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Dirty Harry’s Balcony, sort of

posted March 6th, 2013 in Trip reports

Last Sunday, the weather was surprisingly gorgeous in Redmond, so I figured I should take the opporunity to get out and hike a bit. After a bit of searching for a trail that seemed reasonable but that I had not yet hiked on, I settled on Dirty Harry’s Balcony. The trip reports seemed to indicate that I might find some snow on the trail, but the parking lot was at a low enough elevation that I wasn’t worried about wandering off onto hard packed snow in the process (like happened to me a month or so ago while looking for somewhere to pull over and take pictures).

So I followed WTA’s instructions to follow the signs toward the WA fire training center, which would go under the freeway and in a quarter mile lead me to a signed gate that said something about closing at 4. Of course, it neglects to point out that there’s another trail head right there, and that as a result there is a decent amount of parking; I had assumed it was just going to be one of the many places here where people end up just parking on the side of the road. That is, assuming I found the right place: the sign said 5:30 instead of 4 as the hard closing time. (Furthermore, it notes that there is no parking along the road for the next couple miles, while WTA seems to imply that you could park on the side of the road if you were okay with potentially getting stuck behind the gate.)

I started walking along the road, in search of the “small gravel road/unmarked trailhead” on the right in “about another 0.5 mile[s].” Instead, after something closer to a mile, I think, I found an unmarked trail heading off into the woods that could never have been considered a small gravel road:

I started up this trail for a while but figured it couldn’t possibly be right, so I exited and continued along the main road. Somewhere around a mile and a half in, I gave up on finding anything matching the description I wanted, but I did find a separate dirt maintenance road off to the left. Since it was a clearing in the trees, it was somewhat more inviting, and I could see some of the mountains like I had hoped to photograph. On the other hand, this disaster of a puddle was somewhat less inviting (picture looking back at the main road after I squeezed around the mess):

I followed this road to its end, in a clearing that would’ve had an excellent view had it not been for the fact the clearing existed only as an open space for power lines to cut through.

On the way back out, it spit a bit of snow on me, but as I got back to my first trailhead attempt it had let up so I hiked back in a bit to take a few pictures of a cascade I had seen. Of course, that was when it started pouring snow, so I didn’t hang around long. I did meet a couple hiking in who also seemed to think it was the correct trail for Dirty Harry’s Balcony. I still had enough energy to hike up and back, but I wasn’t really equipped to deal with the snow so I bailed out. Maybe next time the weather is nice I will try again.