Alex Wetmore is always busy with something…

Christine and I just returned from our first kayak camping trip, a 5 day paddle on Ross Lake. Ross Lake is in the North Cascades, about 3 hours northeast of Seattle. The lake is 24 miles long, a mile or two wide at the most. It is not directly car accessible, so it stays pretty quiet despite being close to both Seattle and Vancouver.

To get there we drove up the North Cascades Highway to Lake Diablo. We put our kayak in at Lake Diablo, then paddled 5 miles to the base of the Ross Dam and paid $25 to Ross Lake Resort to portage us and our gear up to the lake. There are alternative ways to get to Ross Lake, but this is the easiest method if you have your own boat.

The lake is surrounded by mountains and there are tons of camp sitesalong the shore or on the islands. We reserved 4 nights worth of them and set off for our first one atCougar Island. Cougar Island was about 3 miles from the dam (don’t forget that we had already paddled 5 miles along Lake Diablo).Itwas a great campground with only two sites set on opposite ends of the island. We had a neighbor, but barely heard or saw him. At Cougar Island we became aquianted with what we called “feet fish”. We later learned that they are a bait fish that were illegally introduced about 6 years ago. There must be millions of them in the lake now, and you couldn’t go swimming without them swarming around you.

We were greeted that evening with a thunderstorm. Those are always fun and exciting for us because Seattle rarely gets them. The storm blew through quickly, didn’t get anything too wet, and cooled it down nicely for dinner.

The next morning was Monday and I woke up to thick fog. The lake already seemed quieter with much of the weekend traffic having gone home. We were due to move toTen Mile Island, about 7 miles up the lake. We choose a longer route and stopped by both Big Beaver campground for lunch and Devil’s Creek for a exploration. Devil’s Creek is a very deep canyon that you can paddle about a mile into. It is incredible looking up at these cliffs going right into the water and it felt 15 degrees cooler in there (nice on a hot day).

It was already 3 or 4pm by the time we got to 10 mile island and 2 of the 3 camp sites were taken. The last one was very exposed,right next to some loud campers,and didn’t offer good kayak parking. We decided to look around and found a much nicer site at Dry Creekand set up there (it is okay to move sites if you tell a ranger what is going on). The new site had great views on 3 sides of water and mountains, and a lot of space for our gear. We stayed at Dry Creek for two nights, using the day in between to go for a short hike and to get in some relaxation.

Wednesday came along pretty quickly and it was time to move again. The lake felt deserted at this point, the only people around were those who were staying the week. Our paddle back down to Spencer’s (our next campsite) was very quiet and we only saw one or other boats. The day was hot and we took a pretty exposed route to check out a waterfall across from 10 Mile Island. By the time we stopped for lunch it was 2pm and we really needed a cooldown swim. We hung out at Rainbow Point (with more feet fish than we had seen anywhere else) for a couple of hours, then headed onto Spencer’s.

Spencer’s was another really nice campground. It offered two sites and both were pretty private. Ours had a great swimming area and a lot of open trees. I wanted Christine to try out hammock camping, so we didn’t setup the tent here. Pretty shortly after arriving we started to hear thunder and it began to rain. It rained on and off that evening, but left large enough dry areas for us to make dinner and enjoy one last camp fire.

I woke up pretty early in the morning to more thunder. Everything was pretty wet (except for us), so we packed up pretty quickly and headed out. The lake was silent and calm and we had a nice and quick paddle back to the dam and our portage home.

We took our time heading back to the car on Lake Diablo. Neither of us really wanted the trip to end and were enjoying the scenery. Lake Diablo is glacier fed (Ross Lake is not) making it both colder and greener than Ross Lake. We thought about camping another night on Diablo, but the best looking camp site was taken so we just headed back to the car. When we got back to Seattle we learned that we missed a week of record heat.

I really enjoyed Ross Lake and expect that we’ll return in a couple of years. It was a great first kayak camping trip because the paddling was easy and we didn’t need to worry about tides or currents. The campgrounds were mostly excellent. It was the perfect mix of relaxation, swimming, and staying busy. The only thing that I’d change if we went again would be to take less stuff. The kayak fits way more gear than a bicycle or backpack, but that doesn’t mean that I need to bring more than I’d take for cycling or hiking.

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