Weekly Hikes #16, #17 and #19: Rainy, Misty, Foggy

I know that you are looking at the title of this post and saying, "But what about hike number 18?" I will get to that hike in a day or two, but I wanted to post about these three hikes together because they are similar in many ways.

On Saturday, September 7th, Mr. D and I decided to hike again on the Rattlesnake Mountain Trail, and see if we could explore a bit farther than we did on our hike earlier this year. Unfortunately, the weather looked like this:

Our plan had been to hike along the top of the mountain, stop in a new spot with a view for lunch, and then hike back down. But, in addition to mist and fog that we encountered in the early part of the hike, it began to rain hard when we were just past Rattlesnake Ledge. We decided that wimping out was our best option, so we turned around and hiked back down. Ironically, it was not raining when we got back to our car, and the sun came out shortly before we got home. While the hike was shorter than planned and there were no sweeping views, we did enjoy the solitude of the dark forest, and we saw some "little views".

A week later, we decided to hike at Cougar Mountain. I really wanted to go back to see the Million Dollar View. This time, we took a different route to get to the viewpoint, but on this day there was no view, just fog all around us. (Click the link above to see the view on a better day.)

We had two other hikes planned in September, one of which was to be my first expedition to the top of Mount Si, but both were rained out. A new rainfall record for the date was set on September 28th, the day we would have been hiking on Mount Si. I was very glad we stayed home! Because of the rain-outs I'm extending my "Weekly Hike Season" until at least the end of October, and maybe even longer, weather permitting.

On October 16th, Mr. D and I decided to hike the western end of the ten-mile long Rattlesnake Mountain Trail. We learned about this section of the trail from a woman we encountered on our rainy hike at the other end of the trail. She told us that it was very scenic and less heavily traveled than the east end of the trail.

Once again, we started our hike in the fog:

As we started to climb, it became brighter and brighter, and finally the sun broke through the fog.

When we reached Stan's Overlook all we saw was fog below us, but we did have a great view of the mountains.

After eating a snack, we headed back down into the fog, which provided us with another great view:

Sometimes less than perfect weather can still be your friend!