This is a short photo essay of the four-day excursion to Lake Viviane in the Enchantment Lakes area of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness (Central Cascade Mountains, WA).
Five of us joined Eric Bilderback to help him take sediment cores from the bottom the lake.
Here are Anne and Lee grinding up the last hillclimb before Lake Viviane. It took us two days to get up there with all the gear. It's just over 8 miles and 5400 vertical feet from the trailhead.
You can see the holes we made in the ice to drop the coring equipment. The ice here was about four feet thick.
Towering above the lake is Prusik Peak. It stands over 7800 feet tall, about 1000 feet higher than the lake.
Our campsite looks deceptively warm. When it was cloudy (most of the time) it was below freezing and very windy. Winter had not yet ended this high in the mountains.
I don't think there could have been a better time to be on this ridge. The mountain in the picture is Little Annapurna. You can see the way these high mountains slice into the weather systems. Little Annapurna seems to be shielding us from a repeat of the snowstorm we had the day before.
Here's Prusik Peak from the west, whereas the other photo was from south of the peak.
Last Modified September 10, 2000 by Benjamin Siwiec
