Hike to Saddle Mountain, July 26th

This weekend I was supposed to climb Mt Adams but as you can see from the title, that didn’t happen. For those of you that don’t live in the area, there’s a huge fire in the area and all access roads to Adams are closed. As a second choice, we were thinking about backpacking to Trapper Creek but that didn’t happen either. Lastly, I joined Kristin, a long time friend to go camping and hiking to Saddle Mountain in the coastal range. Some of you might remember or have seen pictures of this place before. That is no coincidence. Saddle Mountain was my first hike here in Oregon. I knew there were some camp sites and recalled this place of being somewhat remote and quite; well, not anymore. Saddle Mountain has become probably the most visited hike in the coastal range. Not many people camp there so finding a big spot was not difficult. After dealing with the campsite “host” and since it was drizzling a bit, we decided just to do the hike and set up camp on our way back. The hike itself, as expected, was beautiful despite the fact that there were no views at all. For me, it was really interesting to see how this area has changed in a little over a year. Some parts of the trail don’t exist anymore and some others are brand new. We found a lot of blow down and fallen trees. I have to say though; the Forest Service has done an incredible job maintaining this trail. The only thing I didn’t like is that being the most visited trail in the area, well, you get a lot of people. A lot of noisy people. On our way back, the drizzle turned to rain so staying overnight didn’t seem very appealing. The first plan was to put up a tarp and wait while we cooked dinner or something like that, but after seeing that the weather was not getting any better, we decided not to camp. Instead, we drove to Camp18, a nice restaurant resembling one of the old logging camps. There, we had a nice dinner before heading back home to the comfort of our beds.

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