
Along the River Trail, After the Snow

Every photo tells a story but remember this — there is a story teller behind the lens.
A hot day at the National Zoo this summer earned the pandas some cold treats. Getting better at using the telephoto.
Sunday, July 29th. Building up my bicycle butt. Longest ride yet. Bothell to almost Sand Point and back.
This was a classic case of why you should carefully read up on a trail before you do a hike. It didn’t help that it was a rainy day. The goal was to visit the Monte Cristo ghost town site. Getting to the trailhead was easy enough:
After about 1.5 miles of a mostly flat and wide gravel trail, we came to a fork in the trail:
If you go straight, you end up where the trail has washed out:
If you go to the right, the trail runs out and you are faced with a massive downed tree that crosses the river (but no sign saying, yes, use this to cross the river.) It looked super slippery and because we hadn’t read up on the hike before hand, we weren’t sure it was where we were supposed to cross. No cell phone coverage meant no Internet to look anything up (or call for help if we fell in the river.) So, with the rain coming down more steadily, we decided not to attempt scampering across the trunk and took a picture instead before running away:
We’ll be back to attempt it again later.