Day Hike - West Tiger Mountain 1-2-3

We were a party of 7 for a nice almost-loop trip around West Tiger 1-2-3, starting and ending and the High Point trailhead (not the usual Tiger 3 trailhead) and spending most of our time along the lightly travelled east side of the mountain.  After a long, wet winter and spring it was a wonderful change to finally have a nearly cloud-free day with sunny skies, and moderate breeze, and no precip.  Temperatures were warmer than we PNWers are accustomed to, so we took frequent breaks including a Hobbit-like "first lunch" on the summit of West Tiger #1 at 10:30am while taking in expansive views that included Mt. Baker, Glacier Peak, and Mt. Stewart while most of Issaquah and other points to the near south lay hidden under cloud floor.  It was a nice surprise to find ourselves above a cloud floor even though we were at only about 3000'.  

We expected to see a Memorial-day mob on the summit of Tiger 3 and took a raffle among the group to see who could guess how many people we could encounter on the summit.  Predictions ranged from 15 - 50 people but we encountered only 10.  This was still twice as many as we had seen during our entire morning pre-Tiger-3, but we were still surprised at how few people were on Tiger 3.

After a brief visit to the memorial at the site of the old fire lookout we hiked down via the TMT and K-3 trails, where we came across some Issaquah Alps Trail Club people working on a re-route of a portion of the TMT.  We chatted with them a bit and thanked them for their hard work.

We were back at the cars at about 2pm, for a car-to-car time of about 6 hours 10 minutes.  Approximate stats: 10 miles, 3000' gain.