Little Mountain Trailblazer hike

It was a dark and stormy night, with lots of rain pounding on our roof. I wasn't sure how many of the faithful would be willing to go on today's scheduled hike. When I checked our forecast for the day it said a 90% chance of rain. Oh well, if it's one thing we know here in the Pacific Northwest don't trust the weather report ;-). If we did, we'd never go anywhere!

9 hardy souls showed up at the Senior Center to drive just south of Mt. Vernon to hike Little Mountain. The rain really came down on our drive down the freeway heading south.

When we arrived at the east trailhead it was just sprinkling, so on went the rain gear. Our fearless leader "Pat" had planned a lollipop hike (just picture a lollipop...part of the trail is the stick then it loops at the top so you'll do a loop at the end but will be walking back along the portion of the trail by the trail head.) for us today.

Poor drenched Trillium -

The forest was full of wonderful dark and light greens, Trilliums and Bleeding hearts,

as well as unfurling ferns -

 & wonderful trail signs on the trees.

As the sun was burning through the trees we were treated to these wonderful misty views.

I was excited to see the little hand made water way to help ease the erosion of the trail.

I spied a tree peeking at me. 

If you click to enlarge the picture below you will see a stump in the distance with 2 notches in it. There is a small light colored bark tree just between the eyes. It looked eerily like eyes peering at us.

Do you see the eyes?

Once on top, we ate our lunch at the picnic tables, great views and no rain but a bit of a breeze. 

On the way back I just had to get a picture of this sign. Our chief correspondence person "Ginny" wasn't able to be with us today but she was definitely with us in spirit :-)

How wet has it been here lately? Here's proof, the snails are happy "out" of their shells!

I'd say after hearing the day's weather forecast, we came out pretty well with just a shower at the beginning of our hike.

Endomondo stats:
5.35 total miles hiked
357 Min. altitude
957 Max. altitude
842 Total ascent
713 Total descent