Alger Alp 2016

Frozen Squires Lake this morning

Twelve Senior Trailblazers met this morning to take a nice hike from the Squires Lake trailhead up to the top of Alger Alp. It's not a long or hard hike, but we did expect to get a little more sunshine than we actually ended up having. We took off from the Senior Center for the short drive south, with patchy fog that looked very much like it would lift momentarily.

The group almost to the top

It wasn't warm, but since we were moving uphill and had no wind, we needed to shed clothes fairly soon. It always amazes me how quickly physical activity warms me, raising my metabolism and hopefully helping me to burn more calories than I eat. The trail we took to the top takes us by the lake and a beaver pond before we end up on old logging roads up to a viewpoint.

Al in the sunshine at the top

By the time we reached the top, it looked like we would finally be in sunshine. We had climbed far above the fog in the valley and the sky above looked mostly clear. But, as nice as it was for those few minutes, the clouds ended up winning out. I always love to take pictures with fog because the scenes look so magical.

The fog covers up I-5 heading North/South

We could hear the traffic from I-5 down below us, but it looked more like a fairyland than an interstate highway. The mountain across the valley is Blanchard Mountain, which we have climbed many times. To the north (left) lies Bellingham. Whenever we would stop for any length of time, all of us began to get cold, so soon after I took this picture we decided to head back down to Squires Lake and find a nice spot in the sunshine to have lunch. We found the nice spot, all right, but the sun was long gone.

Frozen Squires Lake at lunchtime

I used a "noir" filter on this picture, since it was already very silvery looking and without much color. The lake was still frozen pretty hard, and every time one of the guys would see a likely looking rock, he would skip it across the frozen lake, making an interesting pok-pok-pok sound. (You can see a rock in the middle of the picture sitting on the ice, if you look closely.)

We covered about six miles and 1,400 feet of elevation up and down, not a long or hard hike, but very satisfying, with wonderful company and getting me home to my warm abode at an early hour. Now I am writing my obligatory post before settling in for a nice little rest. I wouldn't want my hiking friends to wonder whether or not they had a good time. We did indeed!
:-)