High Trails: A Guide to the Cascade Crest Trail

Publication Year: 1963.

High Trails: A Guide to the Cascade Crest Trail, by Robert H. Wills. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. 157 pages. Maps. Price $3.00.

High Trails serves its narrow purpose: trail description of the Pacific Crest Trail in Washington, mileages, trail conditions, access roads, and short general remarks about each section. Like most outline guides, it gives you just enough descriptive material to whet your appetite.

However, limiting this book to the Crest Trail is limiting indeed. Traveling the Crest Trail through the Cascades is like the driver who travels the superhighway through your state and then claims to have seen your state. In this case, the traveler has just begun to glimpse the startling Cascades and its trails.

For example, in the North Cascades Primitive Area the Cascades must be close to 100 miles across. The Crest Trail passes through one of the least spectacular parts. Traveling through Mount Rainier National Park you merely skirt the edges and come nowhere near the famous Wonderland Trail. Also, you are miles away from the pristine beauty of Mount St. Helens and Spirit Lake. I have always felt that Cascade Crest Trail was a misnomer. Many sections are far from the crest and indeed are in the very valleys beneath the crest, for in places this country is far too rugged to build or maintain such trails. A prime example of this is the crest of the Cascades between Cascade Pass and Suiattle Pass. With its jumble of cliff-sided mountains and active glacier terrain, many claim this section to be the most wild and rugged part of the continental United States.

This is not to detract from the book, however, for it adequately and accurately serves its limited purpose of describing 457 miles of trail in the State of Washington.

Philip H. Zalesky, Seattle Mountaineers