Photos from this trip can be found here.
Pups and I went up to Deception Pass just before the rain started rolling in over the weekend. We had been here before to check the Headlands and got our first look at the bridge from the north.
I parked in the North Beach parking lot and hiked the Pacific Northwest Trail easterly along the beach. The trail weaved in and out of the woods in lower elevation, intersected with a couple of pullout parking trailheads before moderately rising up to the base of the Deception Pass Bridge at northwest end of Goose Rock. The trail took us under the bridge to the east side where the Goose Rock Summit/Perimeter Trail junction was. To make the trip worth while, we hiked on the Perimeter Trail clockwise and got a look at Strawberry and Ben Ure Islands along the way.
On the southern tip of Goose Rock was another Goose Rock Summit/Perimeter Trail junction. The Perimeter Trail looked to be heading even farther south toward residential area, which wasn’t what we wanted. Instead we took the Summit Trail and went to the top in order to drop back down on the north side and reconnect with the Perimeter Trail by the bridge.
The summit was extremely windy and surprisingly we were the only ones up there. From the summit I was able to see Puget Sound with the Olympic Mountains in the backdrop plus a small portion of Cranberry Lake in the foreground. Dark clouds looked to be moving in our direction so it wasn’t long before we headed back down.
On the way back to the car we got out onto the beach for photos and that’s when the rain began to drizzle.
Access: Pacific Northwest Trail by North Beach
Gear: none