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.