Quartz Creek, Jul 3rd

While researching some trails, I found a bit of information on Quartz Creek which caught my attention. This creek, located in the Dark Divide, seemed to be exceptionally beautiful but seldom visited. I found conflicting information about the state of the trail so I didn’t know what to expect. Most reports did say that the trail was unmaintained but I also read that it was a backpacking possibility. Not wanting to experiment that particular weekend, I decided to take a small group on an exploratory hike up the creek to find out. Getting to the trailhead went smoothly and easy as this trail starts from the upper Lewis River. As soon as we found the trailhead, we were surprised to see it was well marked and clear. The first part of the hike was like hiking on any other trail although we crossed a couple of bridges that haven’t seen a bit of care. Things started to change as we got closer to the first obstacle. We knew that we needed to cross Straight Creek that has on bridge, but just before that, we found the first blow down. It wasn’t that bad but a sign that things would change after that. We took a small detour to an overlook of the Quartz Creek before continuing on to the creek. Straight Creek was unexpectedly beautiful. The river bed was a yellowish rock which made the whole section look golden. At that time we didn’t want to get our feet wet so we hiked upstream and found a log pile that made it easy to cross although we had to pay the price for that afterwards. The short section we hiked upstream on one side of the creak was a heavy bushwhack on the other side to get back on the trail. Once there, we started ascending and found the first campsite. From there, all things changed. What seemed to be a well maintained trail changed to a seldom visited place. First we started finding some blowdown trees that as we went on, became larger and more frequent. We even got to a section where we found to old growth trees, one on top of the other, crossing the trail. Once we climbed over those two trees and found the trail on the other side, we came face to face with three more crossed old growth trees. Some later sections were even more challenging as the trail became invisible for more than a couple hundred yards. At some point we got to the second creek which was one of my intended turn around points. This creek, the Snagtooth Creek, is much smaller than Straight Creek and, although there’s no bridge, it’s much easier to cross jumping from rock to rock. Being in the shade and cool, we decided to stop there for lunch before continuing. From Snagtooth Creek, we continued up until we found a fork. At that point, the trail can continue up to the boundary trail o veer to the right down to Quartz Creek and then to the Quartz Ridge trail on the other side. We decided to continue towards the creek where we found a third campsite. We stayed there for a while before heading back out the same way we came in. On the way back, the only change was that we actually crossed Straight Creek instead of walking on logs. Damn that water was cold.