Bothell to Seattle, 18+ miles

Sunday, July 29th. Building up my bicycle butt. Longest ride yet. Bothell to almost Sand Point and back.

Monte Cristo / Sauk River Hike

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.

Iron Goat Trail Hike

Pammy and I had a fun 5 mile hike on the Southern, Western part of the Iron Goat Trail today. Not too hot, not too cold. Broke in our new-to-us SUV (a 2014 Pathfinder aka “The Beast”) and a wonderful new, hand-carved Hickory hiking stick (aka “Hickory Dickory”). Not a lot of people on the trail today. Seeing the massive concrete walls of the 100 year old snow sheds and railway tunnels is always incredible. On track for 1,000,000 steps by summer’s end.