Of late, a few friends of mine and I have been hiking every weekend on the Palouse training for future hiking expeditions at Mount Rainier National Park and eventually the Pacific Coast Trail. Due to the “rolling” hills out here, we are restricted to only a couple of elevated hikes worth practicing on. Connoisseurs of Pullman’s hiking top prize “Kamiak Butte”, I began looking for a new place to hike on the internet and the closest place available was Moscow Mountain. I searched and searched and searched for an address so we could get there, but we found nothing.

Out of frustration and an urge for adventure, 11 of us piled into three cars and headed to Moscow! With walkie-talkies in hand, we were off like Hell’s Angels in search of a destination unknown, except we were adventurers instead of criminal bikers trafficking drugs. As we rode through Moscow, the lead car directed us to a Safeway where Jeff jumped out to snag up a map in hopes that we could find the mountain. With map in hand, we were back on the road. Paved roads turned into gravel roads quickly and we were in the countryside. Vague street signs were our only source of true direction. Eventually after a few U-turns and the occasional stop, we made it to Moscow Mountain!

Jumping out of the cars, we looked around in confusion as to where the trail head began, and information about this hike, there wasn’t any. So, we just started hiking up the gravel road, which used to be an old logging road. The weather outside was perfect for a day hike, especially for a hike that has an unknown length, trail or anything for that matter. We hiked for about an hour until we began to see mountain bikers storming down the hill one after another. Followed by some ATV’s racing uphill from behind us, very weird. Eventually, we came upon some old equipment for clearing roads and clearing out trees. We poked and prodded with the machinery but refrained from trying to start the large machinery. Continuing on with our unknown destination we finally talked to some fellow walkers about this so called “hike”. We find out that we were only 1/3 of the way up after walking for an hour and a half. It was starting to get late so we couldn’t finish the trip but we did find some bike trails on the side that scaled the mountain, so we took those on our way down. The overall hike that we took ended in about 6 to 7 miles of hiking.

I hope to finish the 10 or so mile hike in a few weeks with my friend Riley, but the one nice thing besides the group of people we got to go with us, was the occasional split in the woods where we could look out to the land beyond. This hike is not your ordinary trail hike, it’s quite unique and I hope to finish the hike in weeks to come.