Pickets Range from Hannegan Pass
— — the row of peaks no road can reach.
Not only on a wall.
“Four miles up from the end of Forest Road 32, the trail through the Ruth Creek meadows climbs to a notch at 5,066 feet and opens onto the eastern wilderness. The Pickets stand in the distance, a row of glaciated peaks named for the resemblance to a fence: Whatcom Peak, Mount Challenger, the long ice apron of the Challenger Glacier, the Northern Pickets falling away to the Chilliwack beyond. No road touches them. Climbers approach for days. From the pass and from the ridge that climbs north toward Hannegan Peak, the range is a horizon, not a destination.
Pickets Range from Hannegan Pass, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hannegan Pass sits at 5,066 feet in the northern North Cascades, on the boundary between the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest and North Cascades National Park in Whatcom County, Washington. The trail to the pass climbs about four miles from the trailhead at the end of Forest Road 32, off State Route 542 above the town of Glacier. The Picket Range lies east of the pass, well inside the national park, a remote subrange of the North Cascades named in the late nineteenth century for the resemblance to a row of fence pickets. The eastward view from the pass, and from Hannegan Peak above it, opens across the upper Chilliwack River drainage to the western face of the Pickets.
The Pickets are among the most rugged terrain in the contiguous United States, with twelve summits above 8,000 feet and exceedingly steep relief. The Northern group includes Whatcom Peak (7,574 feet), Mount Challenger (8,236 feet), Crooked Thumb, Phantom Peak, and Mount Fury at 8,292 feet, and carries the long apron of the Challenger Glacier on its north flank. The Southern group, anchored by Mount Terror (8,151 feet), Inspiration Peak, and The Pyramid, sits south across the divide that drops into the Goodell Creek and Skagit watersheds. The rock is grey gneiss and granitic intrusion from the North Cascades batholith, sculpted by Pleistocene ice into the horns and aretes that gave the range its name.
The Hannegan Pass trailhead is reached by State Route 542, the Mt. Baker Highway, to the Hannegan Forest Road, about thirteen miles past the town of Glacier in Whatcom County. The trail runs roughly nine miles round-trip with 1,900 feet of gain to the pass, generally snow-free from mid-July through October. A Northwest Forest Pass is required at the trailhead, and overnight travel past the pass into North Cascades National Park requires a backcountry permit from the park's wilderness office in Marblemount. Snowstorms are possible in any month. The ridge to Hannegan Peak above the pass adds about two miles and another 1,200 feet of gain.