South Tiger Mt - Feb. 2, 2012

Michael and I, being the only ones running this Thursday morning, decided to be a little adventurous and try running up West Tiger 1 from the south side of Tiger Mountain.  Little planning, no map, little knowledge of the area and a very ambitious run is a combination that leads to good things, right!?? 

First of all, we couldn't find the trailhead to Tiger Mountain Trail (the great TMT!), which I thought was right off of Issaquah Hobart Road.  We turned up the right road, Tiger Mountain Rd. SE, but missed the small sign and trail a half mile up on the right.  We checked it out one last time and finally found it.  WARNING!  There is NO trailhead parking-lot here, just a wide shoulder to park on across the road from the trailhead, which is very small.

We started up the TMT, which was pretty clear at first.  However, because of all the rain, we were pretty much running up a small stream, our feet soaking wet immediately.  Remember the downed trees and limbs from our Grand Ridge run last week.  Well, this week was much worse!  The trees were bigger and more plentiful; we spent a lot of the beginning of this run clearing them, jumping them, or climbing over them. 

Heading north, we took the Horse Trail, the South Tiger Powerline Trail (got some nice views in there), passed South Tiger Summit and Carol Hapke Launch Area, then...we got lost.  Unfortunately, we got on some logging roads that ended up being disappointing dead-ends.  On one of these dead ends, I thought for sure we were right below West Tiger 1.  Afterwards I discovered (according to my favorite map of Tiger) we were really right under Middle Tiger Summit, still far away from our goal.  On a positive note, running on the logging roads at least gave us a chance to run w/out stopping every 20 seconds to climb over a fallen tree.

South Tiger Mountain...not much to see here.

Because of this, we decided to take a different way back to the car: southbound on Highway 18 from Tiger Summit Trailhead.  Ya, I know, not the greatest idea but at least we got back in under three hours and were able to let the legs go those last 3 miles downhill.  After all the stop and go, it was actually fun to let the legs go and run uptempo pace while large semis flew by us on the road.

Run Stats:  Total Distance: ~14 miles   Time: 2:03   Elevation Gain: ?/plenty    Pace: 8:47