On Sunday morning my buddy and I got up early and headed out to North Bend for a nice easy hike up Little Si. This is Mt. Si's very little brother and it was a breeze. The trail is about 2 miles from car to summit and climbs about 1100 feet. A sign at the trailhead indicates 2.2 miles. I used my new GPS (thanks REI dividend!) for the first time and measured 1.9 miles. We hit the trail at about 6:50 AM and it took just under an hour to get up to the top (which we had to ourselves). The views were just okay. We could look up at the summit of Mt. Si and to the south and southeast we could see Rattlesnake Mountain, Cedar Butte, and Mt. Washington.
This morning my buddy, his dog, and I got up early to pay homage to the church of the Oyster Dome on Blanchard Mountain. What we found was a cold, cloudy, wet, windy, muddy mess of a mountain. It was awesome. For the most part the mountain had adequate signage. I didn't have a proper map so I just printed a terrain map from Google Maps. I don't have a GPS (my upcoming REI dividend will fix that) so I don't have the exact distance, but other trail reports indicate that it's perhaps 8.5 miles via the route we took. Also, we climbed from what was very near sea level up to 2000 feet on the dome. My pictures for the most part aren't very good due to the rain and the clouds.
Blanchard Mountain is on State Route 11 just south of Bellingham. The trailhead is just north of milepost 10. We climbed up to the Oyster Dome from the road and then departed along the trail towards Lily Lake before returning via Max's Shortcut.
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