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Trip Report    

Mount Constitution

  • Sun, Jan 17, 2016
  • Moran State Park
  • Day Hiking

Beautiful blue skies on 1/3/16 with views of San Juan Islands as well as Cascades and Olympics. This ~12 mile and ~4000' elevation gain loop (shown on map in photos, link at end of report), is one of those easy-to-drive-to Winter Scramble destinations that involves no mountain passes and only low altitude driving (albeit a ferry ride ;). The 2nd Orcas Island ferry (7:40am from Anacortes) allowed some extra sleep as well as using most of the daylight hours with a total trip time of ~8 hours. This included a great navigation exercise that uses a trail not shown on the map USGS map. This trail leaves the road (marked by sign) just south of the Mountain Lake boat ramp and intersects the Little Summit trail. From this intersection I askEd folks to guesstimate (turn off the GPS) their location by looking at the surrounding terrain and to correlate it with the contour lines on the map. Using this estimated location we take a bearing and traveled it cross country (using map and compass) to reach what they believe to be the small 2100' contour circle just SSE of the 'False Summit'. After reaching what they believe to be that spot we verified it via GPS (yes it was), then turned them off, took another bearing, and followed it through the woods to what was believed to be the 'False Summit'. Again, we did in fact reach the correct spot, then finished with a bearing to reach the trail just East of us, before hiking the trail to return to the cars. Photos from this trip as well as other prior trips can be seen at:
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B08Ju8EH6wG5aI