I went for my first hike in the USA! The Mount Baker area is pretty close to the border and incredibly beautiful. There are quite a few fantastic sounding walks there, but we started with one of the famous ones; The Skyline Divide Trail.  This hike follows a trail through a forest, with occasional bursts of meadows covered in wildflowers, then you will emerge onto a lovely ridge walk. The views from the ridge are pretty amazing with Mount Baker in one direction, and other beautiful greener mountains everywhere you look! We were lucky with the weather, so we had a perfect American day out! If you’d like more details about this hike, it’s another one from the 105 Hikes book by Stephen Hui.

Marc was working hard this weekend, so I joined a group of hikers from Wanderung, Vancouver’s hiking group. This was organised by Ying, our driver was Jutta and Emily, Nicolay and I joined in too. I am soooo glad I signed up, as I loved every second of this hike, and really enjoyed everyone’s company.

Skyline Divide Trail Map

Skyline Divide Trail – the basics

Distance: 13 km
Elevation gain: 670 m
Highest Point: 2000 m
Time: 4-5 hours (we took 4 hours and 20 minutes)
What to bring:
Walking boots. Hiking poles. Plenty of water and food. The 10 essentials.
Facilities:
There is a loo at the trailhead. It is stinky, but had plenty of tissue.
Dogs:
This was a really dog friendly trail! We met sooo many happy doggos!
How hard is it?
Intermediate-ish. This walk will get your heart going with all the elevation gain through the forest, but the path is easy to follow and not too tiring.
Crossing the border into the USA:
This was the hardest part of our day! We had to queue (in the car) for 2 hours to cross the border. If you’re Canadian, it’s pretty simple. However if you’re European, you need to apply for an ESTA (or an EVUS for Chinese people) in advance. Then, once you get to the boarder you have to pay $6 for a visa. You need to have American dollars or a credit card. We left Vancouver at 7:45 and it was crazily busy. If I do another American walk, I’ll aim to leave much earlier!

Parking in the Mount Baker area

You need a parking permit for the Skyline Divide trailhead. We stopped in a small town called Glacier to pay for parking from the Glacier Public Service Center. Soon after this, you need to turn right off the highway, onto Glacier Creek Road, then left straight away, to get onto the bumpy road to the trailhead. (We missed the turning, so went on a scenic detour. Oops!)

This hike starts quite high up, so your vehicle will do a lot of the legwork for you(!)

Getting Started – Skyline Divide Trail

At the start of the trail there is a place to write your name/number and let the park rangers know that you are out on the trail. You need to write down the time you start, and then sign out at the end of the day when you leave.

The trail starts heading uphill straight away through a pretty forest. We started really late (after 1:30pm!) so the forest was filled with beautiful dappled lighting as the sun so high in the sky. Most other hikers were heading home after their walks, so we got to meet quite a few friendly dogs (and their hoomans) all heading home.

Alpine Meadows

Every so often the trees open out into small sunny meadows, filled with wild flowers. This happens more and more as you get closer to the ridge.

You will start to see layers of mountains peeking through the trees. These meadows were lovely, but there were sooo many flies and mosquitoes that we were never able to stop for long!

First View of Mount Baker

How gorgeous is this!? This is the closest I had ever been to Mount Baker! When we walked along Elk Mountain and Mount Thurston, we saw half glimpses of Mount Baker, but mostly it hid in the clouds. I was probably pretty annoying at this point with my “squeeee” noises as it was so lovely! Our walk followed the ridge along that skyline, first climbing the bump to the left of Mount Baker, then hiking along lots of mini peaks, each time getting closer and better views of the mountain.

Mount Shuksan

We also had a pretty epic view of Mount Shuksan. This was the view slightly to the East of Mount Baker. This whole area is still really close to the Canadian boarder, so I’d love to explore more of that area too!

Bumpy trail

Once you’re up on the Skyline Divide trail, you continue to have amazing views for the entire walk! However, there is still a bit of elevation gain and loss and you wander along the ridge. The path passes lots of mini bump-like peaks as you get closer to Mount Baker! We stopped at this bump for our (late) lunch.

I took these photos on the return journey, but you can get the idea. It is lovely, bumpy trail with plenty of high points for viewing the world.

Going on and on

This trail continues the whole way to Mount Baker(!) One of the rangers told us that a good place to stop was at one of the many little peaks, that has stunning views of Mount Baker, about 6.5km into the trail. So this is how far we went.

It really is a good view isn’t it!? I think I can get better photos with my new camera, but I was failing at finding the right settings; So these were all a little over-exposed. Full disclosure: I actually combined two photos together for each of the wanderung group shots above, as it was so overexposed, you couldn’t see the mountain!

Heading back

The view below to the left was looking in the opposite direction from Mount Baker. It was a little hazy, but you can see layers and layers of lush green mountains. Hopefully we’ll get some more rain soon so they all stay that way!

Mini snowman in August!

Some other hikers had made a really cute mini snowman on one of the patches of snow next to the trail! Isn’t he adorable?

More alpine flowers

There was plenty of heather and other pretty flowers, even in August! If these flowers were in Fantasia, they’d make excellent musical tingling bells!

Skyline Divide Trail – Final sunny views

By the time we’d made it back along the ridge, the sun had come out from behind some clouds, so we were treated to some very bright views of Mount Shuksan and the surrounding mountains!

This was our final view of Mount Baker. It’s always nice to look backwards along a ridge that you have just traversed! This walk looks really impressive, but I promise, it was actually pretty easy and fun!

Camera woes

My camera broke at the end of our adventure to Elfin Lakes and the Gargoyles. It was under warranty, but John Lewis told me they will not honor the warranty as I was out of the UK for 30 days. (What cockwombles!) So, I bought a similar model that can use the same lenses as my old camera. However, I bought it the day before this hike, charged the batteries but didn’t have a chance to practice with it. I’m still learning all the settings, so some of these photos are a bit over exposed! I’ll keep practicing, so I’ll be used to it soon! My new Camera is a Lumix DMC-GX850 mirrorless camera.