Little Cranberry Lake

Fifteen Happy Wanderers

One of the problems I have with my limited sight is trying to take a good picture of everybody in a situation like this one. I unfortunately lopped off half of Joe on the left, and had plenty of room on the right if I had been able to see better. Oh well, at least you can see that we had a great group of hikers who went off to Little Cranberry Lake in Anacortes, a forty-minute drive from Bellingham.

And it was cold: when we got to the trailhead, it was about 4°C (39-40°F). We lost one of our cars full of hikers, and by the time we found us more than a half-hour later, we were all frozen. But once we started hiking, it didn't take long for us to warm up. I was having a hard time with all the mud and slick spots on the trail, but once we got to a major junction, it got a little better. At least I didn't fall into the slimy mess, which was a major accomplishment. I was so happy to have my trusty trekking poles.

The group coming to meet me

At one point, I had to "water a tree" and took this picture of the group coming towards me. It doesn't show how awful much of the trail actually was today, but that is because when it was really bad, I had nothing left over to take pictures. I managed to stay upright!

Little Cranberry Lake

You can see how still the water was, and we also had very little breeze to deal with as we hiked. Once we got to the lake, we stopped for a bit of lunch, with picnic tables and the delightful view, along with lively conversations. We covered almosat five miles and 750 feet up and down, not a huge hike, but enough for me to get a decent number of steps for the day, and we not only had no wind, but also no rain. Apparently we have a major event headed our way, with plenty of wind and rain, so I was very happy that we had nothing like that today. It was a good way to enjoy the outdoors with some great friends.

:-)