Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

December 30, 2019

331m

Bellingham, WA

Toad Mountain is one of the handful small, but officially-named hills within the city limit of Bellingham. This particular hill including the very top is primarily used as residential area and to “tag” this summit falls into the category of dumpster-diving. If one wants, one can drive all the way to within 10 steps from the highest point, and to reach the highest point one needs to briefly trespass into someone’s home. The summit does offer a little bit of view looking north, but nothing spectacular. I was aware of this “peak” along with a few other similar ones, but had no rush in bagging them despite the short drive. If the border crossing is fluent, to reach the summit of Toad Mountain is probably no more than 40 minutes from where I live.

After ascending Mt. Josephine in rain earlier in the morning Masayo and I figured there’s still plenty of daylight time and none of us wanted to waste the hours. We were back in Bellingham now, but there were still a few local summits that none of us had yet bothered to bag, and Toad Mountain was the first of those. I made a plan to bag Toad Mountain first, then Squalicum Mountain and finally King Mountain and Masayo agreed. Our first dumpster-diving objective was a drive-up, so I let the Google Map app to do its navigation for us. I could have driven all the way to the top but opted to park earlier, about 100 horizontal meters from the summit. The true highest point was actually in someone’s home. I estimated the highest point was probably only 10 meters from the door and at this distance, I just had to tag it despite the associated risks. After that we took some obligatory “victory photos” and leisurely walked back to the truck.