Off The Coast of Ballard: MIDDLE FORK HIKE

Saturday morning was an early one after hosting a surf and turf dinner for Leigh’s friend Becky. Great dinner, conversation, early to bed, then up just after 5am Saturday morning. Packs had been packed and re-packed and Leigh was ready to go.

Driving out the Middle Fork road took about 40 minutes. The Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie, once was pristine with old growth forests. In the mid 1800's it was logged and mined, and once those two activities played out, it became an area of lawlessness. When I moved out to North Bend in the early 90’s, we’d occasionally hear automatic gun fire from that direction. The Middle Fork Road was a gravel, rutted mess strewn with abandoned cars, appliances, and the occasional derelict trailer used as a Meth lab. Police would only go down there only with two separate patrol cars. Then a few things happened. A Texas couple, having only arrived in the Valley 4 years previously had lunch on an abandoned washing machine after a hike in the early 90’s. Rather than saying “someone oughtta do something”, Wade Holden started to clean out the abandoned stuff. Some 60 cars, countless appliances, and a non-profit later, ‘Friends of the Trail’ has removed over 2,000 tons of debris from the Middle Fork and surrounding areas. Other non-profits joined forces to create a long range plan for the area and after years of logging, mining, dumping, and neglect, the area is well on its way to be a county treasure.

It’s beautiful now back in the valley and the road, under construction for many years, should be completed this year. It’s a wonderful road that punches deep into the Cascades. Towards the end there’s a nice campground and at the end there’s parking for the hikers and car campers. The end of the road is still a bit of a zoo, but everyone is having a good time and no one is shooting anymore.

Our packs were hoisted onto our backs and off we went. Leigh’s book said there were good camp sites just beyond Otter Falls, roughly 5.5 to 6 miles in.

Early on, the trail resembles a road. Which it once was.

One of the dozens of streams cascading down

The navigator. Leigh always hikes with maps. So do I, but she pays more attention to them.

Ferns were all over. Bracken, Sword, but lots and lots of deer ferns.

Just beyond Big Creek, we started to look for campsites. We found one -- just off the trial, but no other campsites were around. We didn't see another soul from around 4pm on Saturday to mid morning Sunday. Perfect.

This was about as the middle of the Cascades as you could get. Roughly equal distance between highway 2 and highway 90. With a whole lot of nothing -- and a whole lot of everything -- in between.

view from my nap

When we reached our camp site, we set the tent up and then as the temperature was rising, we decided to not pursue the plan to hike up to Snoqualmie Lake. That would wait till morning. So at 11am, with nothing to do, Leigh read and I laid down on my sleeping pad and looked up. The branches wove an interesting pattern. I recall pondering the pattern for a few minutes. Then woke up an hour and a half later. Perfect mid forest nap.