Larabee State Park #47

Last summer I picked up a map that has all of the Washington State Parks with the resolution to visit every single camping or day use area. I mean what a great way to explore the state and discover new places. Which if you know me, that is right up my alley, I love to travel and find new places to explore.
On sunday I didn't have work! and I also had to take L to football practice, so I contacted my friend L and asked if she wanted to go hiking with the other 2 kiddos and I. She said yes, so we met in Burlington at the Park and Ride and headed to Larrabee State Park. The drive was beautiful, but sketchy. There are no shoulders and very narrow lanes.
Once we arrived at Larrabee I remembered I forgot my coat and Miss A's coat, we had our fleeces; but it was a cool 36 degrees with shade and a slight breeze. Oh well. Once we were moving and the day progressed we warmed up.

Below the parking area is the amphitheatre, playground, bathrooms and a building with picnic tables.

We headed down the path to discover that Larrabee was the very first State park in Washington state  founded in 1915.

The trail heads down this hill

into this tunnel, which Miss A found to be very cool, she loved the image of the deer.

Going through the tunnel (which is a railroad above your head) brings you to these stairs. We made the decision to stay left at this "T."

We followed the trail

and decided to go right and see where it lead us to.

Taking the right lead us to this...

and this view. So blue and beautiful.

We enjoyed looking at the cave. Can't see it to well in this picture though.

Something caught her attention. She is such a great dog and has come a long way from when we rescued her.

I had to take one more picture of the view of the sound.

Turning around and following a narrow trail we found these rock and trees stumps. They were so cool to feel and see how the waves have eroded them.

The kids also had to check out the tide pools. They didn't find anything and were a little disappointed.

Once again we turned around and headed up hill

to get back on the trail. We had to climb over this tree which was fun to do.

 The trail in this picture is almost all gone. It barely had enough room for our feet. The plants don't let you see that it is a drop off if you step wrong.

At this point the trail that we were following ran out.

Mr. H thought that we needed to go down this way to get to the beach.

However we made the decision to turn around and head back to the parking lot so we could get to Clayton Beach.

Our fearless leader. 😀

You get to walk above the train tracks for a while.

The trail then climbs some and parallels Chuckanut Drive. We ran into some boy scouts that were on the trail cleaning up garbage and cleaning off some of the graffiti on the rocks. I thanked them for being out there and doing that for us!

A short distance later we came to this bridge, which we all enjoyed walking across. Who doesn't?

After the bridge we found this tree root system. If you look closely in the picture you can see that the tree was on top of a rock, so the roots didn't go very deep.

This part of the trail was fun to go down because you could use the roots from the trees as handles and stairs.

Once we were down to the bottom we found a rope swing. Of course we had to swing on it, and we spent quit a bit of time using the swing. I finally convinced the kids that it was time to go if they wanted to make it to the beach.

We crossed the tracks because

 we thought that the trail went down this path,

 so we headed down to it, (Miss A wanted to check out all of the water coming out of the drain pipe. We convinced her that she didn't want to do that.)

 but found that it kinda petered out into nothing.

 At this point we had to turn around so we could be back in time to pick the eldest up from practice.

And we might have stopped again to play some more on the rope swing.

In all we did 2 miles and had a wonderful morning exploring and playing on the rope swing enjoying the sun and views. Until next time!