7 oct 2025
Trip report: Devil's Dome loop, day 2
The Big Climb™
Whereas the first day was one of our longer days and mostly passed by in rolling hills, the second day was our shortest and steepest. That’s because this segment consisted of a straight climb up to the top of Devil’s Dome, where the next campsite is. This climb is no joke—over 5.5k feet packed into just over 5 miles, and what we found to be largely straight up with little switchbacks. However, since the climb was only so long and we had the whole day, we weren’t too worried. There is one creek along this portion of the hike that provides a good refill stop, but other than that we fully stocked up before leaving Devil’s Creek.
Unfortunately, at this point in the loop we leave North Cascades National Park and enter the Pasayten Wilderness. While the scenery is just as beautiful, the trail is definitely not maintained as well. We quickly found what many others before us had noted—trail maintenance has not come around to these parts in a while. Though I had known this going into the hike, I didn’t realize just how much it would slow us down. Stepping under and over branches and always facing the danger of getting whacked unexpectedly slows you down to quite the crawl. To make matters a little worse, we spotted a pile of bear scat on the trail that looked at most a few days fresh.
After a few miles, you leave the brush and come out above the treeline, leaving the overgrowth behind. This should have left us with a relatively smooth climb for the remaining few miles, except we proceeded to lose three crucial things: (1) the trail, (2) the raincover for Chris’s pack and (3) our entire trowel bag! Only two out of these three things were ever recovered (you can decide which two), and the meandering took our total mileage for the day to just under 8 miles.
Once we hit the dome, however, everything turned around. We left behind the bears and the brush and were met with a beautiful sunny afternoon at our second campsite: the top of Devil’s Dome! The namesake of this loop certainly lives up to the hype—the dome is surrounded on all sides by beautiful mountain ranges, with Jack Mountain resting peacefully and assertively on one side and what we thought might be views all the way out to Canada on the other. The campsites are marked by little man-made curved rock walls that shield you from the wind. And once again, we had the entire dome to ourselves.
We spent the rest of the afternoon lounging around, doing questionable yoga and drying out some of our sweaty clothing. The late afternoon gifted us with an incredible sunset that went from a dramatic orange to a deep purple before finally fading into darkness. The clouds cleared up at night and made for great stargazing. We didn’t quite stay up for that, since the third day called for an early wake-up. Also, as you might imagine night hours on top of a mountain can become incredibly windy, so we opted for the tent rather early.
All in all, it was a wonderful end to a tough day. If you have a chance to experience this campsite, I can’t recommend it enough.