Slugman
12-27-2006, 01:22 AM
Daisy and I met up with actionbetty and her dog Artemis (alias "Miss Poo") at the Corral pass rd, and drove up the washboardy, rocky "road from heck" to Corral pass. Any car can make it, but it won't be enjoyable. We started out with lots of water, but as it turned out not enough, since there is none along the trail. We used the cheater method, mtn bikes, in part to show those smug dogs who's the dominant (read: fastest) species on this planet. (We are, thanks to machinery :D ). We took our time on the narrow trail, which has significant drop-offs to the left side, enough to make hash out of an unwary cyclist. We also took lots of breaks to let the dogs rest and drink water, and to soak in the views of Rainier, etc. After two hours, we had only gone two miles. One mile per hour WITH BIKES! :eek: That embarrasses even me. We finally got to the wilderness boundary, ditched the bikes and hiked up Noble Knob, taking in the 360 degree views. The heat was less than 360 degrees, maybe 285 less than that, very comfortable with the vigorous breezes we enjoyed. A few bugs, but nothing to cry about. At this point we realized that either the dogs could drink on the way back, or we could. Bummer. However, we simply kicked in our pre-arranged "plan B" and descended to George lake, about 500 below the knob. There is a path that people coming from the Noble Knob backway trailhead have forged up the north side of the knob, so we used that to descend to the north along the ridge down to the George Lake trail, then turned right to get to the lake. It is a very clean-looking lake with nice shoreline for swimming, etc. The dogs loved it, and played in the water for almost an hour. We also filled a couple of bottles of water from the lake for the dogs, and we drank our remaining bottled water on the way back. Finally it was time to head back, so instead of retracing our steps up to the knob using the "cheater path", or going back north to the Noble Knob backway trail and using that to contour back around to the main trail up the knob, we went south, off-trail, right up to the little pass between the Knob and it's smaller cousin to the east, then angled up to re-connect with the main trail down from the knob. We didn't really save that much elevation compared to just retracing our steps, but it was more fun our way. We finally got back to the bikes, and except for a few brief uphill pushes we were able to coast most of the way back to the cars, with a couple of stops for the dogs. R/T distance was 8.5 miles, and elevation was about 1,500 ft total, mostly due to ups and downs and our side trip to George Lake. There are a bunch of pics posted here: http://www.nwhikers.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=15484&highlight=noble+knob