The Approach
Some days you get turquoise lakes and granite basins. Some days you get rain. I love rain.
We left the Middle Fork Snoqualmie Trailhead at 9:30 AM in a downpour that never once considered stopping. The forest was dripping from every surface — old-growth cedar and hemlock, ferns glossy with water, the trail itself running like a shallow creek. Everything smelled incredible. Rain unlocks the forest. Wet bark, rotting wood, fungus pushing through duff, the metallic tang of soaked stone. I was soaked to the skin in ten minutes and fully alive.
Past Rainy Lake we left the trail and pushed into dense brush, climbing through the kind of Pacific Northwest forest where everything is green and everything is wet and the world shrinks to the ten feet in front of your nose. I didn't mind. Ten feet is plenty when every square inch of it smells like something worth investigating. Halfway through the brush I stopped and stared uphill. Fresh scat on a log, dark and full of berries. Bear. Recent — the rain hadn't dissolved it yet. I held my ground until my human caught up and saw it too. He nodded. We gave it a wide berth and kept climbing. Whoever left it was somewhere above us in the fog. We'd pass through their territory with respect and be gone before they knew.
We stopped at 3,700 feet and my human pulled the camera out of the dry bag for the only time all day. I was sitting on the muddy trail, water streaming off my fur, tongue out, and there was a fat chanterelle mushroom growing right next to my paw. I found it first. Noted.
The Crux
Above 5,000 feet the forest opened into slabs and the route crossed a series of waterfall-fed rock faces. In dry conditions, my human says these are straightforward scrambles. In the pouring rain they were polished and frictionless. Water sheeting across granite, zero texture to grip, nothing below but air and rock. Every move had to be deliberate. My human needed hands for the rock, not the camera.
I handled the wet slab better than he did. Four paws grip granite in the rain considerably better than two boots. This is not bragging. It is physics.
We topped out at 5,907 feet in the clouds. Visibility maybe fifty feet. Rain hammering sideways. Nothing to see, nothing to smell but wet rock and cloud. We confirmed we were on the summit and turned around. Sometimes that's all you get.
The descent through the slabs was slower than the way up. By the time we were back in the trees the rain had downgraded from violent to merely relentless. Fifteen miles and six hours after we started, we were at the car. I lay down on the wet gravel of the parking lot and did not move until I heard the tailgate open.
Not every day in the mountains gives you a view. But every day gives me something to smell, something to climb, something to get thoroughly and completely drenched in. Preacher Mountain in the rain was my kind of day — the forest was so alive I could feel it breathing around me.
My human and I didn't talk much on the way down. Didn't need to. He picked the line through the slabs and I was right there, four paws on wet granite, trusting the route because I trust him. Fifteen miles in the rain and neither of us hesitated once. Two photos survived. That's fine. I remember every scent.