Alger Alp Trailblazer hike

Today's hike to Alger Alp was a bit of an adventure into new territory. Our "fearless leader" Pat has been ill and is going to be taking some time to get back into hiking shape, so we are now a merry band of leaderless souls. Hope we don't go too far off course on our future hikes :-) 

14 of us met at the Senior Center to do our usual pre-hike activities: sign in, talk about where we are going & decide the carpool drivers. Now each week's meeting will determine who will volunteer to lead the next week's hike. Our plan then is to go into our next week's hike with a leader who will know that particular trail and can get us to our destination and back to our cars safe and sound. It sounds like an easy task, but you'd be surprised at how many people hike along and don't take too much notice of forks in the trail and if we took one to the left or one to the right, even if it's a hike we've done many times. I'm included in this list of followers. I tend to look at the scenery and not the trail. Today's experiment worked out perfectly. Leslie was our last minute volunteer leader for the day, since this was the first week to talk about the new plan. She even had a map (yes, we were impressed).

It was a chilly morning today, I had a coating of ice on my car when I went out to start it. This was the first morning of the season that I've had to warm up the car to thaw it out.

There was a light layer of fog as we got to the Squires lake trail head parking lot.

There was a limited view from the ridge trail with ribbons of fog.

We headed up the ridge trail that is very narrow in places and feels like we're walking on the hill's spine.

Just before lunch there is a good view of Mt. Baker if it's a clear sky day. We were in luck.

I spied the rest of the group standing at our lunch spot in the photo below.

The view looking south towards Skagit Valley from Alger Alp.

The view looking west towards I-5 and the Bay.

On our way down we decided to head towards the Beaver pond. The forest looked like we were at the Olympic Peninsula rain forest in areas, there was so much moss on the trees.

Some interesting fungi on the trail today.

 The Beaver pond.

On to Squires lake.

Squires lake looking a bit dark.

It just started sprinkling and as you can see it got a bit darker as we were heading to the cars. A great and a bit chilly day on the trails with the Trailblazers.

All hikers were accounted for at trails' end, a successful day thanks to Leslie, 

Endomondo stats:

Total miles - 6.16

Total ascent - 1414 feet

Total descent - 1444 feet