Wonderland Trail Run

Running the whole Wonderland Trail in one push is a classic for local ultrarunners, so when on Thursday I heard that my friend Roger Michel had decided to run the trail the next morning with a couple friends of his, I dropped all of my plans and invited myself along. He was leaving for the Bay Area next week, so maybe this was his way of having a goodbye party.

Five of us met at Mowich River campground at 8:30am on Friday to start the counter-clockwise circuit: Roger, Matt, Kimberly, Ruaraidh and me. Matt's girlfriend Erin planned to meet us at White River with chicken&rice burrito wraps and run the last 25 miles with Matt; otherwise, we were totally self-supported for the whole trip.

As the weather was looking really nice, I brought a minimum of gear to keep my pack weight to 10 pounds (including 5 lb of food, but not including water weight). I brought a couple extra pairs of socks, long-sleeved shirt, wind shirt, fleece hat, knee warmers and space blanket as my backup clothing. I brought an 8000 calorie selection of food, including bars, gels, cookies, nuts, jerky, halvah, and my special no-cook couscous dinner. I brought both a headlamp and a hand-held flashlight, the latter acting as a backup light for the group.

We started strong, but by mid-afternoon, the sun and high temperatures had slowed us to a speed-walk, so our speed was best described as "casual". The views, however, were fantastic. Mount Rainier was ever present, and wild flowers were in full season. This leg was spotted with many river crossing over glacial silt filled rivers, one of which was spanned by an amazingly thin cable suspension bridge. 11 hours later we found ourselves washing up at the bathroom in Longmire, the first 33 mile leg completed.

We pushed on through the night for our 35 mile second leg, from Longmire to White River. The almost full moon rose shortly after sunset, giving us moonlit views of the mountain over Reflection Lakes. The trail to Box Canyon was recently opened (two weeks ago) and very overgrown with vegetation. Navigating at night was incredibly easy. The snowfields between Indian Bar and Panhandle Gap (the highest point, at 6800 feet) required us to search for the trail once or twice, but otherwise the Wonderland Trail is marked so well that my grandmother couldn't get lost. The trail became a bit more rugged and less runnable in this section. The sun rose as we headed down from Panhandle Gap to Summerland and White River. We found Erin waiting for us with tasty food as promised, exactly 24 hours after we left Mowich Lake the other morning. At this point, we had come up with a variety of excuses as to why not to continue, and so four of the five of us called it a day while Matt continued on with Erin to finish the route. I enjoyed a cold foot soak in the White River before we piled into Erin's car to drive it around to Mowich Lake to retrieve our cars for the sleepy ride home.

68 miles, 17000 vertical feet in 24 hours. I've never run or hiked that far in one push and was quite happy with our little journey (especially the company of friends). I'll definitely want to come back and run the whole circuit one of these days.