Kettle Crest Cake Walk

For two years, Conservation Northwest’s Derrick Knowles, several friends and I have done a one-day hike of the 45-mile Kettle Crest National Recreation Trail, which we have given the deceptively benign name “Kettle Crest Cakewalk.” This year’s date was fortuitous: Lupines were in full bloom, the springs were running, and Conservation Northwest had publicly launched the Columbia Highlands Initiative four days prior.

The Kettle Range is the backbone—and heart—of the western Columbia Highlands in northeastern Washington. The mountains, which range from gently rounded to steep, provide distant vistas of the Cascade and Rocky Mountains from their open, sagebrush- and wildflower-filled meadows. The range is a mosaic of closed-canopy forests and open vistas rapidly rebounding from past wildfires, a reminder that natural fire regimes are a crucial aspect of forest health. The Kettle Crest Trail, the most popular non-motorized recreation trail in the western Colville National Forest, winds over and around the length of the range, including six peaks over 7,000 feet. Hikers and horseback riders revere the more than ninety miles of trails along the Kettle River Range for their seclusion and scenic beauty. The many miles of interconnected trails provide a variety of opportunities for backcountry journeys. While one could easily spend several days traversing and savoring the Crest, there is also something magical in watching the full light of a long summer day rise and fall across these wild mountains in one unbroken chain of footsteps from trailhead to trail’s end.

Our own journey began a little before 6am at the southern terminus of the Kettle Crest Trail near White Mountain. As the sun began to enter the purple pre-dawn sky, the granitic rocks glowed with collected and reflected sunlight. Lupine, Indian paintbrush, buckwheat, aster and yarrow began to stir in the breeze. This spectacular region of the Kettle River Range has long been an important spiritual place to local Native American tribes and remains an important landscape for the adjacent Colville Indian Reservation, and it’s easy to see why: These mountains seems to reflect far more than the sum of their components—rock, flower, tree, light.

It’s little spots on the trail to anticipate and savor that always leave such a big impression in my mind: The rocky bench, with its eastward views of Twin Sisters Roadless Area, right before the trail begins to climb around the west side of Scar Mountain; the open, grassy meadow trailing down the west face of Profanity Peak, with views of the Curlew Valley; the serene grotto of giant Douglas-fir trees underlain by grass and lupine as the trail ascends out of Long Alec Creek. The Kettle Crest Trail offers plenty of quiet nooks in which to pitch a tent or rest aching feet.

Ten hours later and almost 30 miles north of White Mountain, we reached the summit of Copper Butte, one of the Kettle Range’s other trophy peaks. Were one to pause long enough to enjoy the view, one would see in the distance the Cascades, Selkirks, and Midway Mountains, and stretched out below the pristine roadless lands of the western Colville National Forest, the lodgepole pine forests of Twin Sisters, the deep canyons of Jackknife and Hoodoo, the Douglas-fir and Douglas maple of Owl Mountain. These views are a beautiful reminder that the Kettle Crest Trail is but a small thread woven through this vast, wild area. The forests, streams, meadows and canyons on either side of its two-foot width give the trail its recreational value, and it’s our opportunity now to ensure this value is preserved for future hikers thirty, fifty, and one hundred years hence.

The 16 hours spent on the trail seems like a long time, but it pales next to the more than thirty years that devoted people have spent working to protect this area. I suspect that, just like a 45-mile day hike, the journey toward wilderness designation takes longer than the optimistic estimates preceding such endeavors. But someday soon we’ll get there. And someday we’ll have a “Kettle Crest Wilderness – Colville National Forest” sign to look forward to at the end of our journey.