Heliotrope Hogback Trailblazer hike

Our hike today was to Heliotrope ridge, our Trailblazer group hiked this last year in August. You can read about that day's hike HERE. The rangers recommended we not cross the creek to the ridge as we did on last years hike, so our 'fearless leader" Pat said that our route would be the climbers route up the Hogback. The Hogback is part of the route up Mt. Baker. I found an account of a climb up Baker from this route. You can read it HERE (Baker North Ridge in 14 hours) if you're interested.

Today 22 showed up for the hike. Wow, since it's a wilderness area we split up into a slow group and a faster group. I went with the faster group today. I haven't been up the Hogback for years, it was nice to see the views again.

I took this 360 video of the view - enjoy.

https://youtu.be/b5wioxZ8HxM

If you click & zoom in on the photo below you see our group spread out in various locations down the hill from me eating their lunches even waay down at the beginning of the hill.

Looking up the Hogback trail. Several of us continued hiking up the Hogback to the climbers camp area before turning around and heading back down the trail.

In the photo below you can see the trail going left and heading up the climbers route.

Looking back down the Hogback.

Looking towards the Coleman Glacier.

Yes! Boardwalk trails!!

A wonderful day spent in the Alpine enjoying a fantastic view of Baker.

Endomondo stats:

total miles hiked - 6.13

minimum altitude - 3636 feet

maximum altitude - 5612 feet

total ascent - 2051 feet

total descent - 2067 feet

Blanchard mtn. trail run take two

Last week I learned a critical lesson, never get a deep tissue massage the day before a long trail running day. Last week's training run was a mental battle for me. Running with completely spent legs isn't fun. All of my massages in the future will be earlier in the week so they won't interfere with my all important weekend trail training workouts. Spartan BEAST training involves being mentally tough as well as physically tough, so all was not lost. I chose to keep running last week all of the way to the parking lot even though my body was done. "Mental" training day complete! ;-)

Today's run was what last weeks distance was supposed to be before we cut it short because of my fatigue.

You can read about our route HERE in last week post. This week was a repeat of last weeks except instead of heading down the incline trail we took a left turn up towards North Butte on Blanchard Mountain.

What a view, looking towards Bellingham Bay.

After coming down from the Butte trail we enjoyed going a short distance on the Lily lake trail and then back towards the incline trail, down it for a ways, then back to the map to see where we really wanted to go ;-) 

We were correct the first time, Lily lake trail was our route. 

This trail connects with the trail we started on at the beginning of day's run. This section of the trail is really people friendly, lots of benches for resting!

We passed many hikers on today's route. Samish Overlook and the Oyster Dome trails are always heavily travelled areas now. When we were about 2 miles from the parking lot several riders on horseback met us on the trail. We learned on a previous encounter with horses on trails that it's not only good to step out of their way but to speak to them as they pass so they don't get spooked when what they thought was a tree, starts to move. I guess it's unnerving to horses. So now we say "hi horse, we're people not trees!" The riders are always appreciative that we know how to respond to their horses on the trail.

It was a good run, so much better than last week. Fresh legs are good legs and the distance covered was better too!

Endomondo stats:

total miles - 10.72

minimum altitude - 938 feet

maximum altitude - 2302 feet

total ascent - 2241 feet

total descent - 2252 feet