Sumas (WA) Mountain - May 28th 2022

We picked Sumas Mountain in Washington because its not too far, not too hard, I heard its a nice trail and we can stop and get cheap American gas at the same time. Woke up a bit late and hit the road at 10. Crossed the border without incident and made our way to the start of the trail which is called the "Gold Mine" trail. It starts along private property, a small farm, but the owner is very kind and has set up the trail very nicely with signage for parking etc. that makes you feel fine using it. The first 3km of the trail are pretty mellow with maybe 300m of gain over a very nice trail. There were a bunch of branching trails with signage but I didn't see any of them on my GPS and I didn't want to make the trip any longer than it already was going to be so we kept to the plan. After about 3km the trail starts to steepen very quickly. The next 3km you gain ~700m so its definitely a bit of a slog at some point but once again the trail is in amazing shape and it was a nice day so it wasn't too bad. We saw a few other people which was surprising, I didn't know it was a popular hike at all. At one point there is a small loop, we opted left and had to navigate some difficult logs, at the top of the loop we found a geocache completely by surprise. Good eyes Sam. At about 900m you turn south and ascend the NW ridge to the top. This is where all the best views were, which were lacking before then. You get tons of views north towards Abbotsford and very clear views of Cultus, Vedder Mountain etc. It was interesting to see our home area from this vantage point. Finally at the top there is an ugly bushwack to the "true" summit. Coen, Sam and Jebby opted to stay behind and just eat lunch while I bagged the official peak. It was very dense but thankfully short and I just thrashed through. Would not reccomend. We had lunch and headed down. Not much to say about the way down except we went the other way on the loop this time and came to a really cool cabin. We got down around 3, C2C was about 4h15m which was a bit slower than expected but not too shabby. We headed home and had an excruciating wait at the border. I forgot it was Memorial Day weekend.....