Not-So-Wild

Silver Lake Park

Like most girls, I grew up fearing the Big Bad Wolf in the woods. Rationally I know solo travel and camping (with caution and common sense) is almost always safe, but it still has been hard to take the first steps. I thought joining a group overnight would ease my way, but after missing a meet-up in June, last week I reserved a mid-week camping spot at Silver Lake Park, a Whatcom County park in the Mount Baker Forest foothills beyond the town of Everson.

I have bicycled to this park in the past, but this time I was on my 28 pound hybrid bike, carrying 25 pounds of luggage, including tent, sleeping bag and pad, rain gear and some snacks and water. It's about seventeen mostly flat miles from my place in Ferndale to Everson, where I stopped for coffee and pastry, and bought a SubWay sandwich for dinner. I had remembered it being about eight miles from there to the county park, but it's actually more like eighteen. Everson's Main Street becomes South Pass Road at city limits, then about a half-mile past Oat Coles Road, South Pass Road curves to the left and starts climbing for a mile or so. I hadn't ridden my bike at all for several days before leaving that morning, and my legs weren't ready for hill-climbing with a loaded bike. I had to push the bike up the last bit of that hill, and also a couple of short-but-steep bits farther on. The weather was overcast and muggy, and I arrived at the park tired and sweaty after riding 37 miles in about 3.5 hours.

Base camp

I stopped at the park office, but since I had made online reservations no further paperwork was needed and I went straight on to my campsite. I probably could have saved the $13 reservation fee and paid only $24 for a drop-in site, but I hadn't wanted to take a chance on the camp being full. Most of the spaces were taken by RV campers, but there were also some car-campers sleeping in tents.

The camping area is shaded by Douglas firs, maple and cedar trees, with a pretty understory of fern, bracken, salal, huckleberry bushes and all the usual native plants. There are gravelled foot paths, and some bare dirt paths where little kids were riding junior mountain bikes. I locked my bike up to a tree and put up my tent right away, because I'd felt a few sprinkles of rain. I had set up the tent in my living room before, but this was the first time I'd used it outdoors, and actually staked it into the ground. It went up quickly, easily and stood firm all night, though I did have a lot of leftover stakes and tie-downs. Luckily there was no wind that night, or rain either.

It still wasn't even five o'clock yet, and I wasn't quite hungry for dinner, so I tucked away my things and went walking around the park, admiring the lake views and woodsy walks. There is a small swimming beach, with canoes, kayaks, paddle boards and pedal boats available for rent, and a little kids tot-lot with climbing forts and swings. A bath house near the beach is open 8am to dusk, with four minute showers for 75 cents.

Logging equipment at Gerdrum House

Across the road from the park is the historic Gerdrum Family farmhouse, where I walked around and peeked in the windows, and an exhibit of old logging and lumber milling equipment, now overgrown with saplings and bushes.

Back at my campsite I decided to start a fire. A previous camper had left some half-burned logs, and I'd brought a half-dozen old charcoal briquettes, a utility candle and a book of matches. With these and some sticks and twigs I was able to get a little fire going, to create a cozy atmosphere while I ate my SubWay sandwich. But I turned my back on the fire too long, until it began to produce a lot of atmosphere, in the form of smoke, and nearby campers started coughing theatrically. I tried to build the fire back up, which mostly produced more smoke, so finally I broke the coals up and went to bed around 9pm. The campground was very quiet, with no eerie noises in the night, except for someone who unloaded two or three cases of empty beer bottles in the recycling bins sometime after 10pm. I am comfortable sleeping on hard, flat surfaces, but I had some kinks in my back, and my left leg had some sore, out-of-joint spots in the hip, knee and ankle, and after a while my legs began to feel hot. I unzipped my sleeping bag to cool down, and finally fell peacefully asleep, with no nightmares or anxiety attacks.

Morning dew on the grass

At about four in the morning I heard the first bird-call. Pulling my sleeping bag tight around my ears, I went back to sleep until six-thirty when the full chorus began, and I lay awake to listen for a while. The muscles in my back had loosened up, and all the sore spots in my leg were gone. Finally I got up for breakfast - a quad-shot of cold espresso and two Clif bars. After another little morning walk to the bath-house for a blissful four-minute shower, I packed up my camp to head home.

South Pass Road curves northward from Everson, running almost within sight of the Canadian border at one point. I never can spot the place where it comes closest to Canada, which is shortly before the road turns southward toward Silver Lake Park. Leaving the park that morning I looked to my left, and saw a tempting downhill stretch heading south. I had never ridden that section of the road before, but according to my map, South Pass Road loops around to intersect with Mount Baker Highway (Hwy. 542), where I could turn right to get to a section of the in-progress Bay-to-Baker bike route that would put me back on South Pass Road, heading in to Everson, by-passing some of the rolling hills I'd ridden the day before.

Mount Baker from South Pass Road

I made the left turn and tried the unknown road, which turned out to be a much easier downhill run than the rolling hills going up to the park the day before. I saw two dark, shaggy young alpacas munching grass by a fence, and caught a distant view of Mount Baker. I flew down the last hill on South Pass Road before the level stretch heading in to Everson, where I stopped to rest a bit at Riverside Park, before the familiar fifteen-mile home-stretch to Ferndale.

The ride home was 38 miles in three hours, for a 75 mile round-trip. The whole over-night trip was probably more than 24 hours, but that would be because I took a long lunch-hour in Everson, and took my time in the morning, listening to birds and dawdling with packing up my camp.

Mount Baker (zoomed in)

Postscript: Once I left Everson and headed into the hills I got no signal on my AT&T cell phone - zero bars and the AT&T logo didn't even appear in the top left corner of the screen. Kind of strange because there used to be a lot of complaints that people were being charged for international calls when their signal jumped to an AT&T tower in Canada.