Winter snowpack melts into waterfalls

The sound is the first hint.

Then comes the sight: falling water. Everywhere, cascading off rock faces, winding down mountainsides, threading through avalanche chutes. A record hot June and a winter snowpack more than 2,000 percent of normal in places have combined to detonate an explosion of waterfalls this summer in the Central Cascades.

The sun, just past the summer solstice, is high and strong, and the snowpack, held close to the mountains during a slow start to spring, is gushing loose now.

The annual gift of fresh, cold, clean water is without price or peer in a place that depends on snowpack for everything from electricity to irrigation to municipal- and domestic-water supplies, from Zillah in Yakima County, to Everett.

"We absolutely take it for granted," said Scott Pattee, water-supply specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, based in Mount Vernon, and a snowpack expert.

Hiking the trail to Source Lake at Snoqualmie Pass on Tuesday, he could at times barely be heard above the sound of water tumbling from mountain peaks all the way down 3,700 feet, eventually to the Snoqualmie River.

The larger waterfalls made their own wind and threw cooling spray on hikers as they passed.

"They don't call them the Cascades for nothing," Pattee said, stepping through a stream frothing over his boots.

Thrown and spangled by mountain basalt and granite boulders in its path, the water was mesmerizing to watch. The rocks were slick and shining and their colors rich and bright as the water coursed over them.

At the head of the glacier-carved basin at tiny, aptly named Source Lake, the plumbing that recharges Puget Sound couldn't have been more clearly on display.

Snowfields, gleaming above, especially on north-facing slopes, melted into the clear, jewel-toned lake, filling it as quickly as the lake emptied out to creeks below.

"In a few days, this water will be flowing into Puget Sound and the ocean," Pattee said. "Everything is connected: mountains, city, sound and sea."

The payoff for a winter in the lowlands with an unusual amount of snow, this will be a year in which Seattle won't have any concern about adequate water supply, Pattee said.

He was here last winter, boondocking his way into cornices of snow dumped 20 feet deep by storms barreling in from the southwest.

Even beyond the sheer beauty of the waterfalls as the snowpack melts, the significance of an abundant water year like this one in a place that depends on snowpack for 70 percent of its stream flow can't be over-appreciated, Pattee said.

"It's an amazing miracle," he said. "And it continues that cycle we all need to sustain life."

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com