I'd been wanting to hike this trail ever since I read the description in one of the old Manning and Spring hiking guides from the days before the internet. I asked J, and he asked D. When we picked up D at 8:00, he said he had also wanted to do it for a long time. D also had the foresight to bring some water boots, of which more later. J brought crocs, but I could find nothing suitable.
We started walking at about 9:20. We knew from numerous descriptions that we would have to cross Ruth Creek on a footlog. It took a while to find the trailhead, which leads to a short, steep descent into the Ruth floodplain, and then downstream a short ways to the obvious log bridge with a nicely planed-off top about 15 inches wide. No problem crossing except psychology. The same log two feet above the river bed would have been easy to walk across, but because it was 10 or 15 feet up, it felt much narrower. Anyway, it wasn't *actually* risky, and we climbed out of the flood plain to the trail proper, as indicated by a totally full trail register with no place to sign in.
The route follows an old roadbed (rail or truck, I'm not sure) for the first couple of miles, ascending very slowly in second-growth forest, pleasant but not terribly interesting. Made for good conversation, with frequent stop-and-chats. The tread was soft with needles.
After a couple of miles, the road ends and the forest growth becomes old. Lots of cedars and hemlocks, lots of shelf fungi on the trunks, and a flourishing understory. Too late for flowers, but some curious patches, particularly big clumps of devil's club in stages from ripe berries to fall wilt, with hard fern (Blechnum spicant), piggyback plant (Tolmiea menziesii), bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), and wild ginger (Asarum caudatum) on the floor. Also one specimen of either unusually white red-flowering currant or white baneberry; impossible for us non-experts to tell from bunches of berries hanging on bare branches.
After 2 hours and 40 minutes of starting and stopping, with only one distant peek-a-boo of the river, we suddenly came to the river's edge, and could look out through the undergrowth and accumulations of driftwood toward a wide plain of white, semi-polished rocks of various sizes, crisscrossed by braided channels of the river at late-summer low flow, leading upstream to Icy Peak in the distance. We discovered we were in an informal campground with several nice potential campsites, and stopped for lunch.
We thought the trail would still lead upstream a ways, but a lot of poking around revealed more campsites but no clear trail. Poking onto little side trails toward the river revealed a few places where we could get out onto the rocky plain, and we finally decided that was the only way to go if we wanted to see the actual cirque on Mt. Shuksan, which appeared to be around a corner not too far away.
Here's where the footwear came in. In order to get out onto the rocks, we would have to cross a couple of branches of the braided stream, with no obvious rock-hopping causeways. D could get across pretty easily in his water shoes, but I had no choice but to off the boots, tie them together and sling them over my shoulders, tiptoe to the shore barefoot, roll up my pants legs, and wade across, supported by a hiking pole on the upstream side. Not hard to do, and the cold water was refreshing on the feet and ankles, but the procedure took a while, and then I had to put my boots back on when I got back on solid river cobble. J had the equivalent problem, because he found it impossible to walk the cobble in crocs, so he too had to put his boots back on to be able to trudge upstream efficiently.
J and I decided to leave our packs by a drift log out in the middle of the floodplain, and he tied a handkerchief around an upward-pointing branch so we'd be able to find them again on the way down.
Up we trudged, occasionally crossing some shallower streams with boots on, until we came to another deeper one that would require fording barefoot. J said he'd had enough and would head back, but D (easily) and I (with difficulty) accomplished another crossing. When I got to a potential third ford, however, I decided that was enough, and I'd have to save the cirque itself for a better-equipped attempt in the future. Teva-type sandals would probably be the thing.
So I headed back down, but I couldn't find my pack, since J had removed the handkerchief when he retrieved his own pack, and the various big drift logs looked remarkably alike. I finally found it, did the first ford in reverse, and met up with D back at the campground, now occupied by the tent of a family who had also taken to the cobbles, but also started to turn back after encountering so many fords.
We started back at about 2:45, chasing J through the old growth and the second growth, where we caught up with him. We figured that if it had been 2 hours and 40 minutes up, it would be two hours or a little more down, but we found ourselves back at the trail register at 4:30--only an hour and 40. We climbed back down into the Ruth floodplain, but it took us a while to find the trail to the log crossing. When we finally did, we discovered that, after all those fords and cobbles, it wasn't at all scary to walk across that high but wide and flat log.
Despite not making it as far upstream as I had hoped, the hike was far from disappointing. Walking four-plus miles through roadless forest to come upon the plain of a major river, all those white rocks with snowy peaks in the distance, was still magical. If there's a next time, I'll make sure I have proper footwear.
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