had mostly cleared, and we had glorious views of most of the surroundings except for Hozomeen Mountain.

We stayed on top until 1:30 and got back to Lightning Creek at 5:00.

There’s a stream on the trail a half an hour from camp which is a good place to fill up with really clear running water. You still need to boil or purify it, of course.

We were whipped when we got back to Lightning Creek. I couldn't imagine having to break camp and take a water taxi that same day and was very happy we'd decided to camp a second night at Lightning Creek.

We dove in Ross Lake for a refreshing shower au naturel.

Heading Home

The BBQ joint in the old railroad caboose in Marblemount (Que Car BBQ) is supposed to be really good, but it doesn't open until 11:30, and we were there by 11:00. After our 9AM water taxi, we made it to the trailhead and car by 10:30. So we stopped at Cascade Burgers in Concrete for a burger, fries, and a shake farther along the way home.

Extensions

One fun extension (before or after) would be to stay in one of the cabins (literally) on the lake at Ross Lake Resort. I stayed in the cabins with my family years ago on a separate vacation, and we enjoyed it a lot.

Another fun extension would be to park further west on WA-20 at Diablo Lake instead of the Ross Lake Dam Trailhead and take the Diablo Lake Ferry.