Mission Ridge Shuffle
Earlier in the year, I'm not sure exactly when, Katie worked out with some friends of ours how we'd each take a turn watching one another's kiddos for a weekend. We had bookmarked climbing Cashmere Mountain for its unique vantage looking into the Enchantments and across the Stuart Range. Despite it being visible from all around the Wenatchee Valley and the trips we've done over the years, we've never climbed it.
However, at some point we realized to camp at the lake beneath the summit required an Enchantments permit. Not the core, but still a zone that was already booked. The complexities of a last-minute overnight permit, including having to drive to Leavenworth the day before to be within a 1-mile radius geofence of the ranger station, then waiting to find out if we won the lottery, then going into said ranger station to pick up the permit, all the day before, left us looking for other options.
The one stipulation was it needed to be something that was logistically either tough or impossible with kids in tow. How about a car shuttle and an 11-mile long ridge run, mostly downhill. Close to a vertical mile of down, but still, downhill.
What I love about my wife is, within a second or two of me proposing the idea, she said "Yes."
There's nothing quite like running ridges, even when there's no point in doing it at all. After dropping off our kids, we drove Vehicle #1 to the lower trailhead. Except we couldn't quite get there. Google Maps showed we had almost two miles to go when we hit a significant washout. No vehicles were getting past the blockade, but again, after no time at all in considering the additional couple of miles, K said "Yes." That would make our little spur-of-the-moment outing, essentially, a half-marathon.
We hopped into Vehicle #2 and headed to the upper trailhead, each of us scarfing down a half-melted, gooey protein bar along the way. Once we pulled into the upper parking lot, a couple hours had passed since leaving our house. That was part of how this endeavor fit into the category of being impossible with kids.
It was noticeably cooler and much windier at the top. After a quick gear-up and ducking in some bushes, we snapped a selfie. We were fresh. It was one-thirty and we had eleven miles of open ridge to run ahead of us. I let out a whoop as we settled into a pace we could keep up for the next thirteen miles. We were off.
As I've written before, there's a certain ecstatic lightness to moving fast and light through the mountains. On an open ridgeline, it's even sweeter.
Mile by mile, the ridge just kept going.
Eventually we could sense we were going down, following the ridge to its end. I looked back to see from where we had come, the far distant, dark ridge in between the two trees at the left of the frame below. The route more or less traced the contours, all the ups and the downs, of the ridgeline that crosses the frame from left to right. A quarter mile of elevation up, a mile down.
Then we were at the bottom.
Well, not the bottom bottom. We still had to walk the road, near-perfect gravel minus a few hundred feet of being gutted by the creek that exploded following last year's fire. Vehicle #1, dusty and waiting for us in the shade that earlier was bright sun, was a welcome sight. In it was a soft-sided cooler with cold Gatorades, beers, and a fresh bag of krinkle potato chips. We engulfed everything but the beer, saving that for dinner out at our favorite little pub diner in town. In the dark, feeling full in more ways than one, we took Vehicle #1 and headed back up, up, up for Vehicle #2, sitting patiently.
A proper day spent, together, as always, in the mountains.
