a few hikes in the seattle area

I’ve been on two hikes in the last 8 days or so. Here’s a brief trip report for both, plus one failed attempt.

Silver Creek to Mineral City

This looked like a cool hike with mines to explore and everything. But, the internet was telling me that the road might be washed out. (Read:

http://www.nwhikers.net/forums/viewtopic.php?p=225991

http://www.troyh.us/OurMovetoSeattle/Hikes/Silver%20Creek%20and%20Mineral%20City/index.html, etc.)

But it was worth a try. Maybe the road has been fixed by now. About that:

Yeah, it's not going to be easy to drive over that
Yeah, it's not going to be easy to drive over that

So we drove to a different nearby hike (5 miles or so).

Lake Serene/Bridal Veil Falls Hike

The first 2 miles are a gradual climb on nice trail. That gets you to the Bridal Veil falls, which are very nice. The next two miles are a tough climb. Tough for me at least. All the other people there were carrying babies or small dogs. On the way back down, Rachel and I had enough energy to go the 0.5 miles up to the upper falls, which were worth it.

Rachel at lower bridal veil falls
Rachel at lower bridal falls
Bad pic of lake serene and mt. index
Bad pic of lake serene and mt. index

The lake was really beautiful. I scrambled around on the snow, of course. That was last weekend. This weekend, we did:

Monte Cristo and Poodle Dog Pass

Mostly because I wanted to find another way down to Mineral City, we decided to try the monte cristo hike. This time, Robert came along. Since this hike is supposed to have a boring and bikable first 4 miles, we loaded bikes into and onto  my jeep and headed out to the Mountain Loop highway. We heard from a ranger that the 1st mile was going to involve us carrying our bikes a lot. He was right. We had to cross a log over the river and get over lots of cables holding the logs in place.

cross the logs
cross the logs

Then the road was a little bumpy for a while, with quite a few trees in the road. Good mountain bikers can get through the rocks, but we were walking for a while. Still, having bikes made the trip to monte cristo fairly painless. Going back down was exceptionally fast. Once in Monte Cristo, we had some lunch and checked out the working train turn table, while scanning the mountains for mines.

lunch at monte cristo
lunch at monte cristo
robert on the railway turntable
robert on the railway turntable

We didn’t see any mines, so we hiked up about 2000 ft. to Poodle Dog Pass. It was a nice hike that took probably 2 hours. Up there we saw lots of snow.

Robert, Rachel, and I up on poodle dog pass
Robert, Rachel, and I up on poodle dog pass

Crystal lake had these incredible water falls coming down from snow-melt. It was breathtaking.

Rachel and the waterfalls above crystal lake
Rachel and the waterfalls above crystal lake

On the way down, we got to see what branches look like from the inside of a tree:

this is what branches look like from the inside
this is what branches look like from the inside

We biked out of there and ate dinner at a Thai place on capitol hill. This whole big-city-right-next-to-mountains thing is nice.

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