Sunday Hike At Rattlesnake Ledge

So I decided to forego taking the trip into Seattle to take advantage of the Emerald City Comic Con ticket I had. Really wanted to stretch my legs on another trail and decided to try the Rattlesnake Ledge hike again. The last time I did this trail was in June of 2008 and wanted to see what the winter version of this hike looked like.



A nice 1.8 mile trail that was part green and part white with snow. Quite a few switchbacks and this was a nice change from yesterdays road grade outing.



Where is the view? I can only guess it is there but you can click this link from my June 2008 excursion (Rattlesnake Ledge State Park) to see what it should look like. No fear, I’m sure I’ll do this hike again this summer since the apartment is so close to this trail.


Enjoying the snow!





Here are some of the final pictures with my Panasonic DMC-ZS6 camera. I had decided to try and use the small gorilla pod to take a picture of bogie and myself. Out of nowhere, a stiff wind blew and the camera went right into the lake! So another year of hiking and another camera destroyed! You would think I do this intentionally in order to keep trading up!

Squak Mountain - South Access Road

The sun came out on Saturday and decided I wanted to go back out to Squak Mountain and try one of the alternate trails. In fact, I had the South Access Road in mind which looked to be a low impact six mile round trip hike. I didn’t expect to see that much snow and it turned out to be a few inches at the worst part, perfect for hiking.



So the blue highlighted path is the route I had taken a couple Saturdays ago (see Saturday Squak With Rocks). This hike is highlighted in orange. I found this a very nice training hike and I even ran part of the way back. That is until I fell down (tumbled actually) when Bogies leach got wrapped up with a fallen tree. In fact, I went down the trail about 1/4 mile until I decide to check that I had everything. Key (check), wallet (check), phone (check), camera, camera, camera (ah hell). There it was, sitting right next to the tree, so no need to buy another camera yet. (update on this on my next post about the Rattlesnake Ledge hike on Sunday).


So you can see, this is a very flat road and not a trail.



Snow!



The end of the road is a microwave tower and there wasn’t any payoff view at all. Did chat with a nice couple here that took a series of trails in the opposite direction to reach this point. Oddly, I met them coming down from my Sunday hike (again on my next post Sunday At Rattlesnake Ledge).


On the way back, snapped this picture of some moss covered trees. As you can see, the rapid pace down to the trailhead took its toll on the wonder dog!

Exploring Green River Natural Resources Area

So the new apartment is about six miles from work and I’d noticed a couple markers for trails at both ends. I was wondering if they might connect and perhaps biking to work might be something available in the future. Most of the internet resources I found suggested this was the case but they stop short of what I need to be sure. Saturday I decided to try out a new set of insoles and walk to the Green River Natural Resources trail head. From there I would wander down that path to see where it connected to the Interurban Trail. Later in the week I thought I might take a walking lunch, find the closest Interurban Trail connection and see how far I get coming from the opposite direction.


The Green River trail is through a wet lands and provides a living space for many creatures within the local urban sprawl. Here you can see trying my pathetic zoom lens again to capture the image of a bald eagle perched on a utility tower right above me. Most assuredly he was ready to swoop down on any rabbit, mouse or creature of similar size as his afternoon meal.


This map turns out to be handy and I need to go back and take a bigger picture of it to meet my biking routing aspirations. You can see the big loop called the Lakes Trail. I live on that man made lake and walk around it every early morning with the wonder dog. So you can see Saturdays progress as I walked to 64th avenue, to the Puget Power Trail, to the Green River trail and ended at Van Doren’s Landing Park. I took this picture before I made the turn around and it is amazing this picture stops at that point.


The east trail is covered mostly with sandbags as a protection against winter flooding. Only a few inches of that side of the trail are exposed for walking.



So I tried to cross the bridge to the trail without sand bags. Thing is the bridge is one of the wire mesh kind and that totally freaks bogie out. His eyes must miss the details of the grading and appears to him that we are walking on thin air. So I decided this time to venture down the side with the sand bags.


So this is where we turned around for this excursion. I would imagine we walked about three miles before turning around for a total of six miles of exercise. It is nice to know a park is in the middle in case I have bike problems or need to use the rest room on the way to work. I haven’t ridden a bike to work in about twenty years, so this is still a theoretical assumption but one I like dancing around in my noggin.

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.

Sunday Morning At Coal Creek Parkway Trail

Sun came out today and we took off early to enjoy the Coal Creek Parkway trail. Got to the trailhead before 9 am and parking was fine. Left about 12:30 pm and traffic was awful.

Although I've seen signs like this before, the big rock next to it made for a good bogie picture opportunity!



Trail was in good shape but I did take a few wrong turns along the way. They have opened up some new routes and that confused us a bit.




We actually did get down into the waterfall and took some interesting shots. But I thought these pictures would look better on the blog.

Harry And The Hendersons / Wallace Falls

About Wednesday of this week, I decided (wet weather be damned) I was going to do some sort of hike this week. I had latched on to Barclay Lake and set off to do just that this Saturday morning. A dozen or so miles from the turnoff on Route 2, I noticed more snow than I expected. When I got to the 4.5 mile forest road that leads to the trailhead from Route 2, changed my mind. I have a 4x4 and I don’t completely suck using it but those forest roads can get a little funky. Snow, mud and weekend traffic can easily lead to slipping off the road and I just wasn’t in the mood to deal with that. Besides, Wallace Falls state park that I passed on the way has a big parking lot and that seemed an admirable “Plan B”.



Now I’ve passed the Sasquatch expresso stand and Zeke’s Drive In dozens of times the five + years I’ve been out here. Since they both were on the way as I backtracked to Wallace Falls, decided to stop into both.


I didn’t know there was a little dog walking trail at Sasquatch expresso, that there was a “Harry” wood statue on that path or that the area was were some of the movie “Harry and the Hendersons” was filmed.


Had heard that Zeke’s had awesome burgers and have seen lines outside the “walk up” window during the summer months. In fact, those lines are somewhat similar to the beloved Custard Cup in my hometown of Danville Illinois. The burger was pretty good, not awesome, but still yummy.



With the late start and early sundown (4:30 PM), we didn’t have much hiking time at Wallace Falls as I had hoped.





The river and streams were very active, it was wet and plenty of folks on the trail. Still, we had a nice hike and I was able to finish another book in the Dresden Files series on my iPhone!