Campground Creatures Starved From Flood Washouts
After winter storms knocked out the gravy train, campground creatures are reducing themselves to non-people food. Photo courtesy of Lamkoa from the Seattlest Flickr Pool.
A depressing and time-consuming pattern emerging from visits to many of the area’s great hiking grounds is the road-killing washout. Snoqualmie Lake is roughly ten miles round trip, but add in the Middle Fork Road washout, and the reality is more like twenty miles because we spent an entire afternoon just getting to the trailhead before turning back.
We’ve lived with this at Monte Cristo and trudged through it before around Snoqualmie Pass but the magnitude of trail damage and unrepaired bridge washouts in the Middle Fork Valley this year is putting an increasing number of great recreational areas out of day hiking range.
At the midway point of our futile, yet pleasant stroll along the river valley we came upon the abandoned Middle Fork campground. Normally bustling with car campers and screeching children, it was eerily silent, like some low budget '80s horror movie. The abandoned camp site made for a quiet picnic as a chorus of hungry eyes gathered.
We noticed at first a blue jay then a squirrel, then a few more. Word was out. Salty human snacks were finally back in camp. Normally spoiled with hand-outs and camper garbage, the critters had found the good eating days of lazy campground begging obliterated by a single, violent winter storm (we presume), and now they seemed desperate for people food. We wondered if beyond the trees a horde of starving campground animals was gathering en masse to consume us whole, starved from the washout and ready to feast on these first human visitors in ages.
Partly convinced we might fall prey to the very critters we corrupted with crunchy human food years earlier, we finished our lunch quickly and hightailed it back to the car before relations deteriorated to an irreconcilable degree.
