Fuller Mountain Failure - North Fork Snoqualmie

This is what Nim looked like Wednesday morning:

So I took that as a sign he needed a hiking break. Today we woke up and decided to hike Fuller Mountain. It is a primitive/unmaintained trail that I know well but today success was not on our side. 

The trail head is along the side of a fast moving logging road. If you don't know it is there, you won't find it.

This part it though an old "Weyerhaeuser Forest" (Hancock owns it now I think). There are signs that at one point there was going to be an actual loop trail, but it is long gone. Basically people like me who know it is there use the trail to cut some of the logging roads. It is too bad too because it is a pretty area.

I was grateful this log bridge was still there, despite being narrow and slick.

The trail is ridiculously overgrown and there are several downed trees from storms, but nothing like the conditions once we hit Fuller.

Basically I challenge you to actually find the trail in most of the photos. And it is just as hard to find it while you are hiking it, even for someone like me that knows it very well.

We kept pushing hard and got our view of Klaus Lake along the way.

Not many photos were taken at the worst of this trail. I had too much going on trying to find the route and getting the dog through it. It was a marginal trail at best anyway, but the storm damage has destroyed parts of it. You would spend a lot of time trying to get around a tree and then even more time trying to find the trail again.

Ultimately I gave up. Fuller is actually a small mountain and you don't have to worry too much about getting actually lost, but you can spend some quality hours stuck in miserable thick. This was a lot of hard work on the dog and even coming back down I did a decent cross country route that I don't think he was thrilled with when I couldn't find the trail for awhile.

So we will try again later. I need flagging tape and some clearing tools and a lot more patience. I don't want the route lost. The trail was always fairly undefined at the top anyway, but you at least need to know what you did so you can get back out of it.

Once we got ourselves back out we hiked some logging roads out to Klaus Lake to try and redeem the day. Even that areas is far more overgrown right now. But one of the old signs was still readable.