Cold Creek to Larch Mountain, May 2nd.

How could I rate this hike? On one side, the trail goes thru beautiful forested areas while paralleling Cold Creek. On the other hand, it goes thru some logging and clear cut areas which are not very nice. You get a descent exercise out of it, but you get to a complete uneventful and even ugly summit. I guess you can call it good when you get a nice group of people and get a chance to do some bushwhacking. This trail is located just to the Southwest of Silver Star. According to the guides it offers wonderful vistas as it climbs to the summit. Well, it depends. Thing is that there are two maps for this hike. One is an older version (which I had) that has a section of the trail that was closed to let the forest recover. The new version, although current, has a big section walking thru recent clear cuts. There are even posted signs indicating that the trail is closed. I learned after the hike that there’s a plan to re-route the trail a third time so it doesn’t go thru the clear cut. Either way, the first part of the hike was a bit disorienting. Although we started from the intended trailhead, it seemed to me that we were n0ot going in the intended direction. That became apparent when we got to the road shortly after starting the hike. According to the map I had, it should have taken us much longer for that section. Once I got my bearing right, we continued on a forested area that meets the creek and follows it upstream. My initial thought was that we were going to be much closer to it though. At a couple of places, we crossed the creek and suddenly the trail turned up and we came to the clear cut. The In this area, the trail disappears but at least the markers are still there so it’s not hard to find your way back to the trail. The strange thing is that, once we got back to the forest, it was a complete different scenery. The trail was rocky, and the vegetation was scarce. We found some snow on the way up but plowed thru it until we got to the disappointing summit. As you’ll see in the pictures, there’s an antenna station and no views. The only reward you get for getting there is that you got there! For our return, we took pretty much the same route back but I did notice a fork that was almost invisible on the way up. We decided to take this route to verify if it was the trail I had in my map. The first portion was ok as it seemed that bikers have been using the trail. After a mile or so, we got back to the road (the same road we crossed o the way up) but further down. Looking closely, we noticed the trail continuing on the other side. That section was another story. The trail has not received any maintenance or foot traffic so we had to bushwhack all the way. At first it was kind of doable but the farther we went, the harder it got up to a point that we found the creek but there was no bridge. Luckily for us, there was a downed tree close by that served us as a bridge to cross and continue to the parking lot. In the end, I had some tired faced in the group so to finish in a good note; I took them to my secret location for the best banana milk shakes ever.