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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.

Derek made it to the top.  My legs, just pooped enough after Thursday’s hike, gave out just short of the summit.  I sat down on a rock and said I was done going up.  A few minutes later I had enough gas in the tank to go a bit higher, but by then Derek was coming down.

This hike starts at the same trail head (Ira Springs) for Mt. Defiance, but about 2.5 miles up the trail splits.  We took the “Bandera” path today and from that point to the top it is steep, then steeper, then steepest.

It is hard to capture in photos but the one above gives you an idea.  Anyway, this is a super hike and we are going back as soon as we can.  The only downside (other than my legs acting like the legs of an old man) is that on the way down we must have encountered 60 or 70 hikers going up.  If you are planning to hike up Ira Springs Trail, do it on a weekday.

Plenty to be excited about on this hike:

As I say, I didn’t make it all the way up but Derek did and this is what he saw:

Bottom line is that it was a super day.  Plus, shortly after I got home Derek and Jill and Fin and Cam showed up.  Granny and I got to hang out with Cam and Fin while mom and dad visited with a friend from out of town.

And then Fin wound up staying over – she is snoozing away with Granny even as I type.  Fun!

Not sure when we will do our next hike but I will be sure to space them so my legs get at least 2 days off between hikes.  I am really not happy I got as far as I got (probably less than 1/4 mile from the summit) and lost leg energy.  Live and learn.

Update 11/30: link to visualization

http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/little-bandera-mountain-false-summit/#.VlzlcZXltD8

 

How cool if I had planned this perfectly but the truth is that it was just good fortune to find myself on a high (2,500 feet elevation) ledge exactly at sunrise.  All I did was tell myself to be at the Rattlesnake Lake parking lot by about 6:30 to beat the crowds.

But when I pulled in, the lot was almost full.  And as I was hiking upward, I saw no one.  About 30 minutes before sunrise, along the trail, I looked east:

And it was then I realized why so many people had gotten there so early: holiday, plus no clouds plus relatively late (7:30 am) sunrise brought a bunch of people out to see a sunrise from way up high.

Way cool – and my kind of people.

But I was a tad late so I hurried.  This is not the world’s steepest trail but it isn’t Grant Park either.  I was out of breath by the time I got to where most people were headed, Rattlesnake Ledge.

The place was jammed with people.  So up I went to the middle ledge.  There were some people there and I didn’t want to bother them.  So up I went some more, to the upper ledge.

Jackpot.  That’s just when the sun peaked over the mountains to the east, and I was all alone.  I hung out there for a few minutes and started down.  It’s Thanksgiving, folks are coming over, and if you call hiking up a mountain slacking – that is, not helping get the place ready – I was slacking.

But halfway between the upper ledge and the middle ledge I ran into a guy going up.  He was looking for Rattlesnake Ledge, which he had passed about .4 a mile back.  I tried to describe how to find the side trail to the upper ledge but he seemed not too sure of himself so – what the heck! – I volunteered to head back up and show him the way.

Nice excuse to extend the hike a bit.

We hit the upper ledge, stopped at the middle ledge, and I left him at Rattlesnake Ledge deploying the drone he had lugged along:

And by now the sun was creeping higher into the sky:

All in all a nice Thanksgiving morning.  For sure, it won’t be hard for me to find things to be thankful for.  Or to look forward to.  Derek and I are going to hike up Bandera Mountain on Saturday.  This one is famous for a stretch near the summit that, for .2 mile, is a foot of elevation gain for every two feet of distance.  The views from up there will be superb.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Here is a link to a visualization of this hike:

http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/rattlesnake-to-upper-ledge-11-26-15/#.VldWmZXlteU

 

We spent this past weekend (drove south on Friday, 11/20, drove back today, 11/22) in Cannon Beach, OR.  I had checked the area for hikes and found one I thought would be interesting.  Haystack Hill, which according to the trip reports culminated at a viewing platform placed directly across from the local attraction, Haystack Rock.

And I was so happy to find the platform.  It was a slightly confusing (and therefore rather fun) route.

First, just finding the trail head was not easy.  I walked south thru Cannon Beach, had to detour once because the street I was on disappeared for a couple of blocks.  Then I had to follow a tsunami evacuation route through a couple of private backyards and, finally, someone’s driveway.

But I did eventually spy a trail and started up.

There were plenty of side trails and I checked them all out.  One of them led to the top of the hill, elevation about 200 feet.  Elevation at the trail head was 10 feet.  A little different elevation profile than the one we are used to east of Seattle.

Anyway, the trail itself was OK:

All told, the round trip was just under 4 miles with not enough elevation gain to even talk about.  I found out this morning, driving into Ecola State Park with Jan, that I could have had a much longer and tougher hike had I headed a couple of blocks west and then north.  Good to remember for our next visit.

Here is the local attraction from the beach north of the rock:

And here, to jog my memory later, is where we had breakfast on Saturday – excellent stuff!

I love Cannon Beach, at least now I do, having experienced it off-season.  Great town (we saw “Once Upon a Mattress” at the local theatre), great environment.  We will be back.

One of our bucket list hikes was Mt. Defiance.  We have seen it on the north side of I-90 many times, driving away from hikes on the south side, such as Mt. Washington and McClellan Butte.  Today we checked it off our list.  And what a great hike it is.

You can visualize the hike on a map right here:

http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/mount-defiance-11-8-2015/#.VkCfv5XltD8

Basically, from the trail head you go east, then north/north-west, then mostly west, then at the very end the route to the summit is an unofficial path (it does not qualify as a trail) that just outright goes straight up:

To put this into a better context, this part of the world is hiker and backpacker and snowshoer heaven.  It is the wilderness and there are more trails, official and unofficial, than we can count.

The trail from which we turned upwards to gain the summit goes on and on.  We went another mile or so to investigate the trail before we turned around and headed back, making our hike 12 miles.

There are plenty of great sights along the way:

And we both love being able to put our hikes into a wider geographic context.  If we have seen Mt. Defiance from McClellan Butte, well, the sight lines go in both directions.

Directly above is the very peak of McClellan Butte.  When you are there you are on the side not visible from Defiance so this view is interesting.  And it illustrates why the McClellan Butte scramble is so steep and dangerous.

I have to say that we were really pumped and on a great high after this hike.  What a great Sunday.  But when we got back to the car Derek called Jill who told him that Jan, with whom Jill, Finley, and Cam had been hanging out at a mall had been taken to the ER with stroke-like symptoms.

She did in fact have a stroke (the doctor said it was a ‘minor stroke’) and at the hospital last night she said she felt fine, was showing no impairment, etc. etc.  But she is there even as I type on Monday morning and we are all hoping for a speedy recovery and a diagnosis that prevents this from happening again.

What a beautiful day, and the forecast has been for rain.  We lucked out.

I wanted to check out Mount Washington once again, because the last time I was there I ran into (almost literally) an excavator and there has been no good news about the state of the trail.  The WTA (Washington Trail Association) itself was warning that there would be ‘periodic closures near the summit’ through 2017.

Today, not so much.  In fact, I saw no equipment but I did see one little spot with the fruit of their labors and a couple of ‘closed’ signs:

Basically, the Great Wall is closed and the North Face Trail is closed but the main trail is OK.  It appears they are doing what we suspected they were going to do: they are making a trail for mountain bikes and horses (hikers also welcome, but we will mostly avoid it for obvious reasons) from Cedar Falls (about 4.5 miles west) to McClellan Butte (about 4.3 miles east).

So this trail will come up the west side of Mt. Washington and then go down the east side.  It remains to be seen just how much of the Great Wall will be screwed up by this new high-volume trail.

In the meantime, I must say that I think my go-to solo hike is going to be McClellan Butte.  It is only 4 exits farther east on the freeway and the trail is better.  Really, the Mount Washington trail has deteriorated lately.  It has rained quite a bit and much of the trail is rocky and is being smashed by the runoff.  Hike today was rugged to put it mildly.

But given the glorious sunshine the views were great:

I took my new gaiters because I had heard the snow level was 3,000 feet, but I didn’t see any snow until about 3,700 feet and what there was was pretty light.

All in all a nice workout but it will be quite awhile before I come back.  With the Great Wall and the North Face Trail out of commission for two years, and a ragged main trail, I will be looking for other options.

I met up with another hiker not far from the McClellan Butte summit and he said he would show me the safest path up the almost-vertical scramble.  So I followed him maybe 1/4 of the way and when I noticed that the natural “steps” were about 2 inches wide and that any slip would be fatal I decided to call it a hike.

I did turn around and, shakily (I was more or less petrified) took a photo looking down.  Enough said.  I made it back.

McClellan Butte is such a wonderful hike – really a great workout and plenty of nice views:

One noteworthy aspect of this trail is the switchback section.  I cannot count from the GPX file on the map because they are so thick in some places, but I think there are about 15 switchbacks in the space of about a mile.  It is steep!  Here is a view from just about the middle of the section:

Total hike today was 10.2 miles round trip, 3550 feet of elevation gain, 5 hours and 15 minutes total.  Perfect weather, no rain, no hot sun, just great.

I ran into 8 or 9 trail runners today.  These are people who RUN all the way up and all the way down.  Amazing.  I would like to think that I am pretty fit to be able to hike 10 miles up and down a mountain but I am a couch potato compared to the runners.

Respect!

Here is a link to a Garmin ‘adventure’ of the hike so you can see it on a map and look at the elevation profile (for anyone thinking about doing this hike):

http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/mcclellan-butte-10-24-15/#.ViwAapXlupo

Here is sort of what this hiking thing is about.  This is a photo I took on the way down, not far from the trail head.  The view is of a mountain a few miles north of McClellan Butte.

That’s about what you do when you hike around here.