Mt. Erie from Heart Lake Trailblazer hike

A little longer carpool for our hike today, we headed south towards Anacortes and Heart Lake.

The parking lot conveniently has an outhouse, which I used before our hike. 

I know - too much information ;-). 

I spied this sign on the wall and thought it was funny -

16 of us walked a short distance on the trail from Heart lake (about a 1/2 mile) to the road. We needed to cross the road to connect with the Sugarloaf mountain trail. As we were walking the first 1/2 mile section we spotted a Fairy Slipper (Calypso) Orchid.

We had a short rain shower just at the beginning of today's hike. I saw some hail on the ground, but the photo I took turned out too blurry to use. 

The trail is a bit of ups and downs through a lovely fern filled forest. Owen & Penny (our chief identifiers of all things) identified the mushrooms below as Helvella elastica sometimes called elastic saddle. It's related to false morels.

Baby ferns

Whenever we found ourselves at a fork in the trail (this trail has many forks), we would stop and make sure we all took the correct turn.

We headed up to Mt. Erie for lunch.

I never tire of the view from Mt. Erie.

Since we had worked up a little sweat going up the hill, the slight breeze blowing at the top gave us a chill, so our "fearless leader" Pat said "let's go" and we were on our way.

We were scheduled to hike Sugarloaf mountain today but, on the way out Pat decided that we would skip that section of the trail and just head on down to the cars. When he announced that I heard a few "yays" behind me. 

I've decided that if our hikes aren't too difficult I would do my "Spartan workout of the day" afterwards. So when I got home, I was a good "Spartan in training" and did my workout. 

Yay me! 

If you want to understand what I'm training for you can read about it in this POST. 

Endomondo stats:

Total miles hiked - 6.25

Minimum altitude - 297 feet

Maximum altitude - 1277 feet

Total ascent - 1256 feet

Total descent - 1170 feet