TLDR: We saw the Aurora Borealis from a snowfield high in Washington's North Cascades.
The trip started inauspiciously -- a few days before, I managed to dislocate the little toe on my left foot in the second-worst (more later) stubbing of a toe I've ever felt. I really thought I was going to have to cancel. I couldn't get my foot into my mountain boots, and it was pretty sore to walk on. But by the third day, it had settled down a bit, so I decided to try. I wore low-top trail shoes and carried mukluks for them for the snowfields up higher.
Then we immediately got off track at the trailhead. The parking area stretches a couple hundred feet down the highway. We were parked in the middle. My friend said, hey the trail starts far right by the creek. There we found what looked like a nominal trail, but it immediately took us into dense blow-down trees. After fighting that for a few hundred yards, we popped up onto the real trail! But that lasted only another half-mile or so before we got into the rest of the valley, which was burned in a devastating wildfire in 2021 (a few months after we had been up there). The trail was obliterated, and the forest like a pile of blackened pickup sticks. And beyond that, there was a headwall with rotten snow that required serious rerouting to get up. So the first three miles took us six hours. My toe held up for the most part, except if I put too much pressure on it or bumped it too hard on a rock.
But we had some nice stars on the first night in the first high basin, where we camped in the snow. And we had decided not to go to the summit of the nearly 9,000-foot-high peak the next day, so we knew we were going to have an easier time. That next day, we lazed in camp, got a mid-morning start and were up in the high basin at about 7,500 feet by noon. We stomped out shelves on the side of the snowfield to lay our sleeping bags on, far enough away from where avalanches had been coming down.
After an afternoon of wandering around the basin, we had an early dinner and hit the sack so we could get up at 11:30 p.m. to spend a couple of hours shooting the Milky Way. When the alarm went off and we sat up, I couldn't believe it. The aurora borealis stretched across the horizon, with interesting purples, greens and yellows. It was so bright on the horizon, I at first thought it was still residual sunset, but no, it was the aurora. It was bright enough that we didn't need headlights on the snowfield as we wandered around taking photos.
The way back down, losing 4,000 vertical feet, was pretty tough on my foot. But when we finally found the remnant of the trail toward the bottom, it led us gently to exactly where our car was parked!
On Saturday, a couple of days after we got back, I was walking out of the shower and stubbed and dislocated that same dang toe again. And this time it REALLY hurt. So last night (Sunday), the aurora was supposed to be extremely active, and I couldn't go out to see it!!! So now I have that little toe duct-taped to the one next to it.
And it was all worth it to see that aurora.
