Sandy River, Nov 29th

This was not the original plan or what we had in mind. When Val and I got in the car and left pretty early in the morning, our plan was to hike along a ridge with magnificent views towards Buck Peak, a destination we’ve never been to yet. The drive there is considerable as we had to go all the way to Hood River and come from the back side to head up towards Wahtum Lake as the trailhead is a bit above the Wahtum Lake campground. As we drove there, we found patches of snow but nothing to terrible so we got to the lake in the normal, almost two hours but then things turned south. We continued on the road uphill towards the trailhead and the first thig we noticed was that, there was absolutely nobody out there. Generally, we like that. The second thing was that the snow on the road was getting thicker as we drove. But then, we saw a big tree that had fallen across the road cutting the pass. Being a narrow road as most forest roads are. There was no easy way to turn around and parking it there was not an option since we didn’t know if we would be able to get out. So we backed up to a wide area were we were able to turn around and got out of the car to take a couple of pictures and think about our predicament. It was cold, really cold. As predicted by the weather people, temperature was in the low teens. At that point we were above the clouds so the day was looking pretty fantastic. After discussing for a bit, we concluded that it was not safe to stay there so we continue our way down and started thinking about an alternative. Since we were all the way on the other side of the mountain, our choices were somewhat limited so we opted for taking Lolo Pass road back towards Zigzag as that was in the right direction to go back home and there’s more than a couple choices along the road. One of those is Ramona Falls. The only problem is that the seasonal bridge across the Sandy River was already out. So we decided to give it a try and see. With all that driving, we ended up getting there close to noon so our day time was already running pretty short. We quickly got on the trail that follows the Sandy and got to the point were the seasonal bridge is… no bridge. We looked for a place to cross but water was running pretty high so it was an unnecessary risk. Instead, we continued, off-trail, on the south side of Sandy River. We explore for quite a while enjoying the limited views of the mountain until we got to a big opening that we thought would give us a passage to the other side and eventually to the falls, but that’s when we found the big marks of a bear that was probably wandering in the area that morning. I guess someone was trying to tell us something so we turned around and headed back to the car.



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