Right in Our Backyard: The Pacific Northwest Trail

Erik Burge is the education coordinator for the Pacific Northwest Trail Association. He currently lives in Bellingham and writes an outdoor column for The Every Other Weekly.

As many Northwest Washington trail users are probably well aware—our soggy, rugged little corner of the nation hosts a particularly breath-taking and challenging section of one of America’s premiere long-distance hiking trails—the Pacific Crest Trail. However, many would be surprised to learn that the Fourth Corner plays host to a particularly breath-taking and challenging section of another of America’s premier (although lesser-known) long-distance hiking trails – the Pacific Northwest Trail.

The Pacific Northwest Trail suffers from an identity crisis. More often than not, because of their similar-sounding names and the relative geographic proximity, local hikers mistake the Pacific Northwest Trail for the Pacific Coast Trail or vice versa. Yet these two trails possess striking differences in route orientation and character that for day hikers, backpackers and through-hikers alike warrant careful attention.

The Pacific Crest Trail is a 2,650-mile footpath that travels in a north/south direction through the states of California, Oregon and Washington over the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains.

The Pacific Northwest Trail is a 1,200-mile route that travels in an east/west direction from Glacier/Waterton National Park, Montana to Cape Alava on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Since the Pacific Crest Trail already owns a world-wide reputation, this article will focus on the lesser known, but just as effective, Pacific Northwest Trail.

Each trail takes on the characteristics of the terrain over which it passes. When compared to the Pacific Coast Trail, the Pacific Northwest Trail offers the hiker a strikingly different experience. Beside route orientation and distance (the Pacific Northwest Trail being 1,450 miles shorter) their most striking difference is grade.

For the majority of its length, the Pacific Coast Trail utilizes existing trails to contour near the crests of its two mountain ranges, thus ensuring the trail user with a predominantly alpine wilderness experience. The coast trail user will encounter primarily marmots, mountain goats, rocky ridge tops, streams, creeks, lakes, glaciers, alpine meadows and other backpackers.

The Pacific Northwest Trail experience, although in places similar to the PCT’s, offers a far more varied experience. Crossing over no less than six mountain ranges, the Columbia River and Puget Sound, the Pacific Northwest Trail utilizes a wide array of transportation corridors including but not limited to trails, logging roads, cattle paths, abandoned railroad grades and even a ferry service!

Although it certainly provides the hiker with a bounty of sustained wilderness tracts (126 miles through the Pasayten Wilderness Area), the Pacific Northwest Trail guides the hiker through a challenging variety of topographical and climatic regions, elevations and population centers ranging from rural, agricultural-based communities of Idaho and Montana to and more densely populated urban areas of Puget Sound.

The Pacific Northwest Trail user might encounter a grizzly bear, a herd of black angus cattle, active volcanic peaks, hay fields, abandoned mine shafts and 7-11 convenience stores. A herd of mountain goats, a pod of Orcas, star fish, porpoises, car auto dealerships, housing developments, trains, supertankers, white water rapids, hikers, road cyclists, mountain bikers, ranchers, loggers, cowboys, truckers, skateboarders, motor-cross bikes, four-wheelers, logging trucks, clear-cuts and 20-foot surf to name a few.

On the Pacific Coast Trail you must endure; on the Pacific Northwest Trail you must endure and adapt.

As a trail user in Whatcom and Skagit County you have probably (if at all) first encountered evidence of the Pacific Northwest Trail up on Blanchard Mountain. You might have taken note of the wide variety of signs and markers inscribed with the acronym PNT or caught sight of the official PNT blaze (a single white paint mark on prominent rocks and trees) or noticed the PNT “Talking Rock” Interpretive Boulder at the Oyster Dome (aka “Bat Caves”) Trailhead on Chuckanut Drive.

Perhaps, after seeing one of these Pacific Northwest Trail markers, your curiosity was piqued and it propelled you up the trail eagerly anticipating the next blaze or directional sign only to be left, many miles later, lost and exhausted wondering “So where the hell did it go?”

Approximately 140 miles of the Pacific Northwest Trail’s 1,200-mile route wind and twist their way through Whatcom and Skagit County proper. Through state and private lands where a large percentage of the Pacific Northwest Trail has been constructed by volunteer crews, you will likely encounter some form of trail signage.

Where the Pacific Northwest Trail crosses through National Forest and National Park however, the signage disappears completely. If you’ve tramped any of the classic North Cascade trails on the Mt. Baker Ranger District or North Cascades National park, chances are good you’ve already hiked many miles of the Northwest trail without realizing it. Little Beaver, Big Beaver, East Bank of Ross Lake, Chilliwack River, Hannegan Pass, Welcome Pass, High Divide and Elbow Lake trails are all part of the Pacific Northwest Trail.

Unfortunately, federal agencies like the USDA Forest Service and the National Park System are unable to sign the PNT route through their lands because it has not yet received federal recognition as a National Recreation Trail or National Scenic Trail.

Achieving National Recreation Trail status for the PNT is one of the top priorities of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association, the private non-profit agency who has managed the trail since 1977. Founded by Ron Strickland (the original PNT route finder), the association quickly earned a reputation amongst National Forests and Parks as a rogue agency unwilling to compromise its official route location to accommodate environmentally sensitive habitats and ecosystems.

That all changed with the 1980 publication of the Final National Scenic Trail Study Report. This document, a joint effort of the Forest Service and National Park Service admitted that the PNT crossed some of America’s most varied and scenic landscapes but concluded that, “it is overwhelmingly evident that development of the trail is neither feasible or desirable.”

The study claimed that the proposed route would promote damage to sensitive alpine ecosystems and estimated its cost to taxpayers to the tune of $39 to $106 million.

Undeterred, the Pacific Northwest Trail Association leaders adopted their management and fund-raising strategy for the better, cooperating with public land managers, recruiting volunteers and making great strides to re-gain support at both the federal and grassroots levels.

During the environmental movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the association did an about-face, taking on increasing responsibility for land management issues by cooperating with local public land managers to relocate the route around sensitive animal habitats and fragile ecosystems.

In 1998 for instance, when the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest officially abandoned the Swift Creek Trail (a vital PNT shortcut around the east flanks of Mt. Baker) to comply with the newly established and hotly contested North Cascades Grizzly Habitat Corridor, the association worked closely with Mt. Baker District to establish a new route north of the mountain via High Divide and Canyon Ridge.

As a result of such cooperation, the association now enjoys enthusiastic support from Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, North Cascades National Park and Olympic National Park. With its main office and the core nucleus of its grassroots support based primarily in northwest Washington, however, establishing such a positive, working relationship with those National Forests east of the Cascades (most of whom still adhere to the advice of the 1980 study) has proved more difficult.

Fortunately, that’s about to change. Two recent developments have helped propel the Pacific Northwest Trail Association into prominence amongst conservation groups and land management agencies alike. In 1999, thanks to a $250,000 donation from the Ford Motor Company, the association was able to hire its first full-time employee—executive director Jeri Krampetz who in turn helped secured funding from a variety of private agencies, including Tully’s Coffee and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Such corporate-based contributions have enabled the association to pledge its long-term commitment to serving those ecosystems and communities through which it passes by developing an education program called SKY (Service Knowledge Youth) and establishing the Pacific Northwest Trail Association Native Plant Nursery.

SKY’s (Service Knowledge Youth) mission is to create many future generations of public land stewards by giving high school students in local school districts the opportunity to earn credits and gain paid job experience through trail-related service-learning projects. During the summer of 2001, this nine-week-long program was hosted by four public school districts in northwestern Washington, including State Street Alternative High School in Sedro-Woolley and Nooksack High School.

Combined, students from these two local SKY programs performed nearly 3,000 hours worth of major reconstruction projects on Canyon Ridge Trail in the Mt. Baker Ranger District, conducted a variety of biologic/geologic-based research projects and learned how to responsibly recreate on and care for our local treasure trove of public lands.

Through establishing a partnership with Bellingham-based Workforce Development Council, the association was able to outfit and provide a wage for each and every member of its SKY crews.

For the past year and a half, the Pacific Northwest Trail Association Native Plant Nursery has served both Skagit and Whatcom Counties by providing low to no cost native plants for salmon habitat restoration projects in local rivers, creeks and streams and re-vegetation projects on both federal and state-owned recreation lands.

Through its continued efforts to serve the ecosystems and communities along the PNT, the Pacific Northwest Trail Association has garnered enough support from federal agencies to the point where National Recreation Trail Status could be a reality as soon as next year.

Last year, 2001, saw the publication of the long-awaited 2nd edition of the official PNT Guide, a fully updated 396-page guidebook with current route descriptions and maps written by PNT-founder Ron Strickland.

After a long drought of through-hiking activity (to hike the entire distance of the trail in one sustained effort) throughout the 1990s (34 through-hikers have completed the trail to date), the publication of the PNT guidebook immediately prompted a number of through-hiking attempts last summer (vivid accounts of which can be accessed via the Pacific Northwest Trail Association web site at http://www.pnta.org.)

Meanwhile, as with all long-distance hiking trails (even the 70-year-old + Appalachian Trail), the PNT route is a work in progress. Although public land management policies and the ever-changing political climate will dictate the official status of the trail, the character of the PNT remains constant, dictated only by the shape and spirit of the terrain through which it passes.

From the fjord-like scenery of Waterton Lake to the pounding Pacific surf, over mountains, through old-growth forests and clear cuts, wilderness areas, ranch lands and towns, the Pacific Northwest Trail brings us closer in touch with the land and communities in which we live…and it’s right in our backyard.

For more information about the PNT, full color maps of Blanchard or Anderson Mountain, trail condition reports, or information about volunteer opportunities please contact:

Pacific Northwest Trail Association, 24854 Charles Jones Memorial Circle #4. Sedro-Woolley, WA 98284, Phone: (360) 854-9415, E-mail: pnt@pnt.org.