Lost Out Of The Lot

I'm up in Seattle for the week, and I got here over the weekend to take part in some festivities - some hiking, an Earl Klugh concert at Chateau St. Michelle winery, some wine releases at local Woodinville wineries. In other words, a strenuous few days :).

My friends Craig and Deb Hovey, my sister-in-law Cheryl, and I got together on Saturday morning to go hiking out in the Cascades out east of Mount SI. We took off out of the very basic parking area along the trail, with another party of 4 hot on our heels.

Surprisingly, the trail wasn't very heavily used for the good period of nice weather that preceded our hike. We didn't think too much about it until we got fairly far up the mountain...and the trail just petered out. For the next hour or so, both parties of four wandered around on the slopes of this mountain, into and out of the forested slopes, looking for something a bit bigger than game tracks. Thank goodness I had my GPS with me. I didn't have specific trail maps for the area, but I could see where we had come from - and how we were crisscrossing our tracks! Finally, we ran out of time and made our way down, me in the lead with the GPS. I swear even though I was looking right at our tracks they were barely recognizable.

Finally one of the other party figured it out. We weren't on a groomed trail at all; THAT trail led from another trailhead about 100 feet up the road from the parking lot. We'd wandered off what looked like a trailhead - probably from all the other hikers that have been lost off the parking lot. Indeed, we intercepted three other hikers and turned them around with us in the time we walked back to the lot! Oh well, at it makes for an interesting story...