“Austin Hill”

May 23, 2024

597m

Bellingham, WA

“Austin Hill” is an unofficially-named pimple on the east slopes of Lookout Mountain in the vicinity of Bellingham. It does boast over 100 m prominence to qualify as a separate summit, but the summit is completely forested with no view whatsoever. The hill is more known for the MTB trails so the only usages come from 99% bikers and 1% stubborn peak-baggers. I climbed Mt. Everest on May 23, 2023 so I naturally wanted to log something in on May 23, 2024 but unfortunately I had to work in the afternoon and I was still exhausted from the recent foray into the Meager Group. The weather was actually quite good, so I made the last minute plan to do some dumpster-diving with Kate. The area around Bellingham is excellent for that purpose due to the close proximity to where I live, so I settled on “Austin Hill”. Checking the recent beta I realized that Raphael Smith had just logged it in on May 22, so what a coincidence.

There are two MTB trails shown on the Gaia map and my plan was to make a loop by visiting both. I would take the gentler (more northern) one on the ascent and try to jog down the steeper one, and this hike turned out to be harder than I thought. Both Kate and I slipped a few times. We left White Rock at 9 am after a leisure start in the morning, and made to the trail-head an hour later. There was no need to rush for such an easy objective and I needed to sleep as much as I could. The parking was on a small pull-out about 100 m south of the trail-head as anywhere else had some private property issues. There was actually not much worth documenting about the “ascent”, except for the trail being steeper and more slippery than I thought. After about 400 m elevation gain the trail joins the deactivated road on the north ridge, and the true summit is behind the communication tower structures and in the woods.

Kate starting the trail. It was no brainer

As usual there was short-cutting involved

Passing a short stretch of opens next to the communication tower

Our ascent time was just over 50 minutes and because of the lack of views we quickly started the descent. I correctly located that alternative trail and quickly realized that the trail was extremely steep and technical. I cannot believe that some people were able to ride it down on a bike, as it’s a bit too steep for hiking in my opinion. We both had to get off the trail multiple times so we wouldn’t slip and fall. But in any case we were back to the vehicle in under 1.5 hours round trip, and quickly drove home for a much needed rest before showing up at work. I then worked to 10:15 pm. This turned out to be an excellent objective in supporting that “all peaks matter” hypothesis. Mt. Everest or “Austin Hill”? Well, both need to be bagged. Not sure how much “fun” did either of them offer though…