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John Wayne Trail

posted June 2nd, 2013 in Trip reports

This is a delayed trip report, by almost a month apparently… I hadn’t been doing much hiking for a couple months and so I forgot to come back and add more posts. I’ve actually been out the John Wayne Trail a few times, both on foot and by bike. It runs along an old railroad grade that has been converted to a hiking/biking(/horse riding, I think) trail that starts across near the Rattlesnake Lake area. Technically, it only starts there in the sense of that’s where the name changes; I think it connects to the Snoqualmie Valley Trail or some other separately maintained biking trail.

The first two times I visited it, I walked in with the intent of visiting Cedar Butte, which is accessible by a trail that wanders off through the woods from the main road. The trailhead is poorly marked — and as we have seen multiple times, I’m good at missing trails that leave a main road — so I completely failed to find it the first time. I double-checked the trail description and was able to find it on the second trip, but made the mistake of going on a foggy day in February and was rewarded with basically a flat gray view from the top:

Since then, I made two trips up by bike. My actual goal is to ride back down from Snoqualmie Pass, which is a 25 mile descent, but so far the most I’ve managed is riding about 7 or 8 miles up from Rattlesnake Lake. There are numerous creek crossings and waterfalls, but unfortunately they’re usually relatively deep and steep canyons that I don’t know how I would get out of if I climbed down to the water (to say nothing of the fact that some of them are apparently part of the Seattle water supply and have big “stay away from the water” signs).

The most recent trip was also my first experiment with doing video, both real time and time lapse, of a trip. I haven’t edited the real time portion of the ride going up, but here’s a short clip of coming back down (turns out the ~50 minutes of recording on the way up mostly drained the battery):