Willapa Hills Trail Guide: Chehalis to Pe Ell

The first section of the Willapa Hills Trail connects the county seat of Lewis County with its westernmost community, bringing you front and center with forests, farms, and the beautiful Chehalis River. This is where the old South Bend Branch of the Northern Pacific Railway split off from the mainline and began meandering west, and it’s a perfect section of the trail to familiarize yourself with everything it offers.

 

Chehalis to Adna (4.5 miles)

This segment of the trail is also the most popular, and for good reason: it’s paved, not far from a population center, and easily accessible from Interstate 5.

Start your journey from the Chehalis Trailhead off Hillburger Road, and immediately make your way onto the oldest bridge still in use in Lewis County. Bridge 0, as it is called for its mile marker location on the trail, takes you over the Newaukum River and onto a straight stretch of trail that takes you out of Chehalis.

The rural feel of the trail is immediately apparent after a road crossing with Shorey Road. You’ll be brought front and center with a dairy farm, and if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see cattle grazing all along the trail for a time.

The trail surface in this area, while paved, is beginning to crack a bit. The railroad was built on pilings here and further settling of the ground has created issues between Shorey and Tune roads. Please be careful here!

Just past Tune Road, one of the trail’s less-talked-about treasures greets you. The trail intersects the Chehalis-Centralia Railroad at an angle, and here you’ll want to use caution, not just for crossing the tracks…but be mindful that the excursion train may be running especially on weekends in the summer!

This intersection is a piece of history that most often overlook, simply because today it’s a trail crossing an active train line. But when the Northern Pacific was running along what is now the WHT, it crossed the old Milwaukee Road line here. That’s right — two active competing railroads crossed up here, and did so again 16 miles further down the line in Dryad until the Milwaukee Road sold its interests to Weyerhaeuser in the early 1930s.

In fact, if you pay attention and know where to look along your trip, you’ll get to see some really unique places where the Milwaukee Road right-of-way paralleled the Northern Pacific. This trail is an epic repository of history, and the bike journey will continue to uncover clues of the past that helped form the heritage of our area.
Continuing onward, the trail stays pretty flat and straight, passing along more farms and through a grove of trees before reaching Highway 603. It’s a really good idea to stop here and look both ways for traffic, especially to the right as traffic can come pretty fast down the road at the curve. Never expect drivers to be looking out for you; ride defensively.
Keep going and round the slight curve until you see another one of the trail’s 130-year-old trestles. Bridge 2 crosses the Chehalis River for the first of several crossings of this river on this journey. On a summer day, you’ll see young people treating this section of the river as a swimming hole as many have done for generations.
Bridge 2 is the second of two wood-planked bridges on the route in Lewis County.