Twelve Months at Lake Valhalla

Twelve months of visits to a mountain lake tells more than twelve tales. The solitude found during a Wednesday in the winter is completely different than the chaos found on a Saturday in the summer. The seasons make one set of changes. We make the other. The combination produces a much more interesting set of experiences that can't be revealed in one visit or in a page of some guidebook. Lake Valhalla is perched along the high, rugged crest of the Cascade Mountains. It is wrapped within the Glacier Peak Wilderness and sits along the Pacific Crest Trail. Getting there in the summer can be as easy as a walk. Getting there in the winter can be adventurous and dangerous. The lake sits along a series of borders: wilderness and civilization, open alpine meadows and thick forests, the wet Puget Sound region and the dry half of Washington state. Dayhiking families and thousand-mile through-hikers visit, mix, and tell different stories.