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Day Hike - Pacific Crest Trail: Snoqualmie Pass to Windy Pass

After hours car shuttle from Windy Pass to Dru Bru.

David Bradley David Bradley
July 12, 2017
  • Road recommended for high clearance only

  • The traditional wooden signs that used to mark the PCT's crossing at Windy Pass are both gone. One has been replaced with a temporary modern metal sign that is leaning against some foliage and has not yet been inserted into the ground.

    The trail itself is  in perfect condition the entire way from Windy Pass to the ski area.  We saw no snow anywhere.

    There were enough bugs around Lodge Lake to cause to leave after a minute or two.  The ground in the immediate area of Lodge Lake, with about 20' of the waterline, is muddy.  (Maybe it always is?) 

    The road from Hyak to the Mt. Catherine trailhead is less rough than usual but still very rough.  We were able to traverse it no problem with our two high clearance vehicles.  When we came back later to retrieve our vehicles we were also able to traverse the road in a small Corolla, but MUCH more slowly. 

This was an after hours one way car shuttle from Windy Pass to Dru Bru (Snoqualmie Pass) near the western ski area with a party of eight.  We had perfect weather and perfect trail with no issues. We took the small side trip to Lodge Lake, which was beautiful but buggy so we did not linger.

We had one hiccup at the end of the trip where we had planned to take a shortcut along one of the ski area services roads directly to Dru Bru.   When we got to the base of the ski area we turned left (towards the new "Pass Way" area) but could not find a way through the new housing development, so we ended up walking through the ski area service lots almost all the way to the end of the PCT anyway.   There might be a shortcut if one turns right at the base of the ski area instead of left, but that theory is yet unproven.

The logistics of our car shuttle where slightly complicated because doing a shuttle requires three vehicles but we had only  we had only two high clearance ones and all the other participant vehicles were small.  The driver of the largest-of-the-small vehicles kindly agreed to drive anyway even though they had not anticipated doing so.  This  added an unplanned gas stop and a bit of extra drive time to our car retrieval trip, but this post-hike leg of the trip still took only about an hour which was about what we had planned.