Walks with Moss: Wynoochee Lake Shore Trail

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Wynoochee Lake Shore Trail

Found a football, set it down to take my boots off and forgot to pick it up
again before I crossed the river. Was not about to cross the river again to go get it

Dosewallips road has been on my hiking radar for a while. I think the hike is actually 13 miles now with the washout before the washout. Perhaps the washout before the washout will never be repaired. I did not want to do a 13 mile hike, so I thought about the Wynoochee Lake Shore trail. But Wynoochee is such a long drive for me, or is it? I opened up my map program to compare and found that Wynoochee is actually 5 miles closer to home than Dosewallips.

I opted to do a loop hike around the fake lake. The lake was created by a flood control dam that caused the entire valley to be flooded and destroyed. The dam produces power now. The original Wynochee river trail was destroyed by the dam and the Wynoochee Lake Shore trail was built around the new lake. The Wynochee watershed was treated savagely by logging companies, not much of the original forest is left.

Video of this hike

The Wynoochee Lake Shore trail was 12 miles long before the foot bridge that crosses the lake washed out. I never got to see that bridge, so I’m not sure when it washed out. Now the only way to do this hike via a bridge is to take the car bridge plus a road detour around a side stream that also has a washed out bridge. The hike is 16 miles if you do it that way. No thanks!

So I make my own way, crossing the river about a mile before the old foot bridge. When bridges washout it is best to find another place to ford. Bridges are built on deep and narrow parts of rivers. When you ford a big river like the Wynoochee on foot, you need to find a shallow and wide spot to ford.

I’ve done this hike twice before in the counter-clock-wise direction, today I decided to change it up by going clock-wise. I crossed well before the bridge and had lunch on the lake shore. The crossing was so cold and so long! This was the first time for Sage to cross a big river and she did great. Sage did not even shiver, since Sage was not shivering I was able to have lunch right where I crossed instead of haveing to hike a bit to warm up first.

I felt good on this hike until I saw a sign listing the mileage. The hike back was going to be longer than the hike in! The hike was just shy of ten miles according to my GPS. I must be a little out of shape because it really wore me out. Perhaps my painful tooth wore me down a bit too.

My tooth still hurts a lot but my sciatica was a bit better. I think I will be able to cure it with stretching. I think I have something like piriformis syndrome. I know that my mother had it. Today my tooth is actually finally starting to hurt less too.

We had to navigate around a few blow downs and the trail is getting faint in places. I had the trail all to myself and I did not hear any traffic on the roads that go around the lake, so it was quite pleasant. I might start going to the Wynoochee more often.