Had a great 6 miles round trip hike. We started out at Red Town Trail and walked to the falls and on up to Whittaker Peak. Rested and had some lunch at the bench. Lovely hike. My first one over 2 miles.

So my friend and I, attempted this hike and we got lost haha I have no idea where we hiked

This was a very nice hike around Cougar Mountain between Newcastle and Issaquah. Even though you're between two towns it was actually very peaceful. You can do a loop if you take the Red Town trail to the Cave Hole Trail to the Coal Creek Falls trail to the Quarry trail to the Indian trail back to the Red Town trail. But whichever path you take, I would bring a map and pay close attention to the signs along the way. The hike is through beautiful forest with several interesting trees along the way, some of them fairly big. It's different than hiking in the mountains like around Snoqualmie Pass since there are a lot less conifers and a lot more deciduous trees. The falls themselves aren't that impressive if you're used to hiking to bigger falls in the mountains, but still pretty, and the moss around the falls was gorgeous. The bugs were a bit annoying at the falls, but not on the trail. It only took us a couple hours to do the hike, including stopping often for pictures and spending several minutes at the falls. I had my 12-year old son with me. Saw lots of people including many younger children.

So I parked on the NE part of the parking lot so just took Military Rd Trail to start off, took a right at the Red Town Creek Trail junction, a left onto Cave Hole Trail (which you'll see at least one sign and wooden fence involving old cave ins), and then jumped onto Coal Creek Falls Trail. These were very easy and maintained trails with just one hill really that you could take kids on easily. The bugs I didn't notice until were we along the river(like on the river basically), but didn't notice any at the actual falls which was nice. Then headed back North up Coal Creek Falls Trail and took a right onto Cave Hole Trail, then a left onto NIKE Horse Trail (where you'll see another cave in sign where it looks like there was a big one but don't enter them). Passed through a fence that was opened up and entered into the former NIKE missile base (NIKE 2B/20A/8L-A) through the meadow. It had a few structures left, although there was an old painting shed that said it was now for the history but was empty (looked like anything in there was either taken down or stolen). But over at the Sky Country Trailhead (which is where we found out a lot of runners were coming from) there's some pictures and writings about the old base. Walked Old Man's Trail which was cute, had lots of informational tree signs and baby trees growing. This is where one of the old base structures were which you could see in one of the photographs at the trailhead. Hiked back the way we came, very easy and short hike, we wandered and weren't out for more than two hours. All trails at the junctions were well marked and easy to read, you just want to have an idea of which way to go as there are several forks in the road to get anywhere.

Coal Creek Falls is ideal if you want something short and sweet. Entire hike took less than an hour. The parking lot was full but by the time I arrived back to my car at noon, half the lot was empty. There were a few more cars coming in. Also, there were LOTS of slugs on this trail, including an albino one.