September 6, 2014, on Luna Col, Northern Pickets Range, North Cascades, Washington. Scroll to the bottom to see the view in a full VR panorama.

The evening was about as peaceful as could be imagined, which was a welcome break from the preceding days.

Four of us - Dave Morton, Sid Pattison, Jeremiah Watt, and I - had bashed our way into the Northern Pickets over a couple of grueling days. We came up from Ross Lake, an azure tendril beginning just north of the border with British Columbia and weaving twenty-three miles south.

From the lake, we entered the benign-sounding Access Creek drainage, hoping to follow some semblance of a trail up toward Luna Peak and Luna Col. As a Coloradoan, my concept of a bushwhack entailed veering off-trail into ponderosa forest and zero scrub, small crags and babbling creeks as primary obstacles. Not so in the North Cascades of Washington; here, deviating from the trail – which was a generous term to begin with – entailed suffering of an obscene magnitude. The four of us, sweating under too-heavy packs, forded waist-deep streams, crossed others on snot-slick logs, wobbled through scrub-covered boulderfields, and got torn and tugged and scraped and scoured by seemingly-endless thickets of willows.