Sehome Hill Arboretum

Sehome Hill Arboretum is in Bellingham and borders the campus of Western Washington University.  It is an undeveloped park of 180 acres of second growth forest and  has a rich variety of native plants and trees.  It is called an arboretum but was never deliberately planted as such.  It has about five miles of trails and we go there to walk and look for native orchids, in this case for Fairy Slippers, which we found along with some Western Spotted Coralroots that were beginning to bloom.

Western Fairy Slippers

Western spotted Coralroot

We went the afternoon of April 26th, a Friday and hiked not only the main trails but also some of the side trails and it was on those we found the orchids along with other wildflowers and natural history treasures.  The day was cloudy but warm and we took plenty of time for pictures before going on to Coconut Kenny's for our supper and a quiet evening at home.  Perhaps because it was Friday the park was not busy, though there were a few students running and walking the trails.

Old Automobile Tunnel

(now open only to pedestrians)

The Trail and My Hiking Companion

Unidentified Beetle

Sword Fern

Moss Carving

(this is near a college campus)

Western Trillium

Mushroom and Red Elderberry

Log Carving

A Wet Walk in the Woods

Friday afternoon and evening, April 19th, my wife and I hiked the Fragrance Lake trail in Larrabee State Park.  Larrabee is a state park that includes both beautiful coastline and mountains.  The mountains are the Chuckanuts, a low range that connects the Cascades with the coast, the only place where they reach the coast.  The Fragrance Lake trail takes one from up few miles into the Chuckanuts to a small mountain lake.

We were looking for Fairy Slippers and investigating the trail as a possible place for an outing by the Washington Native Orchid Society.  We did find a few stems of the Striped Coralroot that will be blooming in a few weeks, but no Fairy Slippers.  In fact, we found very few wildflowers other than some Western Trilliums that were just beginning to bloom, and some Skunk Cabbage, which was something of a disappointment.

The day was rainy and misty, wet enough to wear ponchos, but not a bad day to be out and we used the opportunity to get what photographs we could of the woods and mist.  As I noted before, I often try to catch something of what our northwest forests are like, and we tried again on this hike, especially since there was little else to photograph.  The photography meant that the four mile round-trip took us over four hours to complete, but we were in no hurry and it was good to be out in spite of the rain.

At the lake we hiked the path around, but the lake was pretty well fogged in.  We managed to get some decent pictures both of the lake in the fog and the Salmonberries that were growing on the south side of the lake, but did not linger and made a quick trip down the mountain and over the two miles back to the vehicle, where we warmed up before heading for supper at Coconut Kenny's and going on home.