Discovering Lynx Country

Growing up in New England, I had two mental images of Washington. The first featured the Space Needle, a spaceship perched upon a tall, skinny building. The second consisted of lush green mountains dropping dramatically to the sea.

I never knew of the other Washington—a land of rugged, dry forests and pine-studded plateaus. This is the arid, east side of the Cascades, and its contrast with the western portion of the state still blows my mind. 

Yesterday, Robert, Alder, and I returned home from visiting some of our overwintered wildlife cameras in the Pasayten Wilderness and the abutting Loomis State Forest.

Unlike our last field trip, into the heart of the North Cascades—where we were awash in swollen rivers—this excursion was characterized by blackened trees, fiery paintbrush, windswept sagelands, and loud, fragrant lupine. 

After leaving our basecamp behind, we soon found ourselves following remote Forest Service roads into a refreshingly unpeopled (and unmasked) world of wildness. The Pasayten Wilderness covers half a million acres of rare, protected habitats bordered by Canada to the north and North Cascades National Park to the west. Here, we hiked in diverse terrain labeled with evocative names like Windy Peak, Chute Creek, Tiffany Meadows, and Corral Butte. 

We walked pathways of wildflowers that overwhelmed the senses and conjured Monet. 

We bush-wacked in bogs littered with moose pellets and mosquitoes. 

We navigated charred lodgepoles and sub-alpine firs felled like pick-up sticks by the infamous Tripod Fire, which consumed nearly 180,000 acres of beetle-damaged forest in 2006—and with it, habitat for lynx and other native wildlife.

And we downloaded photographs of secretive animals supported by this sublime landscape, some of them returning after decades of regional extinction. 

Gray wolves. Weasels. Canada lynx. Flying squirrels. Mountain lions. Moose. Mule deer. Black bears. Snowshoe hares. Coyotes. No wolverines this time, but we know they’re out there. Notably absent are the grizzly bears, whose proposed restoration was recently halted by politics. A disappointing conversation for another day.

(Camera-trap photos below courtesy of Woodland Park Zoo)