This past weekend Teddy (my boyfriend) and I were lucky enough to go for a beautiful hike in our area. Badger mountain is the closest mountain open to public hiking, and only around 15 minutes away from where we live. We were warned ahead of time that the mountain can be crowded during the day time so we packed up our dinner and headed out around 5:30pm.

Lucky for us, 5:30 seemed to be the perfect time to go hiking. There were only about 5 other groups of people on the entire mountain that we saw, which gave us plenty of space to ourselves. The hike was a little tiring for me, as someone who has yet to do the very adult thing of starting to work out, but Teddy was totally fine and we even saw a few kids on the trails. Additionally, it was nice to be hiking late in the afternoon because the sun was starting to set, saving us from the very dry heat that eastern Washington is known for.

The only complaint that I had the entire time was that the trails were not very well marked. Before heading out to the mountain I had looked at all of the different trails on the website and figured out which one I thought would be best for us, but when we were at the mountain we couldn't ever find the trail. This may have been because the trails were under renovation since we saw a few signs mentioning new trails that were opening and others that were being grown over, but it would have been nice to have some maps around explaining what we were heading into.

After the hike we sat in the bed of the pickup truck and ate our packed lunches at the base of the mountain. Overall, the experience was great and I highly recommend it for anyone in eastern Washington looking for some free entertainment for an hour or two.

View on the way down.

Some cute graffiti at the top of the mountain!