Lord Hills Park – July 4, 2011

I moved to Monroe in March of 2005.  It wasn’t until early 2009 that I had even heard of Lord Hills Park and since then I’ve wanted to check it out.  It’s literally 10-15 minutes from my house…I can’t believe it took me until the 4^th of July 2011 to make it up there.  This time it was the usual suspects (John, Shelly, and I) along with Shelly’s nephew Jake, his girlfriend Cheryl, and Shelly’s friend Julie.

Once again we made our mandatory stop at Starbucks, but this time decided against lunch on the trail.  And again, I didn’t read the information I emailed to everyone else.  Shelly however brought a trail map with her which was very helpful.  We headed out the Main Trail towards Pipeline Trail which we followed to the Pipeline Trail Cutoff that headed for the 630 View Point.  It was a beautiful day and Mount Rainer was out in all her glory (I always think of mountains as feminine).  We headed down from the view point with our eye on hitting the River Trail.  I suspected the view of the Snohomish River might not be worth it, but we did it anyway.  The trail got quite narrow in parts and we got stung by plants which I suspect were some kind of stinging nettle.  Shelly unfortunately got the worse of it.

After a rest at the river we headed back out River Trail to catch Main Trail to the cars.  Cheryl and Julie (along with Julie’s dog Matt) lead the pack by quite a large margin.  My first impression of Julie…she is a much more serious hiker than us, but she is extremely nice and I definitely enjoyed meeting her.

Shelly, John, and I being the proud non-serious hikers that we are spent some time along the way planning out lunch at Mi Tierra…priorities.  🙂 Because of her furry companion and the heat of the day Julie couldn’t go to lunch with us.  The rest of headed to Mi Tierra.  Imagine our disappointment when we discovered not only is Mi Tierra closed on 4^th of July so is the other major Mexican restaurant in town.  Our only option…Red Robin.  By this time we were so hungry we didn’t even care.

Again we decided the following week we were definitely doing it again.

Notes of interest about Lord Hills Park:

• No pass required.
• Easily accessible to children.  We even saw one couple pushing a stroller and wearing flip flops.  Some trails won’t be accessible, but a lot will.
• No bathrooms along the trail.
• No garbage cans along the trail.

My photos for the day.