Beaver Lake — Monday, Jan. 23, 2006

North Cascades > Mountain Loop Highway

Daisy The Wonder Dog and I went for a short jaunt on the Beaver lake trail in the nice weather Tuesday. The trail is an abandoned railroad grade that parallels the Sauk river, just off the Mtn Loop hiway south of Darrington. The trailhead is pretty crummy, with an abandoned trailer and lots of garbage and gun casings, etc. There are some nice moss gardens, large alder trees covered in moss, and a few large cedar trees about a mile in. At 1.5 miles, the trail simply ends at a cliffy bank overlooking the river at the site of a giant washout. It would be possible to scramble through some brushy deadfall and over a large clay landslide area to continue, but I gave that a pass. There is lots of flagging along the trail denoting some kind of wildlife study in progress. The ""lake"" is a slimey, brown-water swamp that smells as bad as it looks. The boardwalks and bridges are as slippery as ice. I did get some nice peek-a-boo views of snow-clad mountains that line the Mtn Loop hiway as it heads south towards Bedal. This trail might be worth hiking if a person was already out in that area and wanted to kill a pleasant-enough couple of hours, but is otherwise not worth the drive out IMO. I've done worse hikes I'm sure, but I can't think of any offhand. There is supposed to be an abandoned ranger station past the washout, built before the railroad came through, which should be reachable from the other end of the trail. That might be worth checking out someday. Still it was nice to get out and stretch the legs, and just to see what was there to be seen.