Chanterelle trail in the snow

Baker's dozen Trailblazers

Melanie took this picture while Sue was still getting ready, so you don't see an actual baker's dozen of 13. But we were all there to hike up the Chanterelle trail, after a night when the snow fell in Bellingham, creating a beautiful winter scene. The opposite of our last two weeks of sunshine. We were all ready with microspikes, but only a few put them on to begin. It turned out that this heavy snow wasn't a good fit with them, clumping up and hanging onto the boot rather than helping.

Kirk and Frank playing "ball"

Making do with what we had on hand, Kirk managed to strike Frank's snowball right in the middle with his trekking pole, causing it to disintegrate. See the snowball in the middle of the picture? Perfect snowball snow.

The view from the overlook

The trail from the parking lot to the overlook is only 2.4 miles, with about a thousand feet elevation gain. We considered going up the trails from there, which are also snow-covered with some steep spots. Instead, we decided to go back down and then head over to the flat Hertz trail around the southeast side of Lake Whatcom.

Snow on every branch

A closeup of the previous shot shows that there was snow on every single little branch, meaning that there was no wind at all as the snow fell last night and early this morning. As we were hiking up the trail, we did hit some spots where ice was camouflaged by the fresh snow, making it very treacherous. We did have one person fall, but no injury. We were very careful.

Lake Whatcom today

Once we got down and made our way over to the Hertz trail, we saw very little snow and no ice left there at all. We walked in for a mile to the covered bridge, where we thought we might have lunch, but a breeze had picked up, and so instead we went down into a nice little protected spot for lunch.

No snow at all, but it wasn't warm

And so we ended up having hiked today around seven miles in total, with lots of snow to begin the day, and very little as we ended our adventure. Here's the most snow we saw on the Hertz trail.

It's probably all gone by now

Most of this trail was completely clear, and while we walked back to the cars, the sun began to shine and the skies cleared. It was a lovely way to spend a snowy Thursday, nobody was in a hurry to finish, but our options today were limited to a short but delightful hike. Next week, hopefully, the weather will be better.
:-)