Mount Misery Trail – Lonely wanderings in the Blue Mountains | story & photos by Craig Romano
For the stockmen who drove their cattle and sheep to the lofty hinterlands of southeastern Washington back in the early 20th century, more than a few miserable moments often waited. To commemorate their efforts or perhaps commiserate over them, they left the name Misery upon a spring and the prominent 6,366-foot summit in the Blue Mountains nearby. Was the object of their despair the stifling mid-summer heat of the interior Pacific Northwest? Or maybe the long dusty approaches to their rangeland? Rattlesnakes? Thunderstorms? Or perhaps just the day-to-day toil of living on the frontier?
The exact reason for the name is unknown, but for those of us who live with all of the comforts of life in the early 21st century, a mountain with such a wretched moniker as Misery may, instead of putting us off, entice us to challenge our outdoor skills and physical prowess. Those whose curiosity gets the best of them soon find out that Mount Misery isn’t a terrible place after all. Indeed, it can be a downright delightful place to explore—especially after the dog days of summer as I’ve discovered more than once.
Traversing the northern reaches of the 177,465-acre Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness in the Blue Mountains on the Washington-Oregon border, the Mount Misery Trail makes a 14-mile lofty and scenic journey. Starting high and never dipping below a mile in elevation, the old Nez Perce trail-turned-stock drive-turned-wilderness-pathway travels across the rooftop of southeastern Washington—and across some of the least known and least visited wild lands in the Evergreen State.
If your notions of this corner of the state are that of an arid wasteland, you’re in for a surprise. True, temperatures here can exceed 100° Fahrenheit in the heart of summer, but autumn is pleasant—and the Blue Mountains are quite green with valleys draped in groves of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir, and upper slopes shrouded with lodgepole pine, subalpine and grand fir, Engelmann spruce, and western larch which, in autumn, brush “the Blues” with streaks of gold.
Consisting of broad basaltic ridges cut by deep canyons, the Blues resemble more the ranges of the Great Basin than the Pacific Northwest. And in the Blues, mountain mahogany, a ubiquitous tree of the Great Basin, pushes its northern limits.
The Blues are blessed with water and wildlife too. Pristine creeks and rivers teeming with salmon and trout crash through the canyons, while the ridges are dotted with copious springs. The area’s abundant Rocky Mountain elk herds (first transplanted in 1913) led in part to the creation of the bi-state Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness in 1978—the first wilderness area in eastern Washington, and part of the Umatilla National Forest. Black bears, bobcats, marmots, pine martens, bighorn sheep, coyotes, mule deer and cougars are also bountiful in the Blues—especially cougars. It was on the Mount Misery Trail that I saw my first cougar in the wild. Thankfully I was in my truck after just completing a 17-mile hike when the sleek and muscular cat with its long, protruding tail came out from the shadows and darted in front of me.
While the thought of cougar encounters may be unnerving for some hikers, by far the biggest hazards in the Blues tend to be ticks in spring, heat in summer, and rattlesnakes at low elevations. With that said, a trek in autumn should prove to be quite a satisfying adventure, and as long as you plan your outing before the opening day of elk season, you should have the Blues all to your lonesome since, outside of late autumn when parties of horse-packers roam these hills, for the most part Mount Misery loathes company.
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