September 2025

My attention was drawn to a story I found online. It was about a secret lake up high on my favorite mountain. After reading it, I instantly knew that this lake and I had a date. I planned to do the hike in September. Luckily September is a fantastic month for hiking. There is a chill in the air, most of the humans and bugs are gone, the leaves start to change color, there are still berries to find on the trail, and the weather is often still nice. It seemed the perfect time to find my lake.

There was very little information about the lake out there. In fact, none of my hiking books mentioned it. I could find all kinds of info about the trail near the lake, but apparently finding the lake was an off trail affair. Exactly my kind of affair I thought. I did not bring a map, and of course I don't have GPS or cell phones or anything of the kind. I was going to find the beauty by a few sparse sentences written by another hiker that I found online. Exactly my kind of adventure!!

At the time though, I didn't realize how terrible his directions would be. But that is just all part of the experience. I have found that the more time I spend in the forests and on the mountains, the more of a sense of direction I have in the wild places. I knew I could find this lake even if I got within a few miles of it. This year, I realized that I have developed a new weird skill. I can sense water from some distance. Not the kind of thing you put on a resume, but a very useful skill indeed. You see, when your body gets anywhere near water, if you have honed the skill, you can sense it by changes in temperature, smell and humidity. You don't have to see it or hear it to find it through your senses. Now I know how the deer and other wildlife find a drink in the forests. Several years ago, I did not have this skill and now that I do, I like to test it out whenever possible. It is uncanny how this works might I say! If the rapture happens post tribulation and we are all living in the woods, you will surely want to be on my team.

When the hike to the secret lake started, it was immediately up hill. Grueling uphill for miles and miles. However, there was one set of switchbacks that made me very happy. They went on for miles and were wide and long, sweeping up the elevation we needed to gain in a way that hardly makes you notice you are even climbing. They are the kind of switchbacks every girl dreams of.....or maybe just this girl. These are the switchbacks that call you to run them whether going up or down. Of course I got distracted easily by the berries along the way. So far this whole year, I have only found the blue huckleberries. But today, I found my very favorite red ones!!! I stopped and picked every single one I can tell you that. Funny, I could tell no other human who had hiked this trail had touched them. I am assuming they think they are poisonous. "More for me!" I said to the girls as I ate them by the handful.

These berries got me thinking of when I was a child. My Mom and I had picked a whole bucket of red huckleberries and made a pie. While the pie was in the oven baking, my Dad drove us down to the tiny nearby town's one room Mercantile for vanilla ice cream. That was the best pie I have to date ever eaten. Every time I eat the red huckleberries I think that someday I will get enough to make another one of those pies. But there were sadly not enough on the bushes today. So we kept moving up the trail knowing that we would soon be opening up into some old burned fields beneath the mountain. Of course before we got there, we had to navigate over and under dozens of fallen logs trying to obliterate the trail. From what I could tell, these almost impassable obstacles seemed to turn back the few boot prints I was seeing. But not us. We made it to the old forest fire line and could see the wildflowers were doing their best to take over while the mountain was being shy with us behind some clouds.

We wove through the trees, continuing to climb over more downed logs as we went. I tried to stay focused, but found an entire field of my favorite blue huckleberries....the low growing ones that are extra sweet and sometimes taste like cotton candy. So we stopped for a bit to fill our tanks up until my hands and surely my face were blue. Then we continued on to the first pond we would find. Nova, the Princess, did not care for how muddy it made her feet. (Neither did I as the mud almost sucked the boots off my feet near the water line). Josie, the Beast, however, loved it....perhaps a bit too much.

Today, the weatherman had warned that there could be thunder storms over the mountains. We had so far experienced a little drizzle and were eyeing some sporty looking clouds coming toward us as we continued to climb in and out of the tree line and through meadows. In one of the biggest meadows, full of more blueberries and a fantastic little glacier fed creek that snaked through the grasses, we found several piles of very fresh bear scat. Seeing that made me do a bit of a better job surveying our surroundings even though I knew Josie would tell me if a bear was close long before I would see them. We ate berries and climbed and climbed. The directions I was following told me that I would go up this trail about 3.4 miles before coming to a junction with another trail. Well, let me set the record straight. That distance would actually be over 6 miles to the trail junction. So at this point, I knew I needed to take these "directions" with a real big grain of salt.

When we hit the junction we turned right to head southbound. Our vistas were dramatically opening up as we were getting above tree line now. It was almost immediately after heading south that we heard it. The first rolls of thunder. I was smiling from ear to ear and trying to not jump up and down in excitement so as to conserve my energy for what was to come. I love storms when I am out in them like this!! It makes the wild places feel even wilder. Every hair on my body felt like they were standing to attention. The girls, however, were not enjoying the booms. We all stopped and stood still as we looked up into the clouds and listened for the continued long, low rolls. The world around us was getting dark as the clouds swooped in.

We continued up the trail, climbing up and down the rolling ridges along the side of the mountain, hugging him as we went. We passed more small ponds and had one decent river crossing to navigate. It was deeper than I expected, and colder, but there was no fear for our lives in the crossing, so I was at peace. After last week's hike and terrible river crossings I had vowed to myself to no longer cross any river that I thought had a high probability of killing us. So I was glad I had not already broken my vow on our first week out from that adventure.

As we continued to listen to the thunder, we suddenly came around a corner and found a cave entrance. Josie was very excited and wanted to go right in. I peeked in a bit, but when I found myself reaching for my flashlight, I had to have a stern talk with myself. If I got distracted by this cave and veered off from the goal, there would be a good chance I would not make the secret lake I so wanted to see. So I took my hand off the flashlight clipped to my pack straps and told the girls we had to keep going. Maybe another day, we could come back and see if this was a bear den.

Now, I did take a moment to pull out my little piece of paper that had my directions on them. They stated that my next junction would be after exactly 1.5 miles on this new trail I was on and opposite a large rock. "These are my kind of directions," I said to the girls who were still peering into the cave entrance. But after hiking only 0.75 miles from the last trail junction, my body stopped. There was a large rock to my right. The grasses in a meadow to my left looked a bit depressed in a few places. "Hmmm....game trail or social trail?" I wondered. I double checked my pedometer. I was only half way to where he said I should be. But I knew his last mileages were far off. I looked in the distance and could see a ridge line looking similar to what I needed......a long ridge, with a slight saddle in the middle just to the left of the highest peak. The ridge looked to be a mile off in the distance and not the half mile that my directions stated. But every cell in my body was screaming that this was it and to turn left off the trail and into the wilds.

So we did. We meandered through meadows and up and down rolling hills and among alpine trees. Then the rock climbing commenced. This did follow my directions. The author had stated I would need to just "scramble up the ridge aiming for the saddle". That is exactly what we did, growing with greater excitement with each step. I could feel that we were very close. There were moments when the girls really had to channel their inner mountain goats and needed a few boosts up from boulder to boulder. There were moments that found me on my knees on boulders pulling myself up with my arms and holding my pack weight close in so as to not fall backwards. Ironically I told myself a rope would have been nice, even though last week's hike had me cursing ropes. But almost before I could get too deep into worry of how bad things would get, the worst was behind us. We turned left heading for the saddle with a wee bit more climbing to do. We found ourselves in a cleft between the saddle and the higher peaks of the ridge line and it was as if we were in a grand entry hall of the greatest castle ever made. We all wanted to run, but knew we needed some sort of decorum for such a magnificent place. This is the kind of place you feel before you even see it. We climbed and pulled ourselves up by holding onto a few more rocks and tree branches, and then suddenly there she was.....my secret lake I had been dreaming of. Of course Josie jumped right in and stirred the surface of the waters. No peace with a Wolf around.

I think that God, who is wise beyond my understanding, knew that I would not be able to contain seeing both the lake and the mountain at the same time. So to keep me from dying on the spot, he continued to hold the mountain inside the clouds. But that would soon change when He knew I was ready to take a bit more excitement in. In the meantime, I asked Nova if she thought we should take off our jewelry before skinny dipping since there was not a human in sight. She seriously pondered the question of course.

The lake was held in a bowl created by rocky outcroppings. Alpine trees surrounded it and one end even had a grassy meadow gently leading to the water's edge like a red carpet. When we weren't in the water, it reflected everything around it in it's stillness. There was still a lot of activity in the clouds above us, but the thunder had ceased. The sun was peaking out now and again to warm us, but the wind also picked up as we were higher up now. I found several secret campsites hidden just above the secret lake as we walked around to explore her. We enjoyed the Fall colors and one of the best thrones we have ever sat on just above the lake's edge with views of both the lake and the mountain. When we sat on that stone, we could also hear the roar of a far off waterfall just beneath the mountain's big glacier. I was in love with this place within moments. Funny, it takes me a very, very long time to warm up to even like a human, but I instantly can fall in love with a place like this.....or a dog. I have rarely met a dog I didn't instantly love.

I so wished I had brought my overnight gear to spend the night here. But I knew I had a 9am meeting at my work the next morning that could not be missed. So spending the night here would have to wait for another day. But that did not mean I couldn't stay until after sunset and night hike out. I was going to enjoy this place that dreams are made of for as long as possible, or until I became too cold to barely move. My most perfect hiking partners of course readily agreed to the plan.

While I was wildly distracted by the sun's setting rays and the play of lights on the surface of the water, I felt a whisper to look back behind me at the mountain. What I saw stunned me into utter silence. I could not move or blink or breathe. It was, once again, a moment that God has given me which I will never forget. He was removing the clouds from the mountain. It was a miracle that the blood was still pumping through my body really.

The comic moment of the evening was Josie the Wolf's face. She was clearly as stunned as I was at the show happening before our very eyes as the sun continued its descent behind us and the lake.

After watching the mountain for some time, we turned back around to check the lake and the progress of the setting sun and then realized we needed to run back to the other side where we could watch the mountain behind the lake instead. So many choices, so little time....and it was almost more than I could bear.

It was while standing right here, taking about a thousand pics, when it happened. It started small, perhaps a single rock. But before long, there was a massive roar of rock fall coming off the mountain. The girls and I looked at each other and then back to the mountain. The roar went on and on, getting louder with each passing moment. I started to become concerned and tried to pay attention to the ground. Was it an earthquake I wondered?? Was the volcano becoming active?? What was happening? It went on and on and on. None of us moved or spoke, only listened and stared intently at the mountain. It reminded me of a song we since in Church....the verse asks, "Did you feel the mountain tremble?"

Oh yes, I did get to feel the mountain tremble while standing on the shores of the secret lake. I wondered if anything in my life could ever be as good as this moment. I highly doubted it. Eventually, we had to forcibly drag ourselves away from the lake of wonder. I made a promise that we would come back someday and spend the night. But now we needed to focus on downclimbing the ridge to get back to the trails. We had almost 8 miles to hike in the quickly darkening skies to get back to our truck. Watching the sun set in the cleft of a rock was amazing and of course slowed us down on our return to civilization.

But as we know, all good things must come to an end. The end for me was when we were about 2 miles out from the truck. We had been dropping too much elevation too quickly, and despite my best knee brace on my bad left knee, it toasted out very, very painfully. My feet were also terribly on fire. They had not recovered from the blisters that came with hiking over 12 miles with wet feet last week and were only getting new blisters tonight. I had super painful heel spurs happening in my right foot, which had the worst of the blisters. I wanted to scream or cry or die to end the pain. I could no longer distract myself from the suffering by thinking about my kitchen remodeling project. As we continued down the stupid steep trail, now without switchbacks, I tried to walk without bending my knees, but the trail was too steep to allow this. I tried to shuffle sideways. I needed to keep my legs straight, but nothing worked. Each step elicited an uncontrollable gasp and moan from my mouth from the pain. Ohh, the misery after such beauty. It almost does not seem fair.

Suddenly Josie was at my left side, leaning into my bad leg. "What baby?" I asked her. Then I realized what she was doing. She is tall....tall enough that her shoulders are about hip level on me and she lined up so the handle on her harness was right next to my left hip. She wanted to support me. I grabbed onto her harness and she took my weight and walked with me every step for that final mile of brutality. Nova came up to my right side to try to do the same, but I had to tell her she was too short for me to reach her harness, but I thanked her for the moral support between the winces and moans. These girls truly are the best hiking partners I could ever have, other than Jesus of course. I don't think I could have made that final mile of steep descent without them. What a motley crew we were coming off the trail in total darkness. I felt like I would never walk again, but once I got onto flat ground and didn't need to bend my knee, it wasn't so bad. The first gift I want when I get to Heaven are new tendons in my knees. Do you think that fair to ask of God? He does promise us new bodies after all. I wonder if I will have to break in my new body with all the hiking I plan to do in Heaven or if it will come pre-broken in. Man, I hope so.

2 Corinthians 5:1-3

"For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling".