Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest, Vol. 1: The Endless Road to Soggy Saddle

With my hiking partner, I'm working on book project number 2: Great Roads of the Pacific Northwest. Everybody knows about the great hiking in the region, but what about all of those great roads, which are wonderful not only to drive  and ride bikes on but just plain walk. Together, we have a list of some 15-20 roads that we will pare down for a book that will serve as a sort of anti(guide). 

Foggy Bottom on the Road to Soggy Saddle: This is the view that I think of when I think of the PNW

Here's the first entry in our project, a screed on The Road to Soggy Saddle:


When I lived in Ireland, one of the prime additions to my vocabulary was the concept of the local. Your local is the pub by your house, the old standard, the constant steady where you'd go and everybody knows your name. Your local wasn't flashy (unless you lived in a flashy neighborhood) but was good and consistent and had been around for donkey's years. But it was reliable and there was a sense of coming home, which is essentially the origins of the word "pub," which is a public house (Irish, almost by definition, do not ever drink at home...you more than make up for your abstaining  at home by drinking at the pub, which is your home away from home).  

The Olympic Mountains and Whidbey Island from Soggy Saddle

Soggy Saddle is our local. In terms of walks, it's not flashy. It's not a trail to glory carved by thousands of boots on a July day. It's a forest road that leads through clear cuts and demolished land to some decent views. The cynic would say "nothing to write home about," but we keep coming back to it as if Soggy Saddle offered postcard panoramas of a space forgotten. You always know what you're going to get with Soggy Saddle. You don't arrive with great expectations of walking over a glacier or peering up to a rock face that defies gravity or your very threshold for beauty. It's just a walk through broken forest and shrubs. For how close Soggy Saddle is to our home in a relatively small but certainly populated college town of 100,000 or so, Soggy Saddle remains desolate, not a soul in view, which is how I like my walks. 

An ice field and Mar overlooking Bellingham Bay

When you hike in the Cascades, as big as an area that the Cascade encompass, the most common trails welcome the visitor with parking lots that rival those of WalMart. You arrive at your trail on a weekend in late August and there are literally thousands of Subarus full of weekend warrior families getting hike # 3 of 5 for the year. Dads toting packs with babies stowed on top, the family dog roped on top of the Subaru with the rocket carrying case that resides there year round, reducing the fuel efficiency of the Subaru, for the 5 trips up to the mountain that the family makes. They're so civilized. You'll most often be welcomed with a perfunctory hello and not an ill thought would cross the family's mind as you walk by them. They are perfectly OK with hiking this trail with half of Seattle and a good portion of Everett, too. They are so happy.The Washingtonians are so polite about the whole thing it just frightens me. I look forward all week to my outing, drive 100s of miles to what looks like a beautiful location in the guide book thinking I'll be getting some peace and quiet to reflect and just get away for a bit, and I arrive at the parking lot for the trail and I see half of Seattle--well that disturbs me. I know. I'm not from here. And I will always be an alien in this part of the world. Which is weird because I've felt more at home in remote villages in Mexico or on the streets of Shanghai than I do living in my own country in the Northwest, but part of this equation is my belief that if I'm going out to nature to get some R and R. Even in my overpopulated home state of California, it seems easier to find peace and quiet. One does not have to drive far north of San Francisco to get into godforsaken wild and wooly coasts where it seems not a soul has trodden upon. And I like that.

Close Encounters with a Creepy Critter aka Lupe

Which is why I seek out the weird hikes. Soggy Saddle is not even a hike. It's a walk on a logging road that any day now I could return to and share the road with a large logging truck carrying out the last few decent sized trees left here. Actually this is the case when you're driving on the road that leads to the road to Soggy Saddle. Once, when I was driving that road in my pickup with Lupe hanging out the front window a logging truck came so fast and occupying the whole road that I had to take evasive action and swing into a ditch and Lupe flew out the window. But Lupe's a tough dog and she bounced up and sprinted after that logging truck, barking at it, wanting to kick its ass. That's just the kind of dog she is. But I'm the type that recognizes that the road is here so that trucks can get logs and bring them to mills who bring them to Home Depot. In this part of the world we live in houses are made from wood. And you have to be OK with that fact to live here. Just like if you eat meat you should know what it's like to slaughter an animal. Of course, if you know what it's like, you'll never eat a feed farm factory raised animal ever again. But that's another story. I'm OK with the logging trucks and I don't have any illusions about the public lands, which I really love, but they truly are lands of many uses. And the reason there are roads there is not so people can hike or recreate in whichever way they choose--shooting cans, blowing up small animals--but so that we (the public...or the government) can maximize the profits made in their investments in those lands. Just a fact of life that I don't argue with. 

Icicles on the eroded roadside

I'm not happy hiking with half of Seattle. If I wanted to hang out with thousands of people, I would have made my to WalMart to spend my day. It's not that I don't like people because I'm OK hanging out with 23 million people (much more people than there in the whole of the PNW) on the condensed streets of Shanghai. It's just that when I'm outside, I need some quiet with my soul. And that's where Soggy Saddle fits in. It's tranquil because it has been destroyed by people in the past. There's not a false sense of preservation that you get, for example, especially so in National Parks, which are nice and pretty but are just glorified zoos. (Would you really witness animals acting like they do in Yellowstone outside of the park's borders? Of course not!)

What's interesting and telling about a place like Soggy Saddle is that it's so rich with animal life. Rarely do I see spores from animals on any of the glory hikes listed in all the guide books read by everybody else. But every time I'm up at Soggy Saddle I feel like we are going to see a cougar. I've seen some very fresh cougar tracks and scat. I once saw so many steaming piles of bear scat that I had to turn around. Soggy Saddle is crawling with the critters who hightailed it away from those glory hikes with parking lots full of people.

Bobcat, coyote and Lupe tracks. You can see her way up ahead.

There is something deceptively beautiful about Soggy Saddle besides the fact that it's a place not too far from home where we are just about guaranteed not to see anyone else. It's so removed, even if there are slash piles and litter strewn around and bullets laying in the muck. At the gate to the forest road leading to Soggy Saddle, there lies the refuse from a dishwasher. Somebody left their boat there as if it were the detritus from the last great flood. Tarps hang in the swamp around the gate. All other refuse is just haphazardly thrown about like the remains of a battlefield after a bloody fight. It's just god awful. But endearing.

A cure for claustrophobia

There really are 2 kinds of people in this world: Claustrophobes and agoraphobes. We fall definitely into the former category, which is a horrible fate because living in the Northwest, we live engulfed in claustrophobia--constant low-hanging clouds, deep dark forests, haphazardly created towns constructed with no real thought of how to manipulate light, thereby increasing it (the entire purpose of sound architecture), in a place where light comes at a premium for so much of the year. To cure our claustrophobia we have to drive to the East side, the other side of the Cascades where Western Washingtonians feel an impending sense of agoraphobia. They look down on the eastern side not just because the people are different but they just can't seem to fathom the open skies, the abundance of light. It's quite scary to them. But that's where I feel at home. Our other cure for claustrophobia is to head up to Soggy Saddle, big and open views of clear cuts and river valleys. It's a sad thing about the clear cuts, but if there weren't clear cuts, there wouldn't be views. It's really crazy in this evergreen state but it is really, really difficult to find land that hasn't been destroyed by the hands of industry. Even the nice forest walks are second growth. Only tiny pockets of land where even helicopters couldn't pull the trees out of the canyons cliffs so steep no man could log them (which brings up another entry on the Great Roads of the ONW--The Hidden Pockets Where Not Even Helicopters Could Pull Out Trees).

Slash pile, dog, mountain. That's the North Twin Sister lurking over Lupe.

Lastly, the name. Why Soggy Saddle? The day we realized the beauty of Soggy Saddle we snowshoed in the rain up to its hump. No views--the clouds were in the way--and we were so soaked that we were soggy. My partner tried to light a cigarette at the top and well...it was too soggy to light. But there was something so satisfying about the walk. A consistent upwards grade, a climb that offers enough exercise to get the heart going and clear the soul. Hiking in such cold rain we earned our pizza and beer at the North Fork Beer Shrine in Deming, our post-walk ritual and the greatest place in the galaxy. And that to me is a perfect day. An 8-mile hike--quiet with views, nothing extraordinary, a pint or 2 of extraordinary stout and a pizza bigger than my face. 

Ice crystals and sunset over the Lorax mountain range.

Soggy Saddle: If you lived here, you'd be home. And Soggy Saddle is my home away from home. 

Sunset over the Lorax mountain range