It was time again to do a training hike. We hadn’t been on the trail for a while and G finally has a weekend off. This time of the year is so busy for G since he is doing both work and his own business which is selling at plant sales. But this Easter weekend he has off.

So I decided to try the Oyster Dome hike. It had intrigued me for a while. It is north of Mt. Vernon in the Chuckanut mountains. I found out it is actually part of the Pacific Northwest Trail . I did a little research on it and we decided to give it a try.

It starts shortly after milepost 10 on HWY 11 along Chuckanut drive. We found the trailhead and turnaround to park. It was shortly after 10am and off we went. Almost immediately, we found a Calypso bulbosa in bloom. The trail starts steeply and switchbacks up. At the clearing we got a view of the sound. The trail junctioned and then the normal NW style trail began with lots of roots. It was fairly steep at parts. At one part, we had a nice view over Samish Bay.

I had a write up on the trail from the PI newspaper and we turned off at the bat cave. It was pretty interesting but we lost the trail. We decided to head back for lunch and we stopped to talk with another hiking group. They said we should have continued up to the Rock trail to find the trail to the top. Oh well. Another day.

We made it down pretty quickly and then went on to tulip fields of La Conner. Brilliant patches of scarlet and yellow. We parked near the school and walked into the center of town. The town has really gentified. We used to love going to Tillinghast Seed but the building is now being renovated. It is so interesting that the two oldest sellers of seed, Tillinghast and Seattle Garden Center, closed shortly after 2000.

Our destination was La Conner Brewery for a late lunch of pizza and beer. They were full except for a few seats. We choose one outside even though it was a little cool in the wind. I had a nice Weise and G had the IPA. I had a pesto pizza and G had the Greek. Yumm.

We headed back to Seattle but the traffic was terrible. We had to wait at least 15 minutes in Conway to even get on the freeway. Our luck we made it to Everett by 5pm. It took us just about 1hour to get to Oyster Dome and almost 2 hours to make it home.

But it was sunny and warm so nice for early April.