Sharatin

For Nora and I the Adjust Your Altitude challenge is complete.  Yesterday we climbed the last peak in the challenge - Sharatin.  We hiked up through the trees from the Small Creek trailhead, climbed up to and over the summit, and then hiked down the Red Cloud trail on the other side.  I'd left a bicycle at the Red Cloud trailhead and biked back to Small Creek to fetch the car and complete the circuit.  Including the bike ride the whole circuit took less than 5 hours.  To be honest I thought it would take a lot longer than that - Nora is a FAST hiker!

Going over the top and making a circuit out of the hike adds a lot of diversity to the experience.  We got to hike up through a mossy green spruce forest and up through an enormous alpine bowl on one side of the mountain.  And then, on the other side descended into a precipitous bowl with huge cliffs and waterfalls and then walked down to the road through wide open fields with a view in all directions.

Sharatin has become incredibly popular as a summer hiking destination.  It used to be that you never met anyone up on the mountain.  While these days it is getting hard to find a parking spot at the trailheads and you generally meet 2 or 3 other groups of hikers on the mountain.  But that's a good thing.  More hikers means more advocacy for trails and green places!
Patrick

August 2019

June 2018

Checking out the B18a Bomber wreckage from WWII

One of the many groups of hikers we saw on the mountain