Wallace Falls Is Schizophrenic--This Is to your Advantage

Wallace Falls State Park is a little over an hour northeast of Seattle. The easiest way to get there is to get on 522 towards Monroe. At Monroe take a right on Highway 2, which trundles along through Sultan and Startup till you hit a tiny outcropping of trailer houses called Gold Bar. Take a left just after you get into town and follow the signs. The park is about two miles north of the highway, on the west side of the Cascade Mountains.

The nice thing about the hikes at Wallace Falls is that they offer an engaging range of difficulty. If you’re super hardcore, the type of hiker that wears cleats to bed, you may be a little disappointed, but just about everyone else—weekend warriors to families—will find something that fits their needs. Round trip, the hike is five and half miles long, takes about two hours, climbs roughly 1300 feet, and becomes progressively more difficult the further you go.

The first quarter of the hike is easy. For the first half mile, it feels like a garden. The path is lightly graveled, the grass on both sides is freshly mowed, and rising 15 feet on either side is a dense tangle of short trees, ferns and flowers. After half a mile you reach Woody Trail, which takes you the rest of the way. Around here the short trees disappear and you’re surrounded by old-growth Douglas Fir, their trunks covered in moss like fur coats, rising up from a dense layer of ferns that follows you nearly to the top of the trail.

After a little ways, Woody Trail gets a little more difficult. The path narrows a little and isn’t as well kept, with the occasional patch of rocks and the exposed roots of Douglas Firs wiggling sternly from side to side on the trail. You also begin to rise a little—but not too much—as the Woody Trail scampers up the mountainside.

The view everywhere is good, with the greenery and the Wallace River roaring off to your right. At 1.8 miles from the trailhead you hit the first of three waterfalls. The second is at 2.1 miles, and both are beautiful, airy whitewater nestled into a feathery green backdrop. From the middle to the upper falls is a little over half a mile, and it is only here that the trail shows any hint of difficulty. The trail here is less a path than a suggestion of which rocks to walk on. If you’re not used to hiking every weekend, it’ll burn you calves a little, but there’s no danger of stumbling or falling; at its steepest, the trail has been augmented with sets of stairs that lug heavily upward and do most of the footwork for you. The trail ends at the upper falls, though if you feel like picking your way through unmarked forest, Wallace Lake is a couple miles further.

The only real problem with this hike is the number of people. Because it’s so hiker-friendly, it tends to draw quite a crowd. On most weekends, the parking lot is full by eleven. (For what’s worth, we went on a Saturday that was pouring rain, and the parking lot was only about a third full. The foliage is so thick, though, that you hardly notice the rain.)

On our decent, we found ourselves lodged in a thicket of fellow-hikers who all seemed to know each other. “Family reunion?” we asked one in a purple rain coat.

“Hiking club,” she answered. It made sense. They all had rain gear and stylish hiking boots, and quite a few were using ski poles to work their way down the mountain. As we slipped through their ranks, the single word that popped out most from their conversations was “gortex.”

The woman in the purple raincoat eyed our tennis shoes warily. “Those don’t look like they have very good traction,” she said as we whisked our way through their well-heeled club.

That’s the nice thing about hiking Wallace Falls, though. It doesn’t matter if you have the newest hiking boots or just some tennis shoes you don’t mind getting muddy. If you can find a place to park, there’ll be a part of the trail that’s right for you.