I hiked the Gold Creek trail today for wildflowers & some exercise. This is one of those nice transition zone trails with both sagebrush & mountain wildflowers. It is open to motorbikes & is rocky in places, but not especially rutted. It also crosses a couple of logging spurs & skirts some old clear-cuts (which are now nice green meadows). The resident mountain goat heard at Devil's Slide was bedded down in the sand at the bottom of the far end of the cliffs. The wildflowers were very nice: lots of lupine & larkspur bottom to top; scarlet gilia, desert buckwheat, & thompson's paintbrush on the bottom; and glacier lilies, spring beauty, & both varieties of pygmy lewisia on top. I had nice views out to Nelson Ridge & Mt Aix and to Fife's Peak, but Mt Adams, Mt Rainier, & the Goat Rocks were socked in.

Had a little trouble getting to the trailhead, as the route described in _75 Hikes in Central Washington_ is incorrect. To get there, turn off 410 onto Spring Creek Road/1705, follow 1705 until it dead-ends into 1703, then take a left onto 1703 and follow it to the end. Went up to the point where the trail crosses Gold Creek; it started getting pretty wet, and it looked like I was going to have to do some searching to find the trail at the upper end of the meadow, so I turned around there. Very nice up to that point; phlox and lupine in the lower parts of the trail, glacier lilies on the upper part, lots of bird life, views of Adams and Rainier, and not another person for the whole time I was out there. The trail did cross some unmapped jeep tracks and logging roads, but nothing confusing. Detours have been laid down around a couple of blow-downs.