Little Quilcene River, Mount Townsend — Tuesday, Sep. 2, 2003

Olympic Peninsula > Hood Canal

We had hiked Mount Townsend earlier in the season (when the flowers were still in bloom)from the trail coming up from the southeast side. This ""backway"" route from the Little Quilcene trail is an interesting alternative, with its increasing more dramatic views out towards the Dungeness, Buckhorn Mountain and the Tubal Cain trail in the far distance. The main problem for us--as always--is the road. Those last four miles with a constant sheer dropoff makes for white knuckles and agraphobia. Each time we do this trail we say we'll never do it again because of that road. Others, obviously, don't have that difficulty. Although we had the only car at the trailhead when we arrived, when he returned, there were three, including a large van (and somehow had signed the trail register with ""9"" hikers). The trail is steep for the first .9 of a mile through an old clearcut and then dense second growth forest and then it turns right for a long traverse sometimes level and sometimes steeply up and down until it reaches the Mount Townsend trail (signed)at about two miles. We climbed up to the north summit in another mile and a third. It's a shorter and less strenuous climb than the more popular route. There were so many flies at the summit that we decided to descend a bit to have our lunch. We had seen a side trail on our way up, about ten minutes from the top, and decided to take it. It led to a great view on a smaller ""summit"", underneath the north summit (you can actually climb down from the north summit to it). On our return, we turned left at the trail junction and continued on the Little Quilcene trail for a while to look at Dirty Face Ridge. This gave us an interesting view down to the road to Tubal Cain. We could even see a car parked at the trailhead of the Silver Lakes Way Trail thousands of feet below us. This all added only about a half-hour to our hike and was well worth it. Walking along the ridge is fun and gives you further views of Mt. Townsend's summits. In all, a wonderful hike. But then--the drive down that awful road! Ice cream in Quilcene was a good antidote.