Cougar Mountain

I got a bee in my bonnet on Friday and decided that this weekend I would go hiking. There's still too much snow at altitude, so I chose Cougar Mountain. I headed up the Wilderness Creek Trail on the Southeast side of the mountain. At the junction with the Long View Peak trail, I decided to head West to Long View Peak. Not much of a view, but on nice days you can see the Olympic Mountains. I turned around and headed back to the junction, then turned North and then Easet on the Wilderness Peak Trail and headed up to Wilderness Peak. Naturally, I signed the little notebook in the Tupperware container. It was full, so I just put a little blurb on the back of the notebook. I may take a new notebook up next weekend if I go up there.

After resting at the peak for a minute or two, I headed back down. Instead of taking the same trail, I took the Wilderness Cliffs Trail to make a loop. It meets the Wilderness Creek Trail about half a mile from the parking lot. It is also the location of one of the only viewpoints of Mt. Rainier on the whole trail. Not a great view, but a view nonetheless. The whole loop was about 6 miles, and it took me about 2 1/2 hours. As an added bonus, I saw a multitude of slugs, snails, ferns, and wildflowers, not to mention a hairy woodpecker, a frog, and a garter snake. I also had the joy of seriously pissing off a couple of Western Red Squirrels, who threatened to tear my throat out while I made kissy noises at them for being so cute. One of them gnawed a tree in my general direction and threw bits of bark at me while the other beeped at me and charged at me every few seconds. Adorable! There was also the standard tree fungus that I seem to be so very enamored of, so naturally I took a picture to include it here. Please do not fail to notice the abundance of slug slime under the fungus, and the marks in the fungus that tell of a small furry mammal of the squirrel persuasion gnawing on it at some point in the recent past.

Granted, the so-called views from Cougar aren't impressive, but it is a nice little hike when there's nothing else available. You can tailor the trail to your needs. The mountain is covered with trails of varying difficulty, so you can pick an easy or difficult trail, a short one or a long one. They even provide nice little maps at the trailhead so that you can decide what you want to do before you go, and all of the trail junctions are signed with trail names and distances so that it is harder to get lost. All in all, this was a great way to spend a Sunday morning.