Traveling While Black: Hiking Spring Lake/Lake Desire Park
Welcome back to another blog for our first hiking series of 2024. If you saw our last blog and episode, we checked out a relatively easy hike within Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. But if not, be sure to check it out!
Again for this first series of hiking episodes for this year, we are checking out three different options all recommended from the King County DNRP TikTok page! For the next hike recommendation, we chose to check out a trail around Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park. Another park technically located in Renton, WA, but close to Maple Valley, WA.
Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park, is a beautiful 390-acre forested park that offers three miles of trails, running between the two namesake lakes. Spring Lake/ Lake Desire Park offers trails for hikers and equestrians.
In regard to difficulty, the park offers trails ranging from moderate to hard routes. We decided that we were going to attempt the Echo Peak trail, an easy trail that leads up to 400-ft of elevation gain, and provides great views of one of the lakes and on a clear day, the beautiful Mount Rainer.
Echo Peak Trail sounded like the perfect trail option for us; an easy hike to amazing views. But we would find out that this trail would turn out to be a case of too good to be true.
Drive Grade
To get to Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park it was around a 30 minute drive from Seattle. Being it was also in Renton, it was the same length as our last hiking adventure to Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park. Anytime we head south of the city, there is the opportunity of hitting some busy traffic. We were able to breeze by it on this trip. And oh yeah, the drive time wasn’t the only positive that was similar to last hiking adventure. Free Parking!
Yes, the parking is free, but the lot is not huge. Once again the only real negative was lack of any views on the drive. Still, for a 30 minute drive to get to a great hiking option wasn’t bad.
So for our drive experience, we’ll give a 4 outta 5 for Drive Grade.
Level of Fun
After being pleasantly surprised by the parking situation, we headed into the park. As soon as we entered we came upon what would be the first of many trailhead signs. We had already decided that we would do the Echo Peak Trail. So we headed in the direction we THOUGHT would put us on that trail.
The decision would not be the first we would have to make on our hike. And definitely wouldn’t be the first wrong one. We would come to a couple of forks where we would have to decide a way we thought was right. Sometimes we would diplomatically decided which way to go aka playing rock, paper, scissors. A couple of times because of our choices we had to turn around. On this hike we ended up on multiple trails, and dare we say perhaps even got lost.
The trails run into each other and you can easily lose track of which one your on. Ultimately we ended back where we started, but we never found Echo Peak Trail. However, during our search we still got to take in the peaceful nature and beautiful natural scenery.
In regard to other details about the trail, the path is dirt and could potentially get muddy during raining days. Of course dogs are welcome, but must the pups must be leashed. As for how we would rate our hiking experience at Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park, even though we didn’t find the trail we originally intended to hike, we did hike further than we would have if we just did the one we intended. And what was even better was that we didn’t even realize that being the case because we were enjoying ourselves too much. We had a blast and we can definitely recommend Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park as a great hiking option.
So for our experience at Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park we give a 5 outta 5 for Level of Fun.
Comfortability of Black People
So once again being that our hiking episodes involve us being outside and in nature, the grades for these hiking experiences are more than likely going to be pretty high. As we always say… “Nature Loves Black People!” And we LOVE nature. But also adding to the nature loving, we did get to enjoy a friendly conversation with a local resident who was also enjoying a hike through the park. We also saw other people throughout our hike who all said hi in passing. We had a great experience, and we definitely recommend considering this park for your next hiking trip.
As for our experience at Spring Lake / Lake Desire Park we give a 5 outta 5 for Comfortability for Black People.
