The hiking gang met at the YMCA and we headed for a nearby wildland park. This is a remote area just five miles from downtown Bellevue.
The wildland park is a series of 50 miles of trails inside a 3,000 acre park.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_Mo ... dland_Park
We parked at one of the four parking lots and from out starting point we had lots of mud. But we also had these "freeways. They are wide enough to drive a truck but are limited to foot, horse, and maintenance vehicles. As you will later see there is a lot of upkeep on some of the board trails.
They mined coal in the area a hundred years ago. This is an air shaft for the tunnels.
Since its a maze of trails there are lots of signs and intersections.
Okay Claudia quite showing off.
Since its a wildland park you can expect to see a lot of animals. There are reports of bear almost daily. If there is ever an incident they leave the animals alone and take the people out. We moved at this pace.
Ester and Sung are two of the regulars. Notice the wood footbridge. There were long areas of this that raised us about the mud.
Claudia goes to Arizonia in the winter but lives here in the summer. This is her second hike of the summer. She goes about every other hike. Tom is our official leader. Rules and signs don't apply to me. Most of us go every Thursday but some of us are talking about adding Monday hikes.
One of the many wooden footbridges. We ate lunch on the Group W bench.
Meanwhile Sung is either hugging a tree or snoozing.
She made me post a picture of her toe socks.
