When: June 2018
Where: Thunder Creek in North Cascades National Park
With: my friend Candy
What: backpacking
Accompaniment: Ocean by Goldfrapp (featuring Dave Gahan)
Thunder Creek is an underlooked little gem in the North Cascades. I guess most backpackers are looking for a hike with grand vistas, while Thunder Creek offers a low-elevation-gain hike up a river valley through a lush old-growth forest with a well-maintained, soft-tread trail. Perfect for someone with iffy knees like me. So perfect, this was the second year Candy and I decided to backpack here.
The first couple miles feel more like a nature walk than a backpacking trip. Shortly before the first campsite, a sturdy wooden bridge takes you across the milky blue-green glacier-fed waters of Thunder Creek. Massive old-growth trees, bark furrowed like deep wrinkles of age, dot the forest. Magical bunchberry dogwood flowers and twinflower vines carpeted the forest floor like in a Disney princess movie. We had the trail to ourselves for most of the day, the river out of sight far below but faintly rumbling.
The river had washed out a bridge to a nice campsite on the far side where we’d stayed previously, so we were forced to spend our second night at the stock campsite on a bluff high above the river. Just before reaching the campsite, we ran into a pair of men who gave us an uncomfortable vibe with the questions they asked and the way they seemed almost to be following us, stopping at the same places we did. It was late afternoon, they had almost no gear, and we were seven or eight miles from the trailhead. Unsettled, we demurred about where we planned to camp. When we arrived at the sprawling horse camp, we picked the most tucked-away site. An hour later, a father and daughter came up as we were cooking dinner and asked to share the campsite. We both felt better to have a couple other people around.
In all the years I’ve hiked and backpacked, this is the only encounter I now recall that felt off (although I can be a little oblivious). Probably, the men were just awkward or unaccustomed to seeing women backpacking alone, and it was the vulnerability of our situation — two women without means of communication or protection — that set off our internal alarm systems. Or did we feed off each others’ discomfort, amplifying our reaction to the situation? I feel like excusing ourselves was prudent in this instance, but in general giving strangers the benefit of the doubt isn’t a bad philosophy. It’s worked out for me in several situations where the “smart” thing to do would have been not to engage, and I met some interesting folks I wouldn’t have if I’d followed my fear. But, I’d probably feel differently if any of those situations had turned out badly.
Have you shared unexpected good experiences with a stranger?
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