Indian Point, Apr 14th

Indian point is one of the many destinations in one of the many trails near Herman Creek. It is a prominent rock that opens up to the gorge inviting you to do things you shouldn’t do… or, you should know how to do. If you look at pictures of this feature (I was not able to take pictures myself because it wasn’t clear enough) you’ll see it’s a rock formation that seems easy to climb onto. Problem is that it’s completely exposed and usually very windy. Falling from there would not be nice. Still, it offers several ways to hike in the area. Certainly you can go straight to it and then retrace back or, you can take any of the trails in the area and do a loop. Val and I decided to do a loop and keep it low to avoid going thru a lot of snow. So we started from the Herman campground reaching quickly the power lines. From there, we continued up to a big junction where the Gorton Creek trail and Nick Eaton Creek trail meet. The Gorton creek trail goes directly to Indian Point and then continues climbing on the ridge. The other way climbs steadily towards Nick Eaton and then pretty much shoots straight up on a series of switchbacks. On this trail, there are several connector trails that will take you to Gorton Creek trail. We took one of those and quickly entered the snow. For just a bit we lost our bearings and noticed we were going the wrong way. A quick correction and we got back on track and started descending on the other side on lingering snow. Finally we got out of the snow roughly at the switchback where a user trails leads to what looks like a vertical drop-off. On clear days (and good conditions), you can follow this trail to Indian Point and maybe climb the rock. So far it’s been three times I’ve been in the area and still haven’t seen it… I guess one of these days I’ll get the opportunity



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