Clear Lake Butte, Feb 6th

So this was an experimental snowshoe in an area I have never been to before. Weather was supposed to be nice but we only got a very dense cloud cover and pretty much no visibility. With all that, well, it didn’t go exactly as planned. The Clear Lake Butte area is a sno-park located a couple of miles south of Government Camp. The cool thing about this area is that you have a butte with a fire lookout tower that can be rented during the winter. The views from the tower are supposed to be just stunning as you have Mt Hood right in front of you but you can also see the White River Basin and several lakes around the area. In the park there’s also a small lake, Little Crater Lake that is not too big but apparently very deep. I’ve been told that it never freezes but I have to see that for myself. Unfortunately, the loop trail that goes around the Butte doesn’t allow you to do both things in one day so I came up with a plan to traverse straight to the Butte and then continue on the other side straight to Little Crater Lake. As luck would have it, we didn’t find the trail markers we needed to head out so we ended up hiking in the wrong direction. Once we found out about that, we corrected course and started navigating off trail in the direction of the Butte. By that time we had already spent about an hour so the chances of doing the whole loop where looking really slim. As we where navigating, it seemed that our path was not as steep as it needed to be. Without any views to get a reference, we got to the conclusion that we were following the right direction but parallel from where we needed to be. Since the Butte is the highest point in the area, we decided just veer off and just go up. That actually worked as at some point we got to the lookout tower. As you’ll see in the pictures, there was no view at all so instead of continuing to the lake, we made a straight line back thru the forest which ended up being a lot of fun as the sow was perfect. Despite the fact that we didn’t finish our intended loop and didn’t get to the lake, it was a great discovery day. Certainly a place I will revisit with better weather.