Actually, it turned out to be a great hike. We arrived at the Dingford Creek trailhead at around 10:30 after an hour on remarkably good Forest Service roads. The rain had looked really bad earlier, but we had Gortex and fleece so we were good to go.
The trail drops quickly to the Dingford bridge over the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie and then turns upstream. It's about eight miles to the end of the trail just short of the Dutch Miller trailhead. We didn't really expect to get quite that far, but we wanted to at least get to the Snow Lake junction, especially after seeing the other end of that trail two weeks ago at Snow Lake.
The trail itself was a combination of perfect single-track through mature forest and an old logging road through a recovering forest slowly becoming a trail. It's mostly the better type until the Snow Lake junction, but then it's all road for the next mile or so. Beyond that... dunno. That's where we stopped for lunch and to turn around.
All along the dogs, Tokul and Juneau, had been off leash one at a time and then together. The last time we'd tried this they had disappeared around the nearest bend and we didn't see them for 45 minutes. This time they were very well behaved and came back each time we called or whistled.
We'd been out of the house for about three hours which should have been well within her window of tolerance, but she was generally sour. We had lunch and started back. For the next half an hour she cried and wailed. We popped her out twice, but couldn't discover anything really wrong with her until I undid her rain jacket, snow suit, and sweatshirt to try to get a whiff of her diaper. She was extremely warm so we removed the rain jacket and opened up the snow suit. We even let her fingers feel the 48F temperature.
Suddenly, she was a much happier little bug. Sure, she still squawked a few times, but in general she was much more interested in ferns, trees, and mushrooms than her own problems.
Yes, I did say mushrooms. The trail was very wet and heavily forested resulting in a ton of odd looking 'shrooms. The coolest were little purple bulbs followed closely by the blood-red flat-tops. Sweet.
By the time we got back to the car we were all pretty wet where we had stepped in creeks or been rained on where the Gortex didn't cover us. We piled into the car and headed back toward home with only a short stop to fix the dog grate that had fallen on the exhausted pups in the back. It hardly made an impact on them and once they were free of the burden they were back to sleep in no time.
