Boulder river hike

After our failed first hike of the season, we’ve managed to get one recorded yesterday.

My previous successful hike was in 2020 on Loowit Trail. Due to many things that happened last year, I didn’t hike at all, not even once. So, this hike yesterday was my first in almost two years.

As last week, we were late to leave the house, which yet again doomed this enterprise from the beginning. We were hoping to hike at least half of the trail, and we got exactly that.

Boulder river trail is one of dozens of trails along the WA-530 highway, and as most of the hikes along this road, the approach road is abysmally terrible. It’s covered in deep potholes, I haven’t seen anything like this before. I mean, I’m used to driving on the Mountain Loop highway which is known for being really bad, but nothing compares to this road.

Anyway, it took us about 30 minutes to cover roughly 4 miles of this road, and we arrived at the trailhead right around 3 pm. The trail itself is officially 8 miles out-and-back with about 1600 ft of elevation gain. In my shape, it’s a hard kind of trail, but for normal people it’s just moderate.

The trail itself is really well-maintained. It goes along the Boulder river, dipping down to the river shore, and soaring hundreds of feet above it.

The main features of this trail are waterfalls. The two we’ve managed to get to were absolutely gorgeous.

There was a single tree on the trail that we had to really crawl under (not this one), otherwise it was pretty easy to track.

All in all, we covered about 6 miles out-and-back, making only about 700 ft of elevation gain. We got back to the parking lot just after 7 pm, and went home to watch the new season of the Stranger Things :)