This run was done in early summer along the Pacific Crest Trail. The approach is long, never leaving the hum and scattered views of I-90 until around 2 1/2 miles. From here this section of the Pacific Crest Trail crosses the Kendall Katwalk, a striking span cut into a curtain of rock.
Ridge and Gravel Lake is a short alpine distance away. The extra 1.5 miles from the Katwalk is well worth the views into the Alpine Lakes region. Here is some brief history of the trail.
Elmo Warren, the Idaho-based lead contractor for the project, called it “the hardest piece of trail ever built.”
Though Kendall was located in a wilderness study area (now the Alpine Lakes Wilderness), the local authorities decided there was no alternative to using machinery and explosives to complete the route. After building the trail up to the ridge, Warren and his crew installed camp in the summer of 1976 at Gravel Lake, just north of what would become the Katwalk. They mule-packed in 1,000 feet of steel cables to secure workers and equipment on the precipitous job site, then marked the route along the cliff face by dropping beer bottles full of red paint from a helicopter. Workers rappelled off the ridge and bored holes for dynamite with an 80-pound gas drill. By the end of the summer, a 4-foot-wide trail cut straight across the 50-degree cliff, with an 800-foot drop below—and no guardrail. In today’s dollars, the Katwalk cost about $42,000 per foot; at 600 feet long, that’s $25.2 million you’re walking on.
https://www.backpacker.com/trips/masterpiece-trails-sky-walk
Finally, this section of the PCT was redesigned and moved, to make it much more “horse-friendly”, and a totally new trail was created by 1978 to Spectacle Lake, and then east to Waptus Lake to meet the old trail. This trail also goes up Commonwealth Basin, up to a ridge on Kendall Peak, and along the ridge around the head of Gold Creek to Spectacle Lake. The most difficult part was blasting a trail through the “Kendall Katwalk”, a steep rock cliff on the ridge between Kendall and Red Mtn. Before it was completed, some people were probably going up Gold Creek to Ptarmigan Park, and getting up on the ridge next to Spectacle Lake from there. Much of the trail between Spectacle Lake and Waptus Lake probably already existed.
http://www.alpental.com/history_-_trails.htm
