Month: December 2015

Derek and I just plain had fun today.  Derek’s car is AWD and we made it into the exit 38 parking lot and from there we trekked up to the Iron Horse trail.  We headed east, looking for the McClellan Butte trail.

There were plenty of sights along the way.

A notable facet of this hike is that pretty much anyone could do it, at least some of it.  With the exception of a little side-trip about a mile up McClellan Butte trail, it was fairly level.  Except for the fact that we were in snowshoes, which are a tad cumbersome, it was pretty mellow.

Not much wildlife on view but we were not completely alone:

We hiked about 11.3 miles, most of it as I say pretty level, about 5 hours.  Derek had to go to work but we had a great workout, particularly when we hit McClellan Butte.  We didn’t go far (time consideration) but we proved we could do steep trails in the snowshoes.

We will be back in this area on Friday, New Year’s Day, with Jan and Jill and Finley.  We will be doing a much shorter hike with them but we figured out where we could park the car for maximum views with minimum exhaustion.

Happy New Year!

Link to visualization:

http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/iron-horse-to-mcclellan-butte-12-28-2015/#.VoG8EJXlupo

 

After a week of relatively little exercise, due to my busy schedule, I thought I would ease back into hiking with an easy stroll down the Iron Horse trail, from Rattlesnake Lake.  My goal was to find the point where the (almost mythical) Zig Zag trail intersects the Iron Horse.

I found a trail about where Zig Zag is supposed to be, but my gps track differs a bit from a Zig Zag track I found on the web.  So, if what I found isn’t Zig Zag I can keep looking a bit east and Derek and I can investigate the trail that I found.

One thing about Iron Horse is there are so many trails, official and unofficial, that intersect it that you could spend a very long time investigating them all.  By my count there were almost a dozen between Rattlesnake and where I turned around.  Some of them may be dead ends, some may lead to adventure.

I will check them all out sooner or later.

While this hike was far from grueling – there was little in the way of elevation gain – the fact that much of the trail was covered in snow made progress a bit tough.

Lots of people out today and Iron Horse (aka John Wayne at this point) is a very family-friendly trail.  I saw quite a few families with mom and dad and one or more kids being carried in various contraptions, just like Derek carries Finley and Camden.

I also took a small detour down to the Exit 38 parking lot, where we park when we do Mt. Washington or Change Creek – or Zig Zag in the future.  I had heard it was snowbound and it is.  There were a number of cars but they all parked short of the lot, filling both sides of the road right up to the point where the snow was so deep it was essentially unpassable.

I determined that this would be a great place to start our planned family snowshoeing outing that we have planned for New Year’s Day.  But it is unlikely we could get the whole crew up early enough to grab one of the coveted parking spots.

Anyway, you don’t have to climb to the summit of the mountains around here to get wonderful mountain views.  And there is so much eye candy around that I was almost indifferent to this very cool and energetic waterfall:

A splendid little hike, about 12.7 miles altogether, in the summer this would have been trivial but in the snow?  Fun!

I had the pleasure this week, Monday thru Thursday afternoons, of babysitting my grandkids Finley and Camden so their mom and dad could go to work.

Figaro’s portrait was painted last year by Jim Manos (working from a couple of photos taken when he was basically a kitten) and I thought he might want to see what the grown-up fur-boy looks like.

Figs is a sweetheart.

As for Finley, she was not in a mood to be photographed today but her baby brother is too small to escape the lens:

It has been a great week.  I worked Monday thru Wednesday but was off today.  Fin stayed with us last night and after Granny went to work I took Fin up to the local mall for an art lesson and from there we went to her house to hang out until mom got home from work.

The whole gang is coming over tomorrow and Merry Christmas to all!

Saturday is a hike day.  Derek is on call so this will be solo and, if the I-90 freeway re-opens (closed just past Jill and Derek’s exit today due to avalanche danger) I will be up here, one way or another:

Photo taken, by the way, from Jill and Derek’s deck.  Nice, eh?

We did a very fun hike today, one we have done before.

We parked one car at exit 27, near the Snoqualmie Point trail head, then drove the other car to Rattlesnake Lake.  We hiked across Rattlesnake Mountain in about 4.5 hours.

The hike was 10.5 miles with a total elevation gain of just under 5K miles.

Even on a grey day the views are fun:

And we love those towers up there.