Salmo Priest Wilderness Backpacking Loop in northeast Washington state

Cheers everybody! This is a short backpacking trip that we do in Washington's Salmo Priest wilderness. Salmo Priest sits up in the northeast corner of the state right on the Canadian border right up against Idaho and what's cool about this place to start with it's a long ways from anywhere super long drive to get out there and it's just a pretty wild area with a lot of wildlife a lot of grizzly bears wolves and even caribou. On this trip we do what's called the Salmo Priest loop it's roughly 19 miles and we start by dropping down to the Salmo River camp there spend part of the next day walking through old growth forests lots of beautiful cedar trees hemlock trees and then we get up onto this ridge and we have great views looking out towards the Selkirks and over the entire Idaho panhandle basically. I did this trip with my good friend Travis aka Mountain Wanderers go check him out on YouTube he's a local up here and has a great variety of trips for this whole area on his channel and also want to give a shout out to our good friends over at Radio Brewing in downtown Kellogg, Idaho. They supplied us with the beer on this trip so thanks guys um all right I'm gonna start you off on the road driving out to the Salmo Basin Trailhead. Cheers! We are here at the Salmo Basin Trailhead and it's after 7 30 p.m so we're getting a late start and our plan is to drop down to the river and find a camp hopefully before it gets dark a few miles away from here but it's all downhill you can see we still got a little bit of snow here to start and it's raining we're at about 5900 feet above sea level so a little bit cooler it'll definitely warm up as we drop down to the river. It is now officially dusk and we have made it to the South Salmo River and this is the crossing we were slightly worried about but it's not big at all so this is going to be nothing we'll do this in the morning and there's a camp right here it's kind of wet but uh it's really the only spot we've found so far so we're gonna camp right here and then in the morning we'll make this crossing and start heading up the valley. It is now day two and it looks like somebody's gonna start the day off with a little bit of whiskey. Look outside my tent door you can see I am right on the Salmo. Good news is there's a little bit of sunshine a little bit anyways. So first thing we gotta do this morning is cross the creek and I'm gonna walk on this tree that is down across the river. Travis opted to just wade the creek and it doesn't look like it got over his knees so it's not too bad. Here's another look at the South Salmo River and all this river flows north into Canada before eventually reaching the Columbia River and flowing back into the states and eventually to the Pacific Ocean. So our plan for today is to head up the valley until we reach Snowy Top Pass. It's gonna be a few thousand feet higher than where we're at right now and we'll be on a ridge so hopefully we have some views and then we're gonna follow the ridge for a while until we find a nice camp. And it looks like we have a little creek crossing coming up not sure what this is gonna look like. So if you look right there you can see some bones. I'm gonna swing this over here. That is bear scat. I don't know what kind but somewhat fresh and this wilderness is one of the few places in Washington where they have grizzlies. So first bear sign we've seen on the trip. It's kind of exciting. All right we've got another stream crossing and none of the crossings have been bad but definitely get your feet wet. Starting to climb in elevation. Not as many cedar trees now and a little bit brushier. Starting to see bear tracks now. So this makes it kind of exciting. Another one right there and then here's a good one. This is one of the more open views we've had so far. We're starting to get up pretty high. You can see we're actually pretty close to the top of the peaks. So we just got to get to that ridge line and then start traversing the ridge. All right so now we're up to Snowy Top Pass and have the first big view of this trip. Totally different than anything else we've been in so far. As you can see we got a lot of snow. I'm going to try to climb the top here. I'm guessing this is going to be a pretty awesome view. Yep. Wow Selkirk Range. Now I'm going to give you a full 360 tour. This is kind of looking towards the northwest and a totally different scene than what we started in but we hiked up from that valley. So the south Salmo is running actually kind of think up that way. So our camp last night somewhere down there. Our next move is basically just to stay up on the ridge follow a trail. We have a lot of snow so I don't know how much trail we're going to actually have but we're basically just going to stay up high and go that way and make camp as soon as we find a cool spot and as soon as we find water. But check out this view. Definitely the best view of the trip. First view of any sort. You can actually see part of Priest Lake way out there. Everything in front of me now is Idaho. Priest Lake is right there and these are all the Selkirk Mountains and this is kind of looking to the south. The range starts down that way and runs north into British Columbia and it's actually its own separate mountain range. It's not a part of the Cascades and it's not part of the Rockies and I believe it is older than the Rocky Mountains. Pretty remote spot and then everything out in that direction is Canada. Trying to see where the line is but the line's kind of running somewhere in there. Alright headed that way looking for camp. Hitting a lot of snow but it's been pretty firm pretty much everywhere so easy to walk on and also giving us a lot of water pretty rugged looking range. So check out these tracks they're not that old. This looks like the bear slid a little bit. They're on top of those other guys tracks that were ahead of us so this bear has come through here today. That's a really good one look at that. So we're leaving the ridge now and essentially heading back to our car which isn't that far away from here somewhere out there but we're just gonna drop down because we want to find water. We can hear it down here. Travis knows there's a camp somewhere in there so I'm gonna try to get over there make camp and enjoy what's turning out to be a pretty nice evening. It is now day three and we have packed up camp and are heading back to the car. Not really sure how far we have to go but it's gonna take a few hours to get there so probably a few miles and we're gonna be walking on a ridge to start so I'm hoping we get some views like this. It's actually a great view and you can see Priest Lake out there so the same peaks we were looking at last night right there. So we have made it back into Washington state and the Salmo Priest wilderness and we still have one pretty good view looking back towards Idaho and Priest Lake you can see behind me. It's just as beautiful as I remember. Great trip. All right so we made it back to the trailhead or almost we've got about a half mile road walk to get back to where we parked but I want to show you this because we couldn't see any of this on day one. I think we started from over there we basically dropped down to the south Salmo river which is running down there so our camp back on day one was somewhere below me here.