Can a hike be both beautiful and eerie at the same time? Yes, this one is. For this weekend Brian, Mark and Carol had planned to go backpacking. Unfortunately I wasn’t ready to do that as I was recovering from my thumb accident. Still, we though a day hike was something we could easily do. Knowing the route Mark and Brian where thinking of taking for the weekend, Val and I decided to hike in the same area with the hopes of bumping into them. The day was a bit gloomy but not bad to the point of keeping us away from the mountain so we headed out to the Vista Ridge trail. We didn’t realize beforehand that this trail borders the remnants of the Dollar Lake fire back in 2011. As we hiked up the Vista Ridge trail, we found a completely burned down forest that looked almost like an image taken from a Tim Burton’s movie. Seeing all the trees still standing up but completely burned was very eerie. Even with the amount of destruction, I couldn’t say it was ugly. The scenery was spectacular in its own way. As we gained elevation, we came out and went back into the fire boundary several times until we finally got a glimpse of Mt Hood. By then, the weather was turning grey. We continued until we found the junction with the Timberline trail and turned west towards Cairn Basin. From this point on, we completely left the fire area and entered a lush green meadow full of wildflowers and beauty. It almost seemed that we had been teletransported to another place. Closer to the shelter we found even more burned out sections but not as big as the ones on Vista Ridge. We got to the shelter and decided to stop for lunch just behind it where the flowers and views of the mountain were pretty incredible. Luck was not with me at that point as I opted for waiting until had finished my sandwich to take a picture. By then, the mountain was completely gone behind the clouds. We waited a bit to see if they would move but that didn’t happen so after a while we just took off towards Eden Park. It was pretty much downhill from that point on with more than a couple of stream crossings. We saw probably two more hikers but no sign of Mark and Brian. Finally we looped back to the Vista Ridge trail and hiked back to the car. The eerie part of this hike did not finished there though. Just coming out of Lolo Pass road, we decided to stop and get something to eat at Sky Wax. While there, weather turned bad incredibly quickly going from grey to stormy to lighting and hail. Back in the car and driving home we got an emergency message on the radio calling everyone to evacuate the area as there was a huge storm coming that way. We feared for Mark and Brian as we thought they were up in the area we hiked. Luckily we learned that they found out about the bad weather at the last minute and decided to change their plans and go somewhere else. They were ok although still got part of the downpour and had to cut the weekend short.
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