But come Sunday, I was feeling better and us, The Benda's, and our friends The Winkle's and The Smith's decided to hit the trail. After Mt. Si, I thought everyone could use a gentler, shorter hike, and I thought everyone would like to see the falls, so we headed to Twin Falls. We headed out at about 11am and although it looked like rain, the clouds held off and we had a nice day on the trail.
It's about 1.5 miles to the top of the trail and gains about 500 feet in elevation. There were lots of hikers out on Twin Falls today. Many of the view spots were crowded with families and groups resting and eating lunch. So we stopped only long enough to check the view of the falls before headed on up the trail.
The Twin Falls Trail connects to the John Wayne Trail / Iron Horse State Park and once we got to the junction, we headed east along the John Wayne Trail. This trail is an old railroad turned rail trail - you can read more about how it became a trail here: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/getaways/101499/iron14.html. They've taken out all the tracks (you can see old railroad ties at Ragnor if you head west from Twin Falls, and there are rusty remnants of the train tracks all along the trail) and you have a nice wide trail that's easy to walk with friends. The trail goes all the way to Idaho, but today we just walked to Mine Creek and back. This is a nice easy stroll with many points to see fabulous views of the valley. The most challenging part of this trail is keeping your ears open for bike bells. This is a popular trail for bicyclists and we saw several large groups along the way. We came upon Deception Crags and decided to sit there for a few minutes eating some lunch while we watched the rock climbers.
We continued on eastward and crossed two railroad trestles - Change Creek and the Hall Creek. When we came to the third trestle, I think it was Mine Creek (I'll double-check and edit if needed) we decided to turn back. Our goal was to get back down the Twin Falls Trail and then head over to Snoqualmie and check out the Falls there. At Snoqualmie Falls we headed down to lower viewing aread, adding another 500 feet in elevation gain and 1 mile to our hiking total for the day.
We capped off our day in Snoqualmie at the Snoqualmie Falls Brew Pub then headed home. Like the last time, everyone is anxious for our next hike!
All told I'm calculating that we hiked about 10 miles with at least 1500 (still figuring out this figure) feet gain in cumulative elevation. Not a bad day's trek!
Pictures: (1) The kids on the Twin Falls Trail. (2) The bridge / old railroad trestles at Mine Creek with our group out in the middles of the span.
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