Narration by Richard O’Neill
Sometime in the middle of the night while we all slept, happily dreaming of new trails, smoke from the Cedar Creek Fire cloaked Odell Lake. Who wants to hike in that crap? Not us, so we quickly confabbed and put together an end-to-end route that ran from Little Cultus Lake to Cultus Lake. And after the half-hour drive to the trailhead, I’m glad to report that the air was blessedly clear at Little Cultus Lake.
We had an enjoyable view of Little Cultus reposing in a forested bowl below a bright blue sky before the trail took us into the woods and we never saw Little Cultus again, in what was a trend for this hike. After a mile or two, we reached scenic Deer Lake and then the trail, in keeping with the trend, then ducked into the forest and we never saw Deer Lake again, either.
Cultus Lake is a large lake and is not so easy to hide, although the trail did a good job of keeping us from seeing the lake as we hiked roughly three miles along the Cultus Lake shoreline. We did stop at a boater’s camp for a lunch ‘n laze, watching thunderclouds form just east of the lake.
As we walked through the forest, we became adept at spotting the floral spires of pine drops, a parasitic plant that we normally don’t see a lot of where we normally hike. There were plenty of pine drops in this area, though.
Mike, Missy, and I get the Golden Boot Award for this hike because while everybody piled into the one car to effect the retrieval of the second car, we hiked nearly another two miles to the Cultus Lake Resort. By doing that, we got more lake time than we did during the entire hike up to that point.
Read more about this hike on Richard O’Neil’s blog, Richard Hikes
More pictures on Richard O’Neill’s Flickr page
Pictures below by Richard O’Neill
