I did a hike recently up to Lake Ann -- a place in the North Cascades that hiking guidebooks often refer to as an "alpine jewel" -- and my intention was to make a photograph of the stunning, towering mass of nearby Mt. Shuksan reflected in the lake. It is a scene that others have photographed, and a trip to Lake Ann has been on my hiking To-Do list for years now but I’ve never gotten around to it.
Well, now I have been to Lake Ann...but I can't report that I have seen her because the day I hiked there Lake Ann was still covered in last winter’s lingering snow. I was dumbfounded by the landscape: SNOW!... in LATE AUGUST!!... at a measly 4800 feet!!! All this on a day when it was 90-degrees in Seattle!
Then two words came to mind: Late Spring.
I remembered that well into June (and even July) we had had rain and cooler than normal temps in the Seattle area, which meant that snow was falling in the mountains. Hikers who have been venturing into the high country this summer have been reporting that the mountain snowpack is about a month behind its typical melt, but somehow that info didn't make the necessary connection in my brain as I planned the hike to Lake Ann.
The upshot that day was this: After several hours of hiking, I stood on a little rise above the "lake," looking down at a flat expanse of snow. My hiking friend, Joelle, took a picture of me, and all I could do was grin sheepishly and then laugh...laugh at myself for not listening to what other hikers had been reporting, and for relying instead on my 30-some years of experience, which, this year, is a mental mountain calendar out-of-sync.
But there was also this: Though the landscape we found that day was not at all what I had imagined beforehand in my mind's eye, it was, in reality, quite wonderful. The edges of the lake were beginning to melt and there were pools of blue beginning to form, though ice lingered both above and below the emerging water. The color and shapes were otherworldly and elemental, and the ice below the water looked like clouds. Joelle napped in the sun while I poked around for some time with my camera, giddy over the making of images.
It was a good day to play outside...and to relearn humility.
