Dog Mountain - May 15th, 2014
Mileage: 9.0 miles
Elevation Gain: 3850 feet
Snoqualmie Pass - North Bend Area
Dog Friendly
Difficulty: Intermediate
Katie and I set off the morning of this hike with the intention of torturing ourselves by hiking the most difficult hike close to Seattle, Mailbox Peak, which gains over 3800 ft. in just over 3 miles. Katie, myself and many of the other members of our hiking group, APPUM have been hiking quite difficult hikes at least once and sometimes more per week for the last few months and have gotten in much better shape to the point where Katie and I were interested in challenging ourselves with Mailbox.
Unfortunately when I Katie and I arrived at the road that goes to the trail-head for Mailbox, we ran into road construction and were told that the road will be closed to vehicles during the week for the foreseeable future. Our hearts momentarily sank at the prospect of not doing Mailbox, which we had been greatly anticipating. Our mood immediately improved when we pulled the car over and pulled up the Washington Trails Association's website and found another hike about 20 miles from our current location that sounded really interesting, Dog Mountain.
Dog Mountain is an abandoned trail in the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. As the trail ascends Dog Mountain, it follows an old logging road which was abandoned, I would guess, between 50-70 years ago based on the size of the trees and the deterioration of the road and other man-made structures such as bridges. It is really a cool experience to get to walk along a piece of history like this old road and be witness to how powerfully and relatively quickly nature can heal the massive scars inflicted on it by our industry.
After a few miles the road ends and turns into a trail with steep and relentless switchbacks as it quickly ascends almost 4000 ft. to the summit of dog mountain. The forest service has not maintained this trail for many years which causes this already difficult trial to be much more technical and dangerous than other hikes with similar mileage and elevation statistics. Despite needing to take more time to stay on the trail and find proper footing, Katie and I got about eight tenths of the way up the mountain in a pretty decent amount of time. After this, the trail disappeared and we began to ascend a steep boulder field that was still covered in snow. After almost an hour of carefully ascending this part, we had only made it another tenth of the way to the summit and were getting quite exhausted. We decided that we needed to turn around because it would be foolhardy to attempt the somewhat treacherous descent if we tired ourselves out further by making the summit.
Once we were back on the trail, the journey down went fairly fast. Overall, this was a very enjoyable hike with breathtaking views of several other snow capped peaks visible during almost 3/4 of the hike. If I wasn't moving in the near future, this would definitely be on my list of places to return to later in the season when the snow is all melted making the ascent to the summit more manageable.
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