Mud and Cedar Lakes

Ferns unfurling

Eight Senior Trailblazers met at the Senior Center to discuss what we might want to do with our hike today, which was scheduled to be Pine and Cedar Lakes, an old favorite during the winter and spring. Al had checked out Mud Lake earlier in the week, in the same general area, and thought we might want to try out something a bit different. None of us (except for Al) had been to the lake, but he wrote about it on his blog here, and it sounded plausible. It would add some extra distance and elevation gain and loss to our regularly scheduled trek to Pine and Cedar, and we would probably want to leave one of them out to keep the hike from being too awfully long.

Reflected clouds in Mud Lake

It's kind of a cool place, obviously visited by many fishermen on a regular basis. We heard bullfrogs croaking but no other sounds, other than birdsong. A most excellent destination, but to reach it we had to travel up and down a fair amount and didn't want to stop for lunch and then have to hike uphill. We decided to wait until we reached the Cedar Lake trail to have lunch. I saw that the salmon berries are beginning to form already.

It won't be long before these begin to ripen, but it was only a few weeks ago that the flowers emerged. In the springtime everything happens so fast! If you blink, you might miss something. Going out once a week gives me a chance to see how quickly everything changes. Once we reached Cedar Lake, we walked around to a wonderful sunshiny place by the lake and ate our lunch. We had already hiked seven miles by the time we got here and were ready for a break.

That sunshine was welcome; it was sunny but not exactly warm. With a light breeze and the temperature in the fifties, it was perfect as long as we didn't allow ourselves to linger too long. I got this picture of the lake showing some of the greenery we enjoyed today.

By the time we reached the cars, we had covered more than ten miles and somewhere around 3,000 feet up and down. I was really hurting by the time we started down the steep trail; going up it's possible to take it slow, but going down steep inclines, there's nothing to be done for my knees except lean hard on my trekking poles. I have said it before, but I simply could not descend such steep trails without those poles. But now it's over, I'm home and feeling happy to have spent another day outdoors in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with my best friends.
:-)