Thursday Hike Up Mailbox Peak

Finally, summer appears to have arrived in the greater Seattle area! On faith, I submitted to take one of my three personal holidays on Thursday in hopes to uncork a challenging hike with a great payoff at the end. This This hike with a final elevation around 4,900 feet, the real challenge is the 4,000 feet elevation gain within 3 miles!





My pictures start about 95% into the trail, where a rocky crown open up to a meadow of wildflowers, Normally, I'm not that much into flowers but it they were beautiful after nearly three miles of climbing (what is basically a tree root staircase). The good news about that climb is that you do have a nice tree canopy the entire way!



Inside the mailbox is a variety of stuff but I immediately grabbed the Sharpie and added my initials to the front of the mailbox.





Again, no real picture opportunities on the way down. Since it took 4 hours for us to make it to the peak, I assumed it would be much faster coming down. Not so much, as it turns out. The trail isn't so much switchbacks as it is a vertical staircase and it would be easy to misstep being (more than a little) tired and try to go to fast. This also was one of the few times that Bogie simply laid down a couple times to catch his breath and cool off. We brought plenty of water, so that wasn't it.






So about three times on the way down, I'd find a particularly muddy spot, let bogie cool off while I played Monopoly on my iPhone. I'd make a few rotations around Go, make some business trades, erect some houses on key properties and then continue on. There is one active stream at the trailhead and we stopped there for quite some time to let bogie cool off.


Oh, for those that might be interested, yes I did win the Monopoly game as well!

Sunday At Bridal Veil Falls / Lake Serene

Decided to get up early on Sunday, drive up north to my old stomping grounds and take in the Bridal Veil Falls / Lake Serene hike over by Index. I knew that I would have to get there early because the parking lot gets overloaded pretty quick on weekends. Still amazes me how you have to deal with congestion and gridlock when you are trying to “get away from it all” on a weekend. We are still waiting for summer to arrive here in the greater Seattle area, so a sunny forecast for a weekend brings out everyone for a hike.



I have done the Bridal Veil hike twice before and the Lake Serene once, but I’ve never done them back to back. They share the same trailhead but they branch into different directions about 1.5 miles into the hike.


Before you get to the branch, you have a nice hike through a nice green forest with plenty of streams and the wonder dog had to lay down in each of them, cool off his tummy, get a drink and then decide when it was ok to move on.




I was wondering how the large amount of winter snow and the late arrival of summer might affect the view of the falls. It is just a .5 mile hike to the falls from the trail branch but it is almost straight up. In fact, a good deal of it is not switch backs but stairs! Pictures were almost impossible because of the high amount of spray and it would have been extremely dangerous to let Bogie get to close. On our last visit, he was able to wade right in and I was able to take one of my favorite pictures of him on a hike.


After taking in the falls and making the trek back to the branch in the trail, it is a 2 mile and 1,000 foot elevation increase hike to Lake Serene. We continued to be passed and then pass three of four groups. The difference was that although I’m not a fast hiker with a 12 year dog in tow (sometimes he leads but not as much each passing year), we don’t stop unless there is water for bogie. This part of the hike doesn’t have as many of those watering holes, so we get a pretty good workout!








The lake was beautiful (as always) but I was amazed how much of it was still covered with ice. We trekked over to “lunch rock” and ... well ... had lunch. A few dog biscuits for bogie, some plums / raisins for myself and I drained the first of two water bottles we had. Bogie went for a quick swim, we snapped some pictures and headed back down the trail. So we only stayed at the lake for about 40 minutes but enjoyed every second of it. I didn’t want to dally to long because I knew we would be greeted with a lot of traffic as we would be going back down. Wanted to try to get past the narrow parts of the trail as soon as possible. Didn’t work out that well and dozens of times we had to wait for small groups to go by but bogie did get to meet many fellow canines!


This did afford us an opportunity to take in the view on the way back down, which is amazing as well!