Eightmile Lake

Author's Comments

The larches are the reason. Mid-October, give or take a week depending on how the season has run, and the trees that ring Eightmile turn a gold so saturated it almost reads as artificial in photographs. It is not. That is just what western larch does in the brief window before it drops its needles, and the granite walls behind the lake hold the color back at you like a second source of light. The trail in is reasonable. Six and a half miles round trip, climbing steadily through old-growth and burn scar both, the forest opening as you gain elevation until the lake appears below you at forty-six hundred feet. This is the easier door into the Enchantments, and it shows. You will not be alone in October. But the crowds thin in the late afternoon as day hikers turn back, and if you are still there at golden hour the lake goes glass-still and the larches double themselves on the surface in a way that makes the wide lens worth carrying. I have stood on the eastern shore at the end of a long October day and watched the last light climb the granite while the lake held the gold below. That is the photograph. It does not require much of you beyond patience and the willingness to walk out in the dark. Bring the Northwest Forest Pass. Bring a headlamp. The trailhead at the end of Icicle Creek Road is unremarkable and the lake is not, and the distance between those two facts is the entire point.

Gallery