That would be the north shore of Lookout Point Lake, as opposed to all the other north shore trails scattered around. I managed to find time between bands of rain to explore this one on a not-too-chilly morning.
First, a note on mapping. This is an Army Corps of Engineers trail, or rather, a trail on ACE land: I suspect the Corps doesn't actually do any of the trail-building or maintenance here, leaving that to the local mountain-biking community. This leads to some route confusion.
AllTrails is, as far as I can tell, dead wrong about the west end of the trail, though accurate as to the location of the east end. The mobile version of
OnX Backcountry gets the west end right but misses a piece on the east end - though intriguingly it shows another chunk of trail further east that I didn't look for - a future adventure awaits!
In any case, the trail is trapped between Lookout Point Lake and Boundary Road, so once you actually find a trailhead it's pretty easy to locate the trail. I missed the west trailhead entirely on my early-morning drive-by, but here's what it looks like:
- West end of the trail
There is a tiny hiker symbol on the red-and-white post, but I didn't see it when I drove by. The white sign is the Corps of Engineers rules for the area, and it's the only such sign on this roadside. This trailhead is about a mile past Lookout Point Dam.
In any case, I started out close to the east end of the trail, on a paved pull-out that looks like this:
- Near the east end of the trail
That's near a horseshoe bend in the road, right after a power-line right-of-way clearcut. If you hit the second clearcut you've gone a bit too far. Google Maps shows this as the point where Landax Park touches the lake, though I didn't see any other sign of the park from the road (there's a sign board and one picnic table just down the access trail towards the lake). There are actually four or five of these paved pull-outs along Boundary Road, and all of them have use trails down to the North Shore Trail, so you can start at pretty much any of them.
For completeness, here's the actual east end of the trail I hiked. There's room for a car on that grassy area, and some people have clearly parked there, but with logging truck traffic on this road I personally wouldn't want to be that close to the travel lane.
- Actual east end of the trail
In any case, on to the hike itself. From the Landax trailhead, it quickly gets into verdant fields of ... poison ivy, of course. There was an abundance all along the trail, though mostly possible to avoid.
- Poison ivy galore
Pretty quickly it goes into the trees, though, and there are occasional lake views. There are also a bunch of use trails down to the lake, or at least somewhere near the lake. With the water level drawn down, I wasn't about to go traversing the mud bank to get to the actual water.
- Lake and hills
- Drawn-down shore
For the most part, this is an easy hike through the trees. It looks peaceful, but with the logging traffic on nearby Boundary Road, and Highway 58 right on the other side of the lake, it wasn't very quiet. Still, a bad day in the woods beats a good day at home any time. You'd think a trail that basically follows the lakeshore would be flat, but this one isn't - there are pretty constant ups and downs, some of them required by the terrain, and some I suspect engineered just to make biking it more fun.
- Hiking through the trees
Eventually you start getting views of the dam itself, and a while after this comes the west end of the trail. I spent a few minutes looking for the continuation of the trail that AllTrails shows, and I couldn't find anything, not even a trace of old trailbed. I think someone just walked along the road and uploaded that track. Again, with the logging truck traffic, I wouldn't recommend doing this.
- Dam peeking through the trees
Along with the ups and downs, the trail crosses a bunch of small streams. Most of these were in pipes, or had strategic wood or stone crossings built up, so there was no need to get my feet wet even after a few rainy days in the area.
- Stream crossing
On the way back to my car, I stopped to look at the first few wildflowers coming out. I guess spring is on the way.
- Pacific Houndstooth (?)
- Stream Violet (?)
When I got back to my starting point, I spent a few more minutes exploring east, and located the official east end of the trail at the road. There is some established trail beyond this point, but it's little-traveled and eventually just sort of peters out in a bunch of brush.
- End of the trail
All told, the hikeable portion of this trail is about 3 1/2 miles, making for a 7-mile round trip depending on how many of the side trails you explore. Given the lack of seclusion, and the evident MTB traffic (lots of tracks in the mud, which I can understand, given that all the more "exciting" routes in the area are partially snow-covered at the moment) I doubt I'll hike it often, but it was good to see at least once.
