Hears Different Drummer: Smith Creek loop hike

Thursday, April 19, 2018

Smith Creek loop hike

We are still in our Spartan training, even though we just finished the Seattle Super over the last weekend. We have several more in our horizon this year. In a couple of week's we will be going to Montana for the Beast/Sprint races. My husband and I will both be doing the Beast and he'll be doing the Sprint the next day.

We wanted to get an "up" hill hike in today, so we chose Smith creek. We parked at the North Lake Whatcom trail head parking lot and as we were preparing for our hike, several cars pulled into the lot. I began to recognize several of them as people I had hiked with when I hiked with the Senior Trailblazers. Sure enough they were the Button Walkers! After some fun visiting we went our separate ways. They were going to walk along the lake on the Hertz trail while we made our way up to the power lines.

We started at the trail head that is now marked "Chanterelle Trail", we used to call it Cub creek. A few years ago we began calling it Smith creek, we still call it Smith Creek even though the new section of the trail begins here now too.

We saw a couple of trinkets in trees along the trail, this one was the cutest, but I have an issue with people that do this. I wish they wouldn't leave "trinkets, painted rocks" etc. in the forests. O.K. end of rant.

We followed the trail to where it junctions. We then took the mountain bike trail that headed left and planned to come down the new trail on our return.

My first Trillium spotting of the year. Not quite open but so pretty,

We had a couple downed trees to crawl over, this one had a nice step notched out of it.

After marching up the very steep bike trail - I definitely had to use my mountain goat feet in some of the straight up sections, we made our way up to the power lines. We walked up the road a bit farther before we had lunch.

We saw some patches of snow still here and there.

Looking back to see where we had come from. To the right of the tower there is a small trail coming out of the forest, that's where we came out from the mountain bike trail.

After our road walk we went on another trail and joined it, the "Tower trail".

We sat under the power lines and had a great view.

My husband brought our backpacking stove and made Chili, boy did it taste good!

It felt so good to laze around in the sun before we headed back down.

We hiked back out the Tower trail and joined the road. We walked along the road until we found the Smith creek trail. When we got to the Chanterelle viewpoint we stopped for a snack and water break and enjoyed the views.