"Beyond the End of the Trail"

One-year-old Clark in the arms of his father watches his mother battle a grayling at Crescent Lake.
 

BEYOND THE END OF THE TRAIL

For a long time, I believed that Crescent Lake was the end of the trail. And for a long time, literally, it was.

My parents fished for grayling there with me when I was only a year old. My father escorted our whole family up there when I was in my surly teens to camp along the upper creek and cast flies for hungry fish. In my 20s, when I was working for the Peninsula Clarion newspaper, I tramped up there with colleagues, again for fishy purposes. In my 30s, I more than once rode my mountain bike to the lake and back for exercise.

But then the year I turned 40 I was surprised to hear that I could travel beyond the creek outlet, that the route had been extended, that a primitive trail had been added around the lake’s southern shore to connect with a branch of the Carter Lake Trail. The traverse, I was told, comprised about 18 miles. Immediately I was interested.



Clark and his brother, Lowell, above upper Crescent Lake
in the late 1990s. They are on LV Ray Peak, with Madson
Mountain to their left.

Crescent Lake curls like the blade of a scimitar in a nest of mountains. Imagine a big smile of a lake, with the corners of the mouth at west and east; the bottom edge of the smile is the southern shore, the top edge the northern shore. According to the Chugach National Forest website, the Crescent Lake Trail runs 6.5 miles along Crescent Creek (and between Right and Wrong mountains) to the stream outlet on the lake’s western end. The primitive trail then travels the southern shore for 4.2 miles to the Saddle Cabin, and then another 3.54 miles (along Madson Mountain) to the eastern end of the lake. From there, a better-maintained trail takes hikers 3.4 miles past Carter Lake and LV Ray Peak to the Carter Lake trailhead. Altogether, says the website, the hiking totals 17.64 miles without any detours, so the foresters call it an 18-mile hike. (My best-guess estimate before reading this information was 18.5 miles, so I feel pretty good about my accuracy in tracing all those squiggly lines on my battered topographic maps.)

In June 1998, Kent Peterson and I decided to check out the route by making an exploratory mission. On a day that constantly threatened rain but only occasionally delivered it, we hiked to the bridge at the lake outlet to find a new sign denoting a primitive trail and began to follow the damp, grassy, uneven path, uncertain at times what we’d find. In the end, we traveled about half of the full 18 miles before deciding to turn around because (a) the weather looked bad, and (b) we had no vehicle parked at the other end of the trail.

So we came back the next year.

In July 1999, Kent, Adam Tressler and I completed a leisurely traverse on an overgrown trail in warm, mostly sunny weather in approximately nine and a half hours. On that trip, we figured out the trail basics: Stage One took us from the Crescent Lake trailhead to the lake itself in about two hours of steady walking; the trail in this section was solid and easy, and none of the hills were particularly taxing. Stage Two took us from the bridge to the Saddle Cabin; this was all primitive trail and involved stretches that were easy going but also places peppered with stinging nettles and half-hidden rocks. There was also one stream that was difficult to cross without wading; if the water was low enough, a jump completely across was possible, but usually crossing the creek meant temporarily shedding one’s shoes. Stage Three was the rest of the trip—nearly seven miles of moderate ups and downs, across a few avalanche chutes, and a definite shoe-shedding creek crossing at the upper end of Crescent Lake. After hiking past Carter Lake, the rapidly descending path to the trailhead was a hard-packed, gravelly old mining road that usually pained the knees and feet after all the previous travel.

On Monday, June 26, 2000, Kent and I returned for a third attempt, and we found the trail in good shape, the weather mostly sunny again, and the traveling much swifter. We arrived at the Carter Lake trailhead after only seven and a half hours. It was at this point that I became determined to complete the traverse in under seven hours. I didn’t know that it would take me two more attempts to achieve that goal … and that it would be another decade before I bettered it.

As a matter of course, it became routine to make only two major stops on the entire hike—for a quick lunch at the bridge over the Crescent Creek outlet, and for a long snack at the Saddle Cabin. Factoring in those stops (at 20-30 minutes each), I decided that it was possible to arrive at Crescent Lake in less than two hours, eat and be on the way to the Saddle Cabin. Two more hours, I hoped, would see us already done with our snack at the cabin and on our way toward Carter Lake. The rest was all up to the determination and endurance of the hikers.

Or so I thought.

It turned out that nature had a say in this as well.

Kent was tired of doing the same hike, so I took Karen Brewer on the first of what would be five consecutive years of completing the traverse together. After I regaled her with stories of good trail conditions and the possibilities for a record travel time, she and I made the attempt on Thursday, June 14, 2001. The weather started out partly cloudy but very warm. We arrived at Crescent Lake in two hours and took a 30-minute break at the bridge. Two hours later we reached the Saddle Cabin, where we spent another 30 minutes relaxing. With five hours already in, I thought it might still be possible to complete the traverse in just two more hours. Instead, it took three hours and 15 minutes, and I’m still surprised that it took only that long.



Clark leaps over a creek in 2003.

By the time we reached the far end of Madson Mountain, we had gone backwards in time. The upper end of Crescent Lake was still frozen. An avalanche from the previous winter had poured debris over the ice, and all those trees and rocks and branches and dirt were still there. The Carter Lake valley itself was filled with wet snow ranging from one to four feet deep; the trail there was impossible to find. And the descent from the far end of frozen Carter Lake was a trough of mud and running water. We slogged in the snow. We post-holed in it. We splashed down the creek-filled final stretch of trail. But we did finish, exhausted, in eight hours and 15 minutes.

I told Karen it couldn’t be that bad two years in a row.

On July 10, 2002, in warm, sunny weather and on a dry, somewhat overgrown trail, we completed the traverse in six hours and 55 minutes.

On June 21, 2003, we took friends with us and decided to just relax. Under overcast skies that occasionally spit rain, we finished in nine and a half hours. On June 21, 2004, Karen and I were cruising toward another record-breaking performance when the temperature climbed to at least 80 degrees in the valley and sapped our energy; in the heat, we finished in seven hours and 40 minutes. And on my last traverse with Karen—on Oct. 11, 2005, in temperatures that never rose above freezing—we finished in approximately eight hours.

Karen Brewer on the Crescent Lake primitive trail in 2004.

After that, injuries and other plans kept me from the traverse until 2009, when Curt Shuey and I made the attempt on July 1, 2009. I was using the traverse as a training hike to prepare myself for a six-day, 60-plus-mile journey with buddies in the Banff area of Canada, and I was babying an ankle that was still weak from a sprain months earlier. During the first mile of the traverse, I re-sprained the same ankle. Despite Curt’s protests, I resolutely refused to turn around and go home. We pressed on under partly sunny skies and finished the traverse. I failed to record the time, but I know it was in the eight- to nine-hour range.

Joe Charbonnet crosses a chilly creek in 2010.

On June 26, 2010, I led a Kenai Peninsula Outdoor Club hike of the traverse, making no pretense about setting any records. It was overcast, breezy and occasionally rainy, and the four of us finished in about nine hours.

But this year, on Nov. 3, Yvonne Leutwyler and I broke my old record, despite partly to mostly cloudy conditions, temperatures that ranged from 20 to 35 degrees, and up to four inches of fresh powdered snow on the last third of the traverse. We jogged and walked (resting about 20 minutes at both of the usual places) and finished in six hours and 43 minutes.

Yvonne and I early on the trail during our 2012 traverse.

We were aided by low water at both major creek crossings, but we were hindered at the biggest avalanche chute by dangerously thin ice over rapidly moving water, so we were forced to descend closer to the lake to find a safe way across.

Challenges exist in every attempt at the traverse. Sometimes it’s the heat, sometimes the cold. Sometimes it’s the mud, sometimes the snow. Sometimes it’s a trail so overgrown that tripping becomes the norm. Sometimes it’s the wind or the rain … or injuries … or waiting for a black bear to leave the trail. It’s best to be prepared for anything.

But a lot of the success in completing the traverse has nothing to do with personal records, and much more to do with personal goals. Sometimes it’s simply more fun to just take one’s time and revel in the beauty of that amazing place than it is to race against the hands of the clock. So I’ll be back.