Good but not great

All our hikes can't be filled with the "wow factor," I guess. Today, for our semi-weekly extracurricular Monday hike, ten Senior Trailblazers set out for Goat Lake, a LONG drive down the Mountain Loop Highway past Granite Falls. From Bellingham, I suspect the entire drive, one way, was somewhere around 130 miles. This means the hike would need to be absolutely spectacular to make the long drive worthwhile. While it was pretty wonderful, it didn't have the pizzazz of last Thursday's Welcome Pass hike, or the Thornton Lakes hike we took a few Mondays ago.

We set out on the trail by 10:00am and headed for the lake on the lower trail. There are two ways to get to the lake, one by Elliott Creek (very scenic) and the other on a higher trail that is a little longer. (We took that trail back.) We reached the lake a little after noon and found a very nice place to have our lunch.

As you can see, the lake is really quite beautiful and serene. Although the day was mostly overcast, the lake was really lovely and in a very nice setting.  The rain stayed away until we were almost at the end of the hike, and then it only cooled us down a bit; nobody needed to pull out rain gear. By the end of the hike, we had covered a little more than eleven miles and around 2,000 feet of elevation gain and loss.

The falls coming down from this lake into Elliott Creek were very spectacular, but I wasn't able to get a picture that gives any justice to the scene. However, I was able to capture this shot of Al, taking a picture of the falls that at least gives a little perspective to the scene. From where he was standing, the falls roared down past him into the creek.

Trust me, the scene he is photographing is amazing, but my pictures just showed some water careening down into the creek without anything to lend perspective to show what I saw. So, this picture will have to do. Maybe the picture that Al is taking will do a better job than mine.

Afterwards, we drove to Granite Falls and had dinner at the Omega Pizza Parlor, where I indulged in a pizza and beer, as I was not one of the drivers. I'm pretty tired, I realize now, and I'm thinking that a nice hot shower and my nice warm bed will feel awfully nice. The sun has set on our day, and I learned that it rained almost all day here in Bellingham, while our rain held off, for the most part, until we were safe and dry inside our cars.

I hope you had a wonderful day, a fulfilling one that had at least a little bit of a wow factor. Now that I'm home, looking back on the day I think it was really a good one.
:-)