Golden Gardens to Carkeek Park Beach Hike

April 3rd, 2014
Mileage: 4 miles
Elevation Gain: 0 feet
Seattle
Not Dog Friendly (Although there are often dogs)
Difficulty: Easy

A few weeks back, Katie and I decided it would be a good idea to start doing a weekday hike once a week to stretch our legs and get in better overall shape both for our health and so we could comfortably do more strenuous hikes on the weekend.  We have mostly been doing Poo Poo Point (hehe) for our weekday hikes but decided to change it up on the 3rd and do a nice beach hike from Golden Gardens city park to Carkeek city park.  Both of these are beach parks located 2 miles away from each other on the same stretch of beach on the Puget Sound in Seattle.

You have to do this hike during low tide or you will either have to swim instead of walk or climb up to the train tracks in the picture above and walk along those, which is trespassing on railroad property, which is illegal.  Koko, our friend from Amsterdam was able to join Katie and I for the hike.

We arrived at Golden gardens about half way between low and high tide with the tide coming in.  Part of the reason we wanted to do the beach hike is because of the usually beautiful view of the Olympic mountain range on the other side of the Puget Sound.  Unfortunately, it was overcast and raining, and for most of the hike the mountains were completely obscured.  We walked along the beach and Katie and Koko helped me play the pretty stuff game which involves collecting pretty shells, rocks and glass to ad to the cool fountain Allison and I built to help us get better quality of sleep by providing some ambient noise.

By the time we got near Carkeek Park the tide had come in far enough to where we had climb over boulders instead of walk on the beach.  This did not bode well for the trip back, but we pushed onward knowing that we could always scramble up to the train tracks if we felt things were getting unsafe with the tide coming in.

We spent a minute at Carkeek Park and decided that we didn't want to scramble on the boulders a second time on the way back and decided to climb up to the train tracks.  Luckily, we only had to go a few hundred feet on the tracks to bypass the boulders and no trains came, so we didn't get in trouble!  About 15 minutes after we got off the track, a long cargo train came zooming by.  We got some cool pictures and the conductor was nice enough to humor me by blowing the whistle when I did the hand motion!  As we neared Golden Gardens, the tide had come in far enough that the beach was totally gone, so we had to walk another half mile on the train tracks and then scramble down a really steep 30 ft tall hill to get back down to the park.  Even though we had to push our luck with the railroad, the hike went well and no one besides us was privy to our trespassing!