After we got settled in on Sunday we took a little drive to case out the campground and its facilities. There’s a day use area with boat ramp that gets a lot of use by the locals since it’s free. It has a great view of the lake and the surrounding mountains. People were out fishing in the area to the far left of the photo.
That’s Mt Baker on the left. Here’s a full of photo of her south face.
I think that this snow cloaked mountain is Mt. Shuksan. The pointy top peak is called Summit Pyramid.
The next morning it was mostly sunny so we set out to drive to the end of the road at the north end of the lake. Kulshan is at the south end where the Baker River is dammed to form the lake. There are campgrounds all along the west shore of the lake and we stopped to have a look at all of them. Back in 2007 we’d camped at Panorama Point Campground and gotten eaten alive by the mosquitos. There are very few mosquitos yet this year, thank goodness. The only campground that we found (besides Kulshan) that had spots big enough for the Airstream was Horseshoe Cove Campground which looks fairly nice both for tenters and RVs. The other campgrounds all would make wonderful spots for folks with small trailers or tents.
The road turns to gravel and there are campsites along the edge of the road here and there (dispersed camping it’s called). We stopped at Shannon Creek Campground and took this photo from the day use area.
The lake ends with an enormous collection of driftwood on its north shores.
There’s a trailhead at the end of the road where you can take the Baker River trail on up the valley or the Baker Lake trail back down the east side of the lake. We stopped and used the restroom and when I came out this young bird—a barn swallow I think-- was sitting on a boulder preening it’s feathers.
We stopped at the Shannon Creek Campground’s Day Use Area on our way back to have our picnic lunch. We found a dead log to sit on and enjoyed the view.
It has a bit of sandy beach and there were even a few sunbathers enjoying the nice weather.
We drove on back and I stopped to get a photo of the view looking southward on the lake.
Not long before you reach Kulshan again there’s a 1/2 mile nature/interpretive trail. We got out and took the little hike through the old growth forest.
There are some pretty big old Doug Firs. This one was estimated to be 600 years old, 7 feet in diameter and standing about 150 feet tall.
There was a lot of bunchberry (Cornus canedensis) in bloom.
It was growing everywhere including up on the tree trunks—something I’d not seen before.
The salmon berries were nearly ripe.
And there were huckleberries that while they LOOKED ripe, weren’t (sour--I tried them).
It rained that night and we awoke to a heavy low cloud deck on Tuesday morning. It wasn’t very cold and the rain had stopped so we decided to take the road across the Upper Baker Dam to the southern trailhead for the Baker Lake Trail. The road is gravel and climbs a ways to the trailhead but doesn’t end there. We wanted to know where it went so we kept going. And going and going until we were up in the clouds and couldn’t see much of anything and still the road went on. After a while, we gave up and found a wide spot in the road and turned around and headed back to the trailhead. (When we got back to the trailer we dug out our North Cascades trail map and it turns out the road winds up into the mountains to a trail that that starts just 3 miles from the Noisy Diosbud Wilderness which abuts North Cascades National Park.)
The Baker Lake Trail heads downhill towards the lake through fairly mature (if not true old growth) forest. There are lots of old moss draped alders, maples, hemlocks and western red cedars and the forest floor is carpeted with ferns.
There were bunches of bunchberries. This huckleberry bespangled with rain drops caught my eye.
Walter spotted this elevated nurse log. Unless that log falls in the next few years the little trees growing on it aren’t going to make it.
Every now and then you get a glimpse of the lake through the trees.
Here’s another elevated nurse log. If it breaks and shifts down hill it’s nursery might make it.
There were masses of twinflowers (Linnaea borealis) along the way.
But most important were the big trees. This big granddaddy Western Red Cedar was growing right next to the trail. Trust me, he reaches to the sky.
When it rains the mosses unfurl in a way that makes them all soft and fluffy. I had to stop and take photos of them so you could see too.
We had sun breaks off and on in afternoon and still had the campground to ourselves. On Wednesday we moved on to Rasar State Park just west of Concrete, WA so we could have showers and charge up the batteries. We’re still learning how long and how often we need to run the generator to keep the Airstream charged up. At Rasar our hot spot worked (even without the booster) and the Sprint cell phones worked but not the Verizon phone. At Kulshan we had no phones but the hot spot worked with the booster. Great fun, eh what?