Day Hike - Point Defiance Park

Meet at 9:30 AM at the picnic table by the restrooms and the duck pond near the Main Entrance to the Park, at the north end of Pearl Street in North Tacoma. No parking pass is required. The pre-hike talk will start promptly at 9:30 AM, so please arrive a bit early in order to have time to put on your boots and use the restroom beforehand.

This is an easy/moderate all-season hike close to home, with scenery rivaling wilderness hikes. We will hike clockwise on the outer (longest) loop trail, marked in blue on the park map and on guideposts. En route, we will pass Ft. Nisqually and three viewpoints overlooking different parts of Puget Sound, before stopping at a picnic table overlooking Puget Sound for our lunch break. After our lunch we will return to the cars and should be back by around 1 PM, depending on how long we spend eating lunch. There are restrooms near the meeting place (by the duck pond), by Ft. Nisqually, and at the Gig Harbor Overlook. No parking pass is required. Although we will stop briefly at the view points en route, this is not a nature walk or a bird watching hike, and thus we will attempt to maintain a pace of around 2.5 mph so that participants get a bit of a workout.