Jan and I were excited to set off on another trail adventure, this time on the PilTriple! We love finding these beautiful and epic routes not too far from home to use for our training runs. We wanted to get up and going decently early to beat traffic, parking lot crowds, and the heat, so we arrived at the Lake 22 trailhead at 6:15am. After prepping, we headed off a little after 6:30 into the cool morning. We decided to start with Mt. Pilchuck to cut down on how much high-speed car traffic we would encounter on the main road and to reduce how much dust we would inhale heading up the access road as cars sped by. We knew we were in for a long and scenic day, so we kept the pace conservative, took time for photos at each of the summits/lakes, and stared in awe more than once. We both carried all our own food, 2 liters of water each, and we dropped an extra liter bottle of water along the route so as to avoid the need to filter water (though we did have a water filter with us); we returned to the bottle and carried it with us to the finish.
We love this route, despite (or maybe because of) the vert and we will most certainly be back to take in the beauty again!