Whistle Lake- 4 mile loop, 580 feet elevation gain
Pass-none Difficulty- 3.5/5 (with kids) Rating-3.5/5
We wanted to do a hike and I had just read about hiking Whistle Lake. (Disclaimer: In that article she said it was almost perfectly flat, but it was not almost perfectly flat. Washington Trails Association said it was 580 feet elevation gain and that is where I got my information on elevation gain and trail length, I’m not sure if it has that much elevation gain, but there was definitely elevation gain!)
Whistle Lake is near Anacortes, so it is a little over an hour away from our house. We were excited to finally have a sunny day and we were ready to get out and explore! We thought that Whistle Lake would be a great spring hike for us!
It starts off on a nice, flat, wide trail, soon you come upon Whistle Lake. It is a beautiful lake in the middle of the forest. Once we came to the lake we went right and started our walk around the lake. We followed the lake for a while; we would take breaks to throw rocks in the water and try to spot fish. We could see the other side of the lake and we could see people hiking on the trail that we would soon be on. Soon we started our ascent. We hiked up into the forest and we lost sight of the lake.
The forest hike was still beautiful and it was fun to be in the trees. Once we made it up hill a ways we kind of lost the trail. We went right and that was a dead end. We went left and it looked like it would just take us to a bluff overlooking the lake. It was a beautiful view and we stopped to enjoy it for a few minutes. We still needed the trail and eventually we found it. Instead of following a trail to the bluff you just keep going and bypass the bluff. We thought this was the point where we would loop back around the lake, but instead we kept going up into the forest.
I did bring Lillian’s carrier with us on this hike and I swear that girl could sense when the uphill was about to start because that is when she wanted to be carried. Since we had her carrier she knew she could be carried so she would throw a huge fit if we wouldn’t carry her. I was the lucky one who got to carry her up those hills!
Finally we started our descent down and we started to hike around the other side of the lake. This part of the hike was so pretty! so we decided we would take a break eat some snacks on the edge of the trail overlooking the lake! Once we finished our snacks we hiked on, and before we knew it we were done!
The kids did a great job! they didn’t love how long it was or how much uphill we did, but they didn’t complain much and they did so good! It was fun to do a longer hike with them and it gave us hope that we could go backpacking this summer as a family!
