GALBRAITH MOUNTAIN TRAIL MAP
THE TRAILS
Galbraith Mountain is a world-class mountain destination located within riding distance of downtown Bellingham. Over 70 miles of singletrack that winds through 3,000 acres overlooking the city and Bellingham Bay. The trails are built and maintained by the WMBC and our trail sponsors. Because of the quantity of trails, the mountain can handle the e-bikers, hikers, trail runnners, horse riders, and bikers that recreate there during the course of the day without trail users feeling like the trails are busy!
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​​Galbraith has the perfect topography to create a huge network of trails with varying skill levels. Trails vary from fast and flowy XC trails to directional jump lines for advanced riders. No matter what skill level you are, Galbraith has a trail that will put a smile on your face. The mountain has two access points, the north and the south entrances.
Galbraith Trail Maps: You can purchase a waterproof paper Galbraith Printed Map, or you can use the TrailForks app. A portion of the sales of the physical maps goes directly to the WMBC to help maintain and build new trails on Galbraith, find them at local bike stores all over Bellingham. The mountain features trail kiosks at both entrances with maps but since there are so many trail options we highly recommend using the TrailForks app to navigate.
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Southside Suggested Rides
Downhill: Dogpatch - Tower Road - Evolution - U-line - Atomic dog - Gate & Switch
XC: Lost Giants - Mole Trap - Rock n Roll - Bandito - Pony Express - The Pigs - Kaiser - Lower Mulltet - 911 - Lone Wolf - Lost Giants
Northside Suggested Rides
Downhill: Up to Something - Dos Copas - road - V Trail - road - Cougar - Oly - Bottle Opener - High Life - Happy Hour - Keystone - Vitamin R - road - SST
Trail: Ridge - Family Fun Center - road - Intestine - Cleavage - El Pollo - Ewok Village - Cedar Dust - Bob's Trail
HOW TO GET THERE
There are two main points to access Galbraith, the northside or the southside.
Northside The northside accesses the mountain at Birch St. from downtown Bellingham off of Lakeway Dr. with a parking lot and on-street parking. Please consider parking in Whatcom Falls Park and riding the short distance to the entrance to avoid crowding. The Miranda trail gets you onto the mountain and from there you can access a number of trails options.
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Southside The southside is accessed via Samish Way with a brand new parking lot directly across the street from Galbraith Lane road. Park here or at the Lake Padden parking area near the dog park. When you go up Galbraith Lane, go straight towards the pipeline road and through the yellow gate. You will access trails like Last Call, New Issues, and Lost Giants.
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Southside Parking Lot Our generous and supportive community raised the monumental funds of $606k needed to renovate and enlarge this much-used parking lot in 2022. The new lot has 180+ parking stalls, horse trailer parking, bathrooms, and a turn-around zone for youth drop-off. This lot is now manage by the City of Bellingham, please direct your questions and concerns to them moving forward.
A huge thank you to the Rotary Club of Bellingham for kickstarting our capital campaign for the parking lot expansion with their donation of $86,000! And another thank you to Recreation Northwest who connected us with an anonymous donor and presented us with a $100,000 check for this parking lot project.​
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If you're wondering why the WMBC took on the parking lot project, read more about the Galbraith Easement. More details in Cascadia Daily New's article.​
CAMPING & LODGING
Nestled beneath towering old-growth cedars, this modern home blends comfort and nature effortlessly. Here, luxury meets adventure—offering all the comforts of home while placing you just a few pedal strokes away from some of the best trails in the world. The closest rental to the trails, just minutes from Historic Fairhaven and Downtown Bellingham, the Galby Getaway is the premier rental for outdoor enthusiasts who enjoy easy access. Bring the whole family as we sleep up to 10 guests.
Set on the seaward side of Chuckanut Mountain near Bellingham, Larrabee State Park is known for its postcard views of Samish Bay and the San Juan Islands.
Birch Bay State Park is a 664-acre camping park with 8,255 feet of saltwater shoreline on Birch Bay and 14,923 feet of freshwater shoreline on Terrell Creek. The Terrell Creek Marsh is one of the few remaining saltwater/freshwater estuaries in north Puget Sound. A natural game sanctuary sits at the park's north end.
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GALBRAITH LAND OWNER ZONES
HISTORY
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The mountain is owned by a private landowner as well as the City of Bellingham and Whatcom County. We are guests on the mountain. WMBC has over 30 years of history stewarding the mountain to keep it open and growing while working with various landowners.
With the 2018 Galbraith Easement secured, recreation access is guaranteed forever. Over the last two decades, Galbraith Mountain has been developed by mountain bikers into a nationally recognized mountain biking facility. Galbraith’s trails also support family outings, runners, hikers, and walkers. Until 2018, all of these recreational uses have been allowed by the property owners on a voluntary basis. The property is zoned for commercial forestry with ongoing managed timber harvesting occurring regularly, and both recreational use and logging have successfully coexisted for many years.
There is a great deal of costs involved in keeping the mountain open, including insurance and trail maintenance. If you love riding Galbraith trails to please donate to the WMBC or join a volunteer trail day to support the upkeep and management of the trails on the mountain.
ADVOCACY ON GALBRAITH MOUNTAIN
BACKGROUND
Galbraith Mountain is a privately-owned commercial working forest surrounded on 3 sides by neighborhoods along Samish Way, Lakeway/Lake Louise Road and Yew Street. Since 1986, WMBC has been building and maintaining trails on Galbraith Mountain and have been the authorized trail stewards since 2001. That original Recreation Use Agreement transferred from the former owners (Trillium Corporation) to Polygon Financial in 2011. Between 2011 and 2018, we assisted the City and Whatcom Land Trust in negotiating permanent easements across the 2,240 acres purchased by Galbraith Tree Farm in 2017.
The four main landowners on Galbraith are Galbraith Tree Farm (2,240 acres), Polygon LLC (650 acres), City of Bellingham (400 acres) and the Department of Natural Resources (50 acres) along with some smaller private in-holdings.
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TIMBER MANAGEMENT
Janicki Logging (along with their subcontractors) performs timber management operations throughout the year including aerial spraying, commercial and non- commercial thinning, road construction and clear cutting. Because Galbraith is a dynamic landscape, WMBC manages the evolving trail network unlike other areas in Whatcom County. Within the timber management, there are two types of logging on Galbraith that impact the public’s trail access each year: thinning and clear cutting.
THINNING
Thinning is where the loggers harvest a percentage of trees in a particular area. After thinning, there is a variable amount of damage to the trails. In most sections, there is slash (cut branches, tops of trees, etc.) laying across the trail. Restoring these sections of trail can typically be cleaned up by hand with typically little tread repair that needs to take place. Piles of slash surround 100% of the trail tread post-harvest and keep sediment from traveling no more than a few feet.
There are also bigger trail crossings during thinning where the machines have created a "road" that the loggers use to travel across the trail to haul logs to their landings. For this part of their operation, they use a machine called a forwarder which has 5' tall wheels with chains on them. The crossings typically have 3-5' deep ruts from the machine where the slash is driven into the soil. The crossings tend to be narrow (30-50 feet wide) but are a massive amount of work to restore.
Depending on the topography and vehicle/road access points, the loggers will sometimes utilize the trail corridor itself and create 3-5’ deep ruts going down the trail itself and require significantly more work to restore. An example of this was the middle section of Atomic Dog during last year’s harvest. Because of the intensity of trail damage, we restore the crossings and ruts with our mini-excavator and then do hand work to button things up at the end. Sometimes, there is just a few crossings and sometimes there's large sections of trail destroyed.
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CLEAR CUTS
As the name would suggest, this operation is when the loggers take all the trees within an area (minus the ones they keep for the Habitat Conservation Plan - HCP). By and large, this harvest operation impacts an entire trail or area of trails and most of the trail tread is heavily impacted by their machines with slash driven into the ground. When restoring trails in clear cuts, we use our mini excavator to move slash away from the trail corridor and then have hand crews (volunteers typically) do the final shaping and compaction of dirt. As with thinning operations, there are piles of slash surrounding 100% of the trail tread post-harvest that keeps sediment from traveling no more than a few feet. Areas on Galbraith that have had extensive clear cuts like the Bears, Bunny Trails, SST and Lost Giants are indicative of the level of work in these zones.
RESTORING ACCESS
An important aspect of Galbraith being a working forest is the volume of trails affected during harvest operations. In the past 5 years, nearly every trail has been impacted in some way and last year (2019-2020) more than 1/4 of the mountain's acreage had timber harvest and the WMBC restored 22 miles of trail. During the 2019-20 season, trail access on the north side (Birch Street) was completely closed when The Ridge, Bob’s, Cedar Dust and FF Center were being thinned. The North Side access is the primary route from Bellingham and the closure affected more than 50% of the public’s access to the mountain. When these closures occur, we redirect ALL traffic to the south side of the mountain (Galbraith Lane) and to other neighborhood access trails which invariably causes friction with neighbors. As such, it is always WMBC’s goal to get trail access restored as quickly and as efficiently as possible post-harvest.