Saturday Squak With Rocks

Saturday turned out to be a very pretty day and I was hoping to relax and recover from some cutthroat racquetball the night before. As I quickly approach the 50 year old milestone, I find myself running self diagnostics on my body all the time. Thing is that the wonder dog hadn’t played racquetball and all he saw was a fantastic day. As I sat at my desk, every ten minutes or so I’d feel the nudge of his wet nose. This has become his way of saying “Dude, I don’t know if you noticed this but “.


I’m thinking my foot doesn’t feel too bad and I have a new pair of boots I purchased on sale. Also, there are many south Seattle hikes in my “60 Great Hikes Within 60 Miles Of Seattle” book that I haven’t explored. These are shorter hikes and it didn’t make much since to drive that far from my previous lair (north of Seattle by 30 miles). I had tweeted that we were going to try the Wilderness Peak Loop but were denied due to an overflowing parking lot.



So a few miles down the road is Squak Mountain State park and my last visit here was in July of 2008. Here is a link to that posting (click here). The parking lot is huge and they have a large number of diverse trails. I didn’t remember any spectacular payoff views that time but do remember getting lost for a hour or so with poorly marked trails. So I wasn’t ambitious in this exploratory effort. Besides, this is fairly close to my new casa and perfect for quick weekend training hikes.

The zoom on my point and click camera is not that great but did snag a neat picture of this woodpecker. Funny that last time I was on this trail, I snapped a picture of an owl. I don’t remember ever snapping pictures of birds on other trails.





I’m not sure where the rock thing comes from and decided to see what the internet said. Answers.com says ...

They are called cairns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairn . Opinions vary on why people construct them and what they mean, but personally I find it to be a landmark of human presence. People pass by it and add more to it, as a way of saying "I was here." Unique and simple expression that you can leave without harming the environment.

I’m wondering if folks that have gotten turned around on the trails like myself are leaving them as markers?


Anyway, we only did about 4 miles of the Central Peak trail and stopped well short of the peak. Mostly because I wanted to spend the day getting my stuff organized in the new apartment ... but ... feel it is likely that I’ll return to this trail many times in 2011.