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Ah, Spring.
The lilacs are in bloom, the cloud cover has softened its scowl into a grimace, and even though Memorial Day is still three weeks away, Outdoor Season is starting to come out of hibernation and wiggle its way towards the mouth of its gray cave.
Right now is the time most everyone is getting ready to go camping. Air out the tent, wash the sleeping bags, get the motor home serviced, find the cooler, pack up the lawn chairs, and start stockpiling beer for Memorial Day. So what does all this mean for you? Buck the trend: don’t waste your time making sure the inflatable mattress is still airproof. Grab your tennis shoes and a sweater and Get Out before everyone else does. For anyone willing to put up with a few inconveniences, now is one of the best times to pile in your car and get out of town and see the mountains, before they start to look like a wooded recycling bin.
Your best bet right now is a series of day hikes on the Mountain Loop Highway, which begins about an hour north of Seattle and circles through Mt. Baker/Snoqualmie National Forest. Head north on I-5, jog over on WA-2 and WA-9 to Granite Falls, and hang a left at the three-way stop at the end of town onto an unnamed road that turns out to be the Loop. It costs five dollar for a forest parking pass, but with the Loop’s variety of easy to moderate hikes, it’s worth it.
When you’re first on the Loop, you’ll see a few things that make you wary. The highway is dotted with maintained campgrounds, but at this time of year they’re all still closed. (A few people are still trying to make a go of it by setting up tents in the pullout areas alongside the highway: small bastions of civilization mucking it out in the perilous wilds, literally hundreds of inches from the nearest paved road.) When we got to the first trail, Twenty-Two Creek Trail, we felt like we’d entered a Wal-Mart parking lot on Christmas Eve. After a while we found a parking spot, but when you have to look that hard, it kinda messes with the whole charm thing. So we pulled out and moved on to the next trail. In a couple miles we came upon a sign pointing us in the direction of the trailheads for Board Lake Trail, Ashland Lake Trail, and Bear/Pinnacle Lake Trail. The trailheads were a ways off the road, but we didn’t see anyone else, so we gave it a try. Bad idea: about five miles off the road we hit the snow line, still over a mile shy of any of the trailheads.
But eventually we came upon Deer Creek Trail, and it was pay dirt. It’s an easy hike, a slight incline but nothing even remotely painful. It’s low enough that you don’t have to worry about snow, but remote enough to thin out the hikers. And you can finish it a couple hours, perfect for getting back in shape after the calorie-enriched winter months.
If there’s a drawback to the Deer Creek Trail, it’s view, but even this is slight. Yes, you can’t really see the snow-striped mountains to the north, but at this time of year, you don’t need to see mountains. Just check out all the activity that’s nibbling the edge of the trail. The bottoms of the trunks of the pines are covered in moss, as are their small, low-hanging branches, which look like shaggy green stair steps. Swarming around the trunks are tangles of grasses and ferns, and great fallen pines, seven feet in diameter, their broken roots angling like still photos of schools of fish. It’s still spring runoff time, and it’s oddly moving to see runoff in its tiny stages. We tend to think of runoff in big terms, swelling rivers, filling dams, carving out riverbeds and moving boulders. But here on the hillside by Deer Creek Trail, it trickles down small gullies, is confounded by little shrubs, slips under exposed roots, and leaves the barrow on the side of the trail a mushy, spongy bog.
It is a very crisp time to go hiking, very clean feeling. The air is still a little chilly, reminding you that you’re just on the edge of winter, which has just finished cleansing the forest of its human traces. A few flowers are just starting to bloom, a dash of white here, a small explosion of pink there, and there still are no human sounds, just the sporadic chirping of robins and the subtle roar of the Stilly River below.
Of course, it’s not really winter that cleaned everything. It’s the Forest Service. But get out there soon. It won’t stay this way for long.
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