We left town early and we were the first car at the trailhead, hitting the trail at 9 a.m. As you may know, the first mile (approximately) of the trail has been realigned, but the new trailhead has no signage at all. There isn't even a "trail closed" sign at the old trailhead at the other end of the parking lot. But we quickly got ourselves onto the new trail and WOW, what a difference. The climb is much easier! You also get to see a lot more wildflowers on the new trail, or at least it seemed that way to me. Here is Greg's list of all the wildflowers we saw.
Here are the boys on the trail ahead of me, in that big meadow after the initial climb.
The views started getting more and more expansive the higher we climbed.
We started seeing lots of balsamroot and lupine on the hillside. Oh, what a sight for sore eyes!
The lupine smelled fantastic!
More views. Check out the glassy river. It was SO CALM on Sunday. The weather was perfect!
Here is Greg's shot from above, which is much better than mine since he took the time to do it properly. I was only shooting for documentation on Sunday.
At the top we admired the view, and ate our snacks by one of the old cherry trees at the top.
Hiking back down took less than an hour since it was all downhill. Woo hoo! What a spectacular spring hike this is.
We ate lunch at the Solstice Woodfire Cafe in Bingen. OH YUM! If you've never been there, I highly recommend it as a post-hike nosh site. The pizza is good, the salads are good, the paninis are good. I haven't ever had anything bad there.
