Money Creek Camping

This past weekend we had our first (and likely only) camping trip of 2012. It seems that all we ever manage to do each year is get out to the great outdoors to camp a single time, but each time we always have an amazing adventure!

 

This year we selected a campground at Money Creek, just outside of a tiny, almost-bankrupt, town of Skykomish. It was only a 1.5 hour trip and when we arrived we were met with glorious sunshine on the creek. 

Pretty sweet view from the tent huh?

After setting up camp we set out for our first mini hike to Dorothy Lake. Well, first we tried to find a different hike but did some miscalculating of the distance we had to drive to get to the trailhead so after driving there and back we realized we probably had to drive another 0.5 miles to reach it. But, along the way we were greeted by the biggest boulder I have ever seen in the road. 

 

After maneuvering around the boulder, we made it to the Dorothy lake trailhead. 

It was about a 3 mile trip (round trip) with some really cool pathways and rock formations throughout.

The views of the lake were incredibly serene -- I could have stared at it all day!

Then of course we had to get back to camp to enjoy some fireside dinner and we also warmed up some blackberry cobbler from home (in a very non-traditional manner). 

 And obviously we also had to top it off with some roasted marshmallows. Tom created his most perfect mallow in history!

 

And then we had some fun with sticks on fire -- too bad my iphone doesn't let you set the shutter speed to let us draw out some words :) 

The next day we set out for an entire day of hiking, not sure where we would end up. We started driving Highway 2 and decided to stop at Deception Falls. 

It’s a beautiful little half mile loop through lush forest with some gorgeous falls at the top.

We did our share of tree hugging through the forest and catching the views from the top of the roots, even if it meant that we had to struggle to get back down :)

 

As we wondered through the woods, we found these clusters of rock piles.

So of course, we had to build our own too! And, because of Tom’s competitive nature, ours had to be the biggest and tallest one of them all!

Next stop on Highway 2: Stevens Pass. We decided to hike around the ski runs for a little while. We enjoyed some amazing views, but were a little interrupted by the “blasting” that was going on for construction purposes (we think…).

 

So, we hopped back in the truck and stopped at Iron Goat. 

 

This was an amazing hike and I highly recommend that you check it out! It’s a fabulously maintained trail going along the old railroad tracks that were built in the early 1900’s (last used in 1929).

As you walk along the old track location you come upon the huge man-made tunnels. These rail crews blasted through solid concrete to make a passage for the trains inside the mountain to avoid the snow and avalanches messing up the lines. One of the tunnels was 2,057 feet long! I don’t know how they did it!

It turns out that all the trees they cut down to use for wooden support beams ended up causing worse avalanches but they didn’t think of that ahead of time. 

So, they also built these LONG concrete walls along the track site as well, to help with the avalanches. There were several sections of wall 600 yards long that you got to walk along as well. 

 

 There was a lower trail and an upper trail that formed a sort of loop. We took the lower trail to start 

and were going to take the upper trail back. 

Well, we did in fact do this, but not without yet another miscalculation on our part. It turns out the upper trail went A LOT farther than the lower trail, as far as another town called Wellington. 

We were just trodding along on the upper trail until we realized that we had walked farther along the upper trail than we had walked on the lower one –A LOT farther.

We still had a great time, but our feet were starting to get fatigued. Not too fatigued to stop and check out this curious thing though:

The toilet with the best view of all time!

So, what was supposed to be a 5.4 mile round trip hike along the tracks ended up being 11+ miles round trip. This was in addition to the 5+ miles we had already walked earlier in that day. But, we finally found our way to the intense switchbacks to lead us back to the car.

 

So, at a grand total of 16.8 miles for the day, we were ready to get home and eat! This is me celebrating our completion at the commemorative caboose at the trailhead

As we gorged on grilled chicken, corn on the cob and couscous (when you eat that many carbs/starches how can it not be great?) we reveled in what was yet another amazing camping trip.

As we unpacked and put everything away we began to prepare for the next phase of our lives. Hang on to your hats folks, medical school starts in 4 days!