Preston-Snoqualmie Trail - Snoqualmie Falls Overlook

We took the girls on their first spring hike to see Snoqualmie Falls from the west side rather than the (very) popular east side. We took the Preston-Snoqualmie Trail from the Lake Alice Road trailhead to the overlook and back which is 3.7 miles round trip. The girls did very well and were in packs over half the time to give Mom and Dad a good warm up to get used to heavy, squirming packs again. They're getting tall enough at this point that this will be the last summer for packs, but that makes sense as they're now 3-1/2 years old!

Photos

Spring Hiking - Mount Walker

It's hard to call hiking in February "spring hiking," but Western Washington has not gotten much snow this year, so it really is spring weather around here. Marty and I had a day to ourselves in late-February, so we went over to Quilcene and hiked Mount Walker. It's 5 miles roundtrip with a 2,000-ft elevation gain in the first 2 miles. The two peaks had tremendous views west to the Olympics and east to Seattle.

Photos

Fall Hiking Recap

To extend the hiking usefulness of this blog, I thought I'd go back and recap the hikes we did in September and October of 2009 before jumping into what we're doing in 2010.

We had a few more Olympic Peninsula hiking weekends. In mid-September we base camped in Port Angeles and hiked Hurricane Hill on Friday - 3.5 miles round trip, moderately difficult with the girls in backpacks. Saturday we joined up with Aunts Clare, Jack, and Beth to do the Little Divide Loop that took us 11.5 miles, ending at the Sol Duc Falls. On Sunday we took Aunt Beth and the girls up to hike the Mount Angeles Saddle off of Hurricane Ridge. We only went about 3 miles roundtrip before heading back home again.
September - Olympic Peninsula Photos

The first weekend in October we took advantage of the weather and hiked Colonel Bob from the Pete's Creek Trailhead with Aunts Beth and Jack. It's a pretty tough 8.2 mile roundtrip trek, but the views from the top are spectacular.

Marty and I also did a few hikes a little closer to home in September - Lake Melakwa, a 9 mile roundtrip hike up past the Denny Creek waterfalls to an alpine lake. It was foggy the day we went, so there wasn't much lake to see, but the hike was still a good challenge. I also got to hike to the top of Mt. Si for the first time in September, so that was nice to check off my "to hike" list. It's 8 miles roundtrip with almost 4,000-ft elevation gain.

I'll try to get some more photos posted soon.