Trail Report: Mailbox Peak

There are trails you hike for the scenery. There are trails you hike just to see if you can. This is not the former.

Trailhead Location:

49834 SE Middle Fork Rd, Tanner, WA (according to Google street view)

Trail Stats:

6 Miles round trip, 4100 ft of elevation gain. Roughly 6 hours for the average hiker.

Directions:

From Seattle, take I-90 East to exit 34. At the end of the off-ramp, take a left. Follow this road until you reach a T intersection and take a right on SE Middle Fork Rd. Part way down the road the road splits. Take either road. After the two rejoin (about 3 miles from the highway) there’s a parking lot on the right. You’ve reached the beginning of the hike.

Trail:

Unless you’re training for something, I wouldn’t really recommend this hike. It’s steep, the vast majority of the hike is in the woods without any views, and early in the season it’s full of mud. To top things off, the trail can be downright difficult to follow since so many people have gone off trail in the past.

A word of note about the trail. The trail itself is blazed, but the boot paths only roughly follow the blazes. There are also a couple shortcuts people have made. This makes it difficult to follow at best. Additionally, some people have written things on the blazes like “Halfway-ish” and “15-30 minutes left”. These are laughably incorrect, so don’t put too much faith in them.

So why hike Mailbox peak? The views at the top are quite spectacular (and very hard won), and it’s one of the harder hikes in the I-90 corridor. This means, if you’re training to climb Mt. Rainier, it is the perfect hike. The difficulty also tends to keep the traffic down, so it’s a nicer hike than Mt. Si.

Once you’ve found the parking lot, you still have to make your way to the actual trailhead. In the corner of the lot there is a gate leading to an old forest road. Follow this road for .5 miles to the trailhead on the left of the road. There’s a sign marking the trailhead with a warning about the difficulty of the hike you’re about to take.

The first 1/4 of a mile is a pretty easy walk through the forest, crossing near a stream. At this point you’re probably wondering why I keep mentioning how steep this hike is. Shortly after, the climb begins. 4100 vertical feet straight up to the top. 10 minutes into the hike, there’s a small view of the surrounding area. This will be the last view you get until you reach 4000ft asl.

The next 2 hours of hiking are a relentless slog up hill through the woods. If it’s before mid June, expect lots of mud. When I hiked Mailbox, the mud was up to my ankles for the majority of the hike.

At roughly 4000ft, you’ll start to see a moraine off to the right of the trail. Another 200 vertical feet or so and you’ll finally break out of the trees. Here  you’re exposed to quite a bit more wind, and the trail gets a bit steeper. however, the views are fantastic. If it’s a nice day you can see most of the peaks along the I-90 corridor and even Rattlesnake Ledge across the highway.

Keep climbing past the false summit and you’ll see the famous mailbox in the distance. Enjoy a break at the top, you’ve certainly earned it. Once you’re ready, start back down the way you came to get back to your car.