Kings to Jones traverse, Jan 22nd

Warm weather, completely unseasonable warm weather for this time of year. It had been so warm that we decided to start doing spring hikes even though it’s still the middle of the winter. Seeing that the weekend was going to be nice, I decided to tackle again the section between Jones Creek and King’s Mountain trail in the Tillamook Forest. As some might remember, I did this hike, or at least planned to do this hike back in November. That time we were not able to do the whole thing because it was rainy and cloudy and also because we didn’t have enough cars for the car shuttle required. This time we had sun, clear skies and a very nice group of people. Rather than do it like I planned the previous time, this time I opted for going up from the King’s Mountain trailhead and follow the Wilson River trail all the way to Jones Creek. To that, I was adding the trail we discovered the first time, The Coronary Ridge. As it happens in a lot of my hikes, we added something more but I’ll get to that in a minute. The other new thing is that I finally took my brand new hiking kilt for a spin. I think the only word I can use to describe the experience is bliss. So after the short drive and leaving cars at both ends of our journey, we started on the King’s Mountain trail and soon veered off on the Wilson River trail. The climb was not as bad as I had expected. I guess that we were a lot closer to the trailhead the first time we did this. In any case, it didn’t take us long to reach the ridge and easily find the Coronary Ridge trail. At that point I had warned my fellow hikers about this section so much that they were all in the right mind set. So we climbed and got to the viewpoint where we turned around the first time. Only this time we actually got a view, a very nice view. From the map I had, I noticed that there was the possibility of connecting the Coronary Ridge trail with the Kings Mountain Trail. Looking around, I noticed a faint foot path and after talking the group into it, we started bushwhacking our way. It took us about an hour of steep ups and downs until we got to the Kings Mountain trail. At that point, it only made sense hike the extra mile and climb the extra 1000’ to the summit so we did that. The views up there were fantastic. I think this was the first time that I was able to see Mt Hood from Kings. After signing the log book at the top, we found a spot for lunch under the warm sun and beautiful views and then we headed back. We took the same connector trail thru Coronary Ridge back to the Wilson River trailhead. At that point, we still had more than a couple of miles to go to Jones Creek so without hesitation, we turned right and started hiking downhill. The rest of the hike was pretty much what I remembered from the first time, deep forests, fern covered slopes and beautiful scenery. After s long hike we finally made it to the bridge and then the last mile from Diamond Mill to Jones where our cars were waiting for us.



You can check the pictures here

Silver Falls State Park, Jan 15th

About once a year we try to have a hike leader meeting where al the current hike leaders in our group (The Portland Hiking Meetup Group) get together to discuss things about the group and the future. This time, we decided to rent a couple of cabins at Silver Falls State Park for our meeting and also as a weekend getaway. Being January, read middle of the winter, we expected it to be a bit cold and maybe some rain. Well, that week we had record rainfall so it literally poured the whole weekend. We were able to have our meeting and with just a couple of brave souls, we did the 10 mile hike around the park that goes by all 10 waterfalls. The scenery was spectacular as half of the park was completely submerged in fog and rain but what made this even better was the amount of water. I’ve been in this park at least a couple of times and some of the waterfalls sometimes just trickle a bit of water. This time, the water level was high enough that it was actually flooding parts of the trail. As you’ll see in the pictures, besides low light and mostly grey tones, the scenery is still amazing.

Newton Creek, Jan 9th

Having done most of the well known snowshoe routes in Mt Hood, I wanted to try something new. After a bit of research, I decided to explore Newton Creek. While doing my research, I did find some non-official winter routes that, in combination with the Newton Creek route opened the possibility to do a loop where more than half was backcountry. The only not so good thing was that weather forecast was not so good for that day. After meeting at our normal spot, we drove all the way to the Mt Hood River Meadows. This is a Nordic ski area located on the east side of Mt Hood Meadows. In the area, there are several trails established for cross country ski and some other summer routes that get very light use during the winter. Weather was as predicted, overcast and snowing. We started heading east on a well marked trail that crossed a small creek and then continued to Newton Creek which we reached in less than half an hour. The views, despite the weather were very interesting although we did not see even a hint of Mt Hood. From the map I had, it looked like we could follow the creek uphill for quite a while but reality was a bit different. Due to the map scale, you can’t make a steep wall on the side of the creek that makes this route impassable. After discovering this, we had to backtrack, not for too long, and then take a parallel route. As we did this, weather changed completely and most of the clouds disappeared giving us a nice blue sky. We continued climbing thru the woods which didn’t offer a lot of views but we were able to see Gnarl Ridge from a couple of points. As we continued up, the small valley we had to our left started to change and close and soon we found ourselves traversing on the side of a slope. Further to the left was another ridge, much higher than where we were, that was our return path, so we knew that at some point we would need to make up there. As we continued, we did notice the valley getting closer to our elevation and suddenly we found tracks crossing to the other side that didn’t require descending too much into the gully. Not climbing further made us pay the price though. From that point, the only way to get up to the ridge was climbing a very steep hill. After some huffing and puffing, we finally made it to the ridge where we stopped for a while to enjoy a bit of sun and the views. I thought that we would still have to navigate back to the cars but quickly found that someone on a snowboard had done the same route earlier that day. We followed those tracks as they wound lazily thru the trees following the ridge all the way down. That section almost made us regret not having something to slide on as the snow was a very nice powder. Then, weather started turning for the worse but luckily we were back on the connector trail that took us in the morning all the way to Newton Creek, so from there we turned right and went back to the cars.



You can check the pictures here

Cast Creek, Jan 2nd

In winter time there are sections of the mountain that you can’t get to because the roads don’t get plowed. One of these roads is Lolo pass that circles around the northwest side of the mountain. On that side, there’s a sno-park called Old Maid Flats as well as numerous other summer trailheads. Wanting to explore this area a bit and considering we didn’t have a lot of snow at lower elevation, I decided to adventure myself to that area. The first thing that happened was almost expected. I got stuck in snow… yes, lesson learned. After toying around with the shovel and finally getting one of the chains on, I was able to get the car out not without a lot of sweating and swearing. At that point, we hadn’t decided what route we would be doing. Choices were the low elevation trails in the sno-park area or adventure ourselves up on one of the summer trails. With Kim we decided on the later as that would give us a better workout and views. So we started navigating thru the woods and quickly got to a small creek where we couldn’t find an easy way to cross. We went around for a while until finally found a path to a campground and from there the Cast Creek trail. With the low amount of snow on the ground, we found the trail very easy to follow. We hiked up and up and up always navigating thru a very dense forest. At some points it looked like we were getting close to views but that never happened. The trails pretty much follows close to the ridgeline but rarely opens up so there were no views to talk about. Since we started rather late, at some point we decided to set up a time to turn around and head back down so we would not be stuck in the dark. When the time came, we sat for a couple of minutes under the little sun that was filtrating thru the trees while we ate a quick lunch. After that, it was a race down arriving at the car just when the sun was setting. As you’ll see in the pictures, we got the last bit of light on Mt Hood as we were pulling out.

Lower Twin Lake, Jan 1st

After the New Year celebration and having eaten a lot of very tasty food, the logical thing to do for a hiker is to go hiking and burn all that. Knowing that most would have been partying the same way, we decided to do a rather short snowshoe to Lower Twin Lake. This is a trail I’ve done many times before and it’s always beautiful. This time we had a really nice group of people which included some new members that were trying snowshoeing for the very first time. The first part of the hike, going up from the Frog Lake Sno-Park was forested and covered as usual but then we got to the lake to an open blue sky and great weather. Instead of continuing on and making this a longer hike, we stayed there for about an hour eating lunch and feeding the blue Jays as they dived from the trees to grab a piece of our food. After that relaxing time, we hiked our way down back to the cars.