Centennial Trail ride

Where to ride and how far to ride? Those were the questions we asked ourselves this morning. We haven't gone on a long bike ride this year, and we decided this would be the day.

We decided to go to our favorite trail - "The Centennial Trail", and ride to Armar and back, it should be about 25 miles round trip.

We started at Nakashima barn and headed south (after we got ourselves organized!).

We stopped at Arlington, and attended to some necessities of life ;-)

and there was a small event going on at the park, we watched some very excited children ride on a cute little train.

There is a nice little parking lot and port a potty at Armar - Armar, so called because it's half way between Arlington and Marysville. Interesting combination of city names.

Wardrobe change time for me. I was getting warm, so it was time to take the sleeves off of my windbreaker.

My husband below riding up out of the parking area at Armar -

Sign board at the Armar junction.

We turned around here and began our return trip. When we got back to Arlington we were told by some other bike riders that they had been turned back at the trestle bridge heading out of town by Police officers. They were told that there had been a large mudslide near Darrington and they were concerned about the debris bursting and causing damage further down river. We thanked them for the info. and rode on up to see for ourselves. Sure enough Police had barricaded the trestle bridge to traffic. So we headed out to hwy 9 and rode about a half mile north till we found a road that accessed the trail again. 

Wonderful day on the trail, our total miles biked was 25 1/2 miles, not bad for the first ride of  the year.

While we were driving home, I searched for any info. on the slide and sure enough, it had been a devastating mudslide. Life's were lost and people were injured. They put out announcements of possible evacuations to any people along the banks of the Stillaguamish river, south of the slide. At the time of this blog post no activity had happened to burst the blockage on the river.

Read about the slide and look at pictures HERE.