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Sun Mountain Trails, Winthrop Washington


Our intentions on this beautiful June day, was a short, pleasant nature hike with a group of my Nephews, one of my nieces, three of my sisters, and one three wheeled stroller with a baby. We were going to make it a short and pleasant hike before we headed up towards Winthrop. My first mistake was not lining everyone up, including the adults and informing all hikers about staying in sight of each other, stop at all trail head signs to make sure we head down the correct trail together, and so on. So this beautiful June day had a few bumps. I did my normal thing, hiked, took plenty of pictures, lost site of my fellow hikers. We didn't get far down our first trail and as a group decided to take a side trail to extend our hike a little farther, since the weather was so pleasant and we were all still feeling lots of energy. Another mile or two no big deal. At some point in our nature hike things went south, the young group of boys continued on the correct trail and lost sight of the adults, and then the adults proceeded to miss a very important trail head sign. The sign was easy to miss, not located in the best spot. The trail head sign was just a little ways off the trail, so at a fast pace you could have missed it. Since I was the caboose, and with nobody in sight when I reached the junction, I had to make a decision. Take the correct trail or follow the trail I was pretty positive the adults journeyed down. So about 4 additional miles out of our way, we explored the whole outside loop of Sun Mountain, circled around and hit the road. Not too long into our journey around the mountain we were fretting about the boys being unattended, and all the scary awful things that run through your head about what they might be up to, or if they got split up too. Lets just say it didn't turn out to be the most enjoyable hike with my family. I am sure they have all kinds of lovely stories to tell about my short nature hikes. All ended well though and we continued on up to Winthrop, ate lunch and stuffed our faces with ice cream to make up for the extra excitement we experienced that morning. I am just glad that all ended so well, the boys seemed totally unconcerned about the where about's of the adults. We did join a group of folks in down town Winthrop to observe a ford truck with a dog in the bed, sitting in the middle of the Chewuch River, the dog was rescued. We watched, cheered and were very thankful that wasn't our vehicle. Very glad and thankful our day ended so much better than that.
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