A Blustery Day

Snow at the Lost Lake junction

I began to question my decision to celebrate my 72nd birthday with a solo hike in the Chuckanuts as the wind began to whistle through the trees on my way up the South Lost Lake Trail. The trail was littered with debris from previous windstorms but I comforted myself by observing all the places on the trail that were NOT covered by big branches and sticks. Even if something were to fall from one of the very tall trees around me, the probability that it would happen to land on me was still very small –  on the same order as getting hit by lightning in a thunderstorm, I should think. If we worry about every bad thing that could possibly happen we would never get up the nerve to go outdoors.

That said, unlikely things do happen. In fact, unlikely things happen all the time – it is extremely unlikely that I would be typing the word “unlikely” at exactly 2:15 PM PST but that did in fact just happen! If you were dealt the poker hand {2 spades, 3 diamonds, 4 hearts, 5 clubs and 7 spades} you would think nothing of it, but that is a very rare hand: there is only one chance in 2,598,960 of being dealt that hand. It is just about the worst possible poker hand you can get, but it is just as rare and unlikely as a royal flush in spades.

Debris on trail

I’ve heard characters on cop shows, when someone relates an unlikely story, say things like, “There are no coincidences.” I hope (without any conviction) that real people involved in the justice system have more sense.

But I digress. I came up on this trail to check out the state of things for Thursday’s hike by the Senior Trailblazers of Bellingham. Last year a plot of private land located along the Skagit County line and just outside of Larrabee State Park was clearcut and in the process a couple of old, unofficial trails were damaged (I.e., obliterated). Last year Fred and I went exploring up there and found what seemed to be a new connector trail skirting the destroyed area. But we didn’t follow it all the way at that time, so I thought I should check it out before taking the whole crowd down a primrose path. Again. Just before Christmas I made a wrong turn on another unofficial trail and led the group down a ridiculously steep trail that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone with any sense. (It is for mountain bikers only )

Dangerous missile

The outcome was mixed. The new trail does in fact connect up with the old trail to the east side of Lost Lake but it is not in terrific shape. It is quite steep in a few spots and has 2-3 inches of wet snow (which may have been washed away by today’s downpour) but is generally manageable – and it is only about a quarter mile altogether.

There was one spot, near the edge of the clearcut, where I had a lot of trouble finding my way through some fallen trees. It might be wise to reroute this trail and stay further from the clearcut – I couldn’t be sure if the deadfall was debris from the logging operation or if they had fallen because they’d lost the protection of the logged trees upslope, but I don’t think the fact that all this stuff was right outside the clearcut is a coincidence. (Of course, it could be – unlikely things do happen, after all.)

Anyways, it wasn’t at all obvious but I did find a pretty decent way through that obstacle, so I give it a “thumbs up” for Thursday.

About noon the wind was really picking up and the trees were beginning to make some alarming motions, as you can see and hear on this video clip. When a wind gust came along, most of the sound was the familiar whisshhh-ing of wind through evergreens, but quite a bit louder. But now and then it was accompanied by an ominous low-pitched roar that reminded me of a passing ‘L’ train from my days back in Chicago.

So I kept an eye on the tall trees as I hustled back down the trail – my brain was still droning on about probabilities but feet were skedaddlin’.

A Spectacle-ular Hike

Eleven hikers set out on this warm day for a hike to Yellow Aster Butte. The air was little less clear than it had been two days before when three of us had gone up the same trail to assess its condition, but the view was still grand just a short distance from the trailhead.

Starting up

One of our goals was to look for my glasses that I had stupidly set down while I put on my bandanna early on that hike on Tuesday. I had very little hope of finding them – I had watched for them pretty carefully on the way down and notified the ranger station. They were wire rimmed glasses with dark colored temples that would easily blend into the forest floor.

But I thought I remembered that Mike had taken a picture of me at about the time that I lost the glasses. I thought we might be able to coordinate the time stamp on the picture with my GPS track and pinpoint the location but that didn’t work out for a couple of uninteresting reasons.

But Mike did find the picture and print it out – it showed me with my bandanna on and glasses off and in the background there was a large cut tree with a distinctive triangular patch of bark missing. (I forgot to grab a copy of the picture from Mike so I can’t show you). He carefully showed the picture to everyone so we would all be on the lookout.

And about a mile into the hike (a good bit further than my guess-timate), that triangle of bare wood popped into view. I watched as carefully as I could and noticed that everyone else behind me was doing the same – but nothing. Unless we came to another distinctive triangle of missing bark pretty darn soon I would have to give up. Which I soon did.

Resting and waiting

We had hardly been stopping at all since we’d been swarmed by black flies right at the trailhead and all the way along the trail, but I stopped at the next turn in the trail for a short break and Fred walked up to me and handed me my glasses! Eight of us had walked right past them but Amy (perhaps because she is built a little closer to the ground than most of us) spied them right near the magic tree. Someone else had apparently found them and had moved them a little ways further from the trail to a more open and visible spot – just a bit further away than the rest of us were looking.

I’m only half Irish but I must have inherited a full dose of their proverbial luck. Just a couple of weeks ago I had left my brand new trekking poles at the Goat Lake trailhead – a hundred miles from home and far out of our usual bailiwick. Four days later I got a message from Ward & Linda, two of our hikers from Ferndale, that someone they had met on the trail that day had picked up a pair of poles, assuming that it belonged to our group. Mind you, these were not old friends but complete strangers who had bumped into us on the trail and had just happened to notice that Fred had the word “Ferndale” on his cap!

Amy said that I should probably go right down and buy a lottery ticket. I haven’t decided yet whether to do that or go hide in a cave.

Flowers everywhere

The rest of the hike was comparatively uneventful – another glorious delayed summer day in the Pacific Northwest. The “spring” flowers are out in force, having just emerged from the snow, and yet some of the bushes are starting to turn to their autumn colors. We began to escape the flies soon after reaching the open meadows where the picture above was taken but the warmth of the sun caused us to stop short of the summit of the butte. We stopped for lunch on a rocky hill about 500′ feet lower in elevation and afterward went on up to the base of the summit trail.

Mount Tomyhoi

Amy, Fred and Mike (my Spectacular Spectacle Heroes) started on up the very steep trail to the butte (400′ gain in about 1/4 mile) but turned back about halfway. The rest of us waited patiently, enjoying the view, and then reluctantly headed back down the trail, fully expecting that our little black flying nemeses would be waiting for us and licking their chops (if they have any).

Tomyhoi and Border Peaks

And indeed they met us about where we’d left them at the tree line and capered joyfully about our heads all the rest of the way down to the cars. They didn’t really eat much (they only got one good bite out of me) but the continuous buzzing and occasional incursion into ear, eye or nostril was more than a little annoying. But I think it’s a fair price to pay now and then for the privilege of visiting these glorious mountains.

I didn’t take any of my usual scenic shots today.  Jan, our stalwart Blogger-in-Chief, was unable to join us today and assigned me to write this posting in her absence, so I was focused on actually having people in my pictures for a change. So I’ll sneak in a picture I took last Tuesday showing the lupines along the summit trail, with Mount Baker in the background.

Lupines & Baker

Return to Keep Cool

On Saturday Fred and I drove up into the mountains to investigate the old “Keep Cool” trail as a possibility for this Thursday’s hike with the Senior Trailblazers. We are still bedeviled by the extraordinary snowpack in the North Cascades, a residue from heavy snowfalls during the spring months. We are scheduled to go on the new Yellow Aster Butte trail but the Forest Service says that it is only open and snow-free for 1.25 miles, about the point where the trail curves around to the north side of a ridge. I know just the place they are talking about as I have been there and done that – the trail winds around in a meadow and gets lost under the snowpack and then, if you manage to find it, climbs up the side of a steep slope before it comes out into the sun again.

Shuksan from the lower trail

The Keep Cool trail is the old route to Yellow Aster Butte. It starts at about 3000 feet (500′ lower than the new trail) and has something for everyone. It starts gently on an abandoned logging road (with some nice views of Shuksan and Baker) and then goes on a somewhat steeper, even-longer-abandoned road. Then there is a short stretch (2-300′) where it does a credible imitation of the steepness of the Welcome Pass trail before coming to a wooded ledge or plateau at about 4000′. Then it repeats that ditty of steep-and-level a couple more times before it curves around to a lovely, open meadow at 4700′ with great views of the surrounding mountains before the last steep push up to the little lakes at the base of Yellow Aster Butte and Mount Tomyhoi.

The hope was to get to the meadow at 4700 feet. When I was there about three weeks ago (July 5) with DJan, Kathy and Verne we lost the trail in solid snow at that first ledge at 4000′ and had quite a difficult slog from there on. The combination of Verne’s considerable experience on that trail and my good GPS track from last September brought us to the high meadow, but it was very hard work and not very suitable for a group hike. Would three weeks make a difference?

The Trail Groomer

One small complication was that I did not have my good high-sensitivity GPS unit, having left it in Dennis’ car after Thursday’s hike. I dug out my old Garmin eTrex low-sensitivity and and its archaic RS-232c serial adapter and managed to put my good track onto it, but the combination of high, steep hills and dense trees in our area were always a bit much for it. With considerable inconvenience I guess I could have put the track onto Fred’s high-sensitivity unit but didn’t bother, hoping that my recent familiarity with the trail, combined with some melting of the snow, would get us by.

Since this trail has been abandoned by the Forest Service for about ten years it can be pretty brushy, especially in the more level areas. Shortly after we got started I was surprised to realize that Fred was not right behind me, since he can walk a lot faster than me. Then I heard some snipping and saw that he was using his pruning shears to cut back the brush. Later on he pulled out his saw and cut off a 4-inch tree that had fallen across the trail.

I was a bit disappointed, but not too surprised, when we got to that first ledge at 4000′ and saw that it was still covered in snow. But it was not quite as deep as before and there were a lot more bare spots, which gave me hope that the trail might emerge on the other side, where it begins to climb up another steep slope where the snow can’t accumulate to such depths.

GPS tracks

As expected, the old eTrex GPS was doing an excellent imitation of a paperweight – no signal at all. And my instincts didn’t do much better, as I led us well off to the left of the trail. But the snow did diminish as the hill got steeper, and we somehow managed to find a little scrap of the trail as it passed under a huge fallen tree. We followed the trail for awhile, then lost it and found it again a few more times before the snow became solid again and we had to just wing it.

On the map you can see our “progress”. It shows the upper part of the trail from the 4000′ ledge to the upper meadow. The brown line (sometimes dashed) labelled “Trail” is the trail shown on my map – it is so approximate as to be almost perfectly useless. The yellow line (bounded by black, with little red arrowheads) is my good track from last fall when the trail was snow-free. The brownish-red line is the upward bound track that Fred recorded yesterday, showing considerable deviation from the trail. If you click on the map to expand it you can see near the bottom (near point #1) where we lost the trail and then found it again. Near point #2 you can see where we missed a sharp right turn and went well uphill from the trail – very hard work, but we did come to an open spot where the eTrex finally managed to snag a good enough signal to tell us that we were quite a bit above the trail.

On a lot of trails you can do alright by just heading uphill when in doubt, but if you look closely at the contour lines you can see we were already almost up to the level of the high meadow, and that going further up would take us into a creek valley that would miss our destination by quite a bit. Not to mention being very steep and wooded.

So we turned and tried to stay on the level and head to the east and get back near the trail. But it is very hard to bushwhack on the level, so we reluctantly gave up some of our hard-won elevation gain to get back on a more sure course. The eTrex would lose and regain the signal so we were still flying blind at times – you can see near point #3 where we overshot the trail on the low side shortly after we got to it.

YAB From the Meadow

But soon the trees parted and we arrived in the meadow at about noon. In the picture at the left you see Yellow Aster Butte at the left, then Mount Larrabee and the Pleaides and over toward Winchester on the right. (I say “toward” Winchester, since it just “had to be” Winchester from its relation to the other mountains, but we couldn’t see the lookout cabin. Or even the flag pole. With binoculars, even! Today I studied the map carefully and found that the ridge that leads from Gold Run Pass over to Winchester curves in such a way that its highest point just barely blocks the view of Winchester from this angle. So Winchester is just behind that peak showing between the trees on the right.)

That meadow is such a lovely place! It would be a great destination for Thursday’s hike, but the way we had gotten there would not do at all. But we agreed that if we could do a better job of following the trail going back and put up some orange flagging and have all our electronic gadgets in good working order, it just might be doable.

Testing the new gadgets

Speaking of electronic gadgets, Fred and I had each downloaded the Photosynth App that Dennis had showed us on Thursday. I runs on iPods, iPads, iPhones and other “smart” phones and allow you to make a panoramic photo by, essentially, just waving your phone at the scenery. It follows the scene and takes a picture now and then and “stitches” those pictures together into a panorama. The image quality is not exactly glorious but it is still a clever toy – and an impressive display of the computing power that resides in these little doohickeys. I tested my new gadget by taking this panorama that includes Fred testing his new gadget. (FYI the photo shows “Winchester” and Goat Mountains.)

Waterfall above the Meadow

The creek

On the way back down we had some luck – the eTrex managed to hang onto the signal it had acquired in the meadow (most of the time) and we managed to find a pretty decent route. We probably were not right on top the trail but we stayed pretty close to it, with one exception. And even that exception. If you refer back to the map at the top of the post, and look closely, you will see our return track recorded by Fred’s GPS as a green line – but it is mostly hidden by the yellow line. The main exceptions are directly east of point #2, where we deviated a bit downslope from the trail, and just south of point #2, where the trail is very steep and goes right up a creek bed and we chose to find an easier route. (BTW the magenta (pinkish) line is the eTrex track – it stays pretty close until we got down into the trees, where it goes completely nuts.)

As promised, on the way downFred put up some flagging tape (and did some more brushing). We agreed that this would be a reasonable pick for Thursday’s hike, given the very limited choices available. There is bit more snow travel than some might like but the flagging assures that we will stay on a reasonable course. And there are no scary places (like steep side slopes.) It is steep in spots, but nothing we can’t handle, and a lot less brushy than it was on Saturday morning.

Bat Mitzvah Day, cont.

Sunday, 8:00 AM

As I was saying, before I was rudely interrupted by real life, the Shabbat service last night went well. The service is mostly sung, reminding me of the Roman Catholic high masses of my youth, and Lana led many of the segments. Another similarity with the old masses is that it is sung mostly in an unfamiliar language. You can follow along in a book (forgot to get the name – like a Catholic missal) as the rabbi calls out the page numbers. The text is written three ways on each pair of facing pages: in the original Hebrew script down the right side of the right-hand page, in Hebrew transliterated into the Roman alphabet on the left side of the that page and translated into English on the left.

Even with the shout-out on the page numbers, it can be hard to follow, since many prayers continue on for several pages and parts are often skipped and others are repeated with no indication in that text. And just for good measure, since the Hebrew script reads from right to left on the page, the pages are also reversed in the book. You can tell the goyim (gentiles) right away as we comically fumble around, turning the book this way and that and upside down and inside out.

I enjoy trying to follow the transliterated Hebrew, since I have a little experience with it from singing in choirs – and I just love languages for their own sake. But I think the best strategy for a goy who wants to share the experience is to just read as much of the English as you can. Many of the prayers are very beautiful and practical, and speak to universal human situations – I would even say that Judaism (the Reform branch, at least) is very humanistic, although that might get me into trouble.

While I spent a lot of time trying to hack the Hebrew, I did read a few of the English prayers and one of them really struck me as being outstandingly sensible and realistic. Those are qualities that most people seem to check at the door when they enter a place of worship. My very crude paraphrase: Don’t pray for things that humanity has no experience with and no chance of attaining. World Peace? Give me a break! Better you should just pray that more people would get angry and frustrated by war and poverty. It may be too much to hope they’ll actually DO anything, but angry is a good first step.

We enjoyed a nice spread of healthy foods after the service. Another humanistic touch is that, instead of having a separate social hall and kitchen complex as you’ll find in most churches, they have tables set up in the rear of the main room, right behind the rows of chairs. So you eat and yammer and gossip right in front of the Ark of the Covenant – right where God can see you!

Back in the Real World

That was a bad choice of words – it is very silly indeed to try to apply the word “real” to anything about Las Vegas. But after driving our charges back to the Bellagio we hopped onto I-15 for the two miles back to the Stratosphere (to avoid the Friday night traffic on The Strip) drove right into a linear parking lot. There had been an accident about 3 miles up the road and there were no exits before our destination, so we had to just sit there and crawl. It took about a half an hour to go those 2 miles.

Aside

I’m getting rather far behind on my blog posting, so that my titles no longer make any sense. And my spouse is getting itchy to get to The Wedding, already. No time for proofreading.

Traveling Man

In case you are interested, I am writing about our trip to Vegas on my other blog. Actually I’ll be doing that even if you are not interested

Good intel, bad news

This morning Fred and I headed up Mount Baker Highway to get a first-hand assessment of the snow conditions on the trails along High Divide, which are usually the first of the high country trails to melt out. The Trailblazers hiking group is scheduled to go to Excelsior Pass and Welcome Pass on the next two Thursdays, so the original plan was to try Excelsior. But when I mentioned that I would be out of town for the Welcome Pass hike Fred suggested that we do that one instead so that I would not be deprived of the feelings of accomplishment and joy that accompany that hike.

[At this point his tongue was so far into his cheek that his face was about to explode, since Welcome Pass is without question the most difficult hike in our area - short and extremely steep, with a nice but modest payoff in the way of scenery at the top. And the low hanging clouds above us promised to deny even that reward on this day. Did I mention steep?]

But I took him up on it. We already had a solid report that Excelsior has been manageable for several weeks, despite a good bit of snow on the trail, and it is pretty reasonable to assume that the snow level on the two hikes is about the same, given their similar situations, so a trip to Welcome Pass should give us the desired information.

Fred at stream

Our first sign that the day was not going to be a walk in the park was the difficulty of crossing this little stream early in the hike. This is in the first mile of the hike, The Teaser, where the trail is pretty gentle – following a long-abandoned logging road. So insignificant was this stream that neither of us even recalled its existence – but today it was a challenge to pick our way across the slippery rocks. [The picture was taken on the way down, by which time the flow had increased to the point where we climbed about 100 feet upstream to find a safer crossing.] We took this as good news – it hadn’t rained much lately so this meant that there was some serious melting going on higher up.

After that first mile the trail suddenly changes character and climbs toward the pass at a killer rate. I kept telling myself, “Don’t look ahead, don’t think too much – just put one foot in front of the other.” But a bit later I looked down and saw that I wasn’t even doing that – it was all I could do to pull each foot up alongside the other and maybe a few inches further!

At about 4000′ we saw our first patches of snow and by 4200′ the trail was completely covered by solid, congealed old snow. It was not not icy, however, and soft enough to kick steps into. The surface had lots of depressions which made for pretty good footing and we could follow some footprints that must have been left by some of the people who had signed the roster on the day before.

So we kept going. Since I hadn’t planned to do this hike today, I didn’t load my GPS with the hike info and was going by memory. My recollection was that the pass was at about 4700-4800 feet so it didn’t seem completely unreasonable that we might make it to the top.

That hope dissipated at about 4500′. We had lost the trail quite awhile ago, but had been on a section of the trail that climbs more or less straight up along a small ridge (most of the upper section of the trail consists of short, steep switchbacks, about 70 in all) – but when we got to the end of that ridge there was no clear path. We punched on for a bit but I was having a very hard time of it. And then I thought about what it would be like going back down the snow (always harder than going up) and threw in the towel.

After a short break and a snack – it was now 11:30 – we started back down. It was tempting to be only 2-300′ feet from the top but considering how much time and energy I’d expended in the 300′ since we hit solid snow, it seemed the wiser course. [After I got home and checked the map, finding that the pass is actually at 5200', it seemed even wiser. Lucky is more like it.]

And indeed I had quite a struggle getting back down the first 50 feet or so. Fred seemed to fly down, but my vertigo rebelled at the steepness. I had to sit down and kick my heels in ahead of me, slide down a little, kick in some new footholds, slide a little – I am sure I never in my life worked so hard going downhill. I was very happy to eventually set foot on dirt again.

There had been occasional drizzles on the way up, a bit more on the way down and it finally changed to just plain rain. Given all the steepness and struggles I was already soaked with sweat so I was one soggy puppy by the time we got back to the car. We gave up the idea of also exploring the site of the Great Excelsior Gold Mine and just headed for home.

Conclusions

The rain may hasten the melting of the snow, but we agreed that the snow on Welcome Pass trail is much more likely to endure for the next ten days than the proverbial snowball in hell. Perhaps the trail would be ready if we had ten days of warmth and brilliant sun, or better yet, ten days of heavy rain, but neither of those is very likely. We’ll have to bump this hike for now – maybe we can pull it back in later in the summer if there is another undoable hike.

[What do I mean, "IF?". Canyon Creek Road is currently closed; so is Hannegan Pass Road; I've heard no mention of even trying to clear the road to Artist Point.]

On the other hand, I do still think it is worthwhile to try for Excelsior Pass on Thursday. The trailhead is 600′ lower so it will take longer to reach the snow; the trail is wider and more well-defined than Welcome; it is also a steep trail, but a nice steady 1000′ per mile compared to Welcome’s ridiculous 1500′ per mile. The only reason we had trouble with the snow travel today was the extreme steepness – the footing on the snow was in some ways better than the bare trail had been.

And I know a lot of people are eager to get up into the high country again – this seems to be our best bet for now.

 

Burnout Checkout

Old trails in the Burnout Road area

Last fall a clear-cutting operation on a parcel of private land adjacent to Larrabee State Park destroyed some informal trails that had been used for years to complete some loop hikes on the south end of Chuckanut Ridge.

On the map to the right the so-called “Burnout Road”, officially known as South Chuckanut Road, is the brown line in the lower portion, leading from the Clayton Beach trailhead to what I’ve labeled as “South Chuckanut Hill”. (You can enlarge the map by clicking on it.) The light and dark blue lines near the top comprise the South Lost Lake Trail.

The newly logged area is roughly square, with the corners near South Chuckanut Hill and the Lost Lake Junction. The green and orange lines are the boot-built trails that were more or less obliterated by the clear-cutting. The green line is called the Overlander Trail on some maps.

Yesterday (May 24) Fred and I hiked up to see if we could find a way to resurrect the two loops that have used this area: the Burnout Road hike, which followed the road and the orange line and part of the green line to connect with the South Lost Lake trail and return via Fragrance Lake; and the South Lost Lake lollipop, which came up in reverse to the Lost Lake Junction, followed the green trail around to the east side of Lost Lake (which is just off the map to the north), and the dark blue line back to that junction.

I was hoping to find a better way across the logged area than that big zigzag using the orange trail – if you blow up the map you can see that it drops down quite steeply and then climbs steeply back up the green trail. It’s good exercise but the hike is hard enough without that bit. Maybe we could just strike a bee line across the clearcut and save some climbing.

Shortly after we started up the road we were met by semi-trailer truck rolling slowly down. This is not the sort of thing one often sees on these logging roads – graders, back hoes, logging trucks maybe, but a full-sized semi? [Is it a contradiction to call something a "full semi"?] Further on we found a large slash pile, one of those loaders with a big claw on the end of an articulated arm and a huge chipping machine. Also a sign announcing that the area was open to hikers and bikers despite the ongoing “Biomass Recovery Project”, which made my day, since I always enjoy a fresh new euphemism. Or perhaps that’s not the right word for it – “euphemism” is usually used to mean a nice name for something naughty, but this is just a fancy name for something simple, like “sanitation engineer” for sewer worker.

The other cute thing about this post-logging cleanup operation is that the company name on the trucks was “Barker’s Chipping Service”.

So what seems to be going on is that dump trucks drive up to the logged site where another of the big articulated claw things loads them up with logging debris (or “slash”) which they bring down and dump on the pile at the chipping site. Then they chip all stuff into the big semi (which probably has an open top).

This all sounds very industrial, but it didn’t really disturb our hiking experience much. The chipping site, or Biomass Disaggregation Station, was uninhabited and quiet since the semi had taken off with its load of chips. We met a couple of loaded dump trucks coming down the road and one empty one passed us on its way back up.

Up at the logging site I was surprised by how small it looked. We could see across some low hills to the tree line marking the state park line and to the Biomass Accumulation and Lading Site (i.e., the claw thing). The road continued on but we couldn’t see exactly where because of the hills.

The View to the East

We climbed up onto a nearby hill that seemed to be the highest point in the clearcut and were treated to some nice views despite the cloudy skies. In the picture above, the view spans from Lookout Mountain and Lake Samish on the left to Blanchard Mountain on the right; at the extreme right you can just barely see the cliffs below Oyster Dome; on a better day Mount Baker would rise over the foothills just left of center.

Fred on The Stump

There was also a fine view over the water to the west but I didn’t get any good pictures. The one on the left shows Fred surveying the domain (the bright spot near the center is Lost Lake) from atop the big stump where we stopped to have an early lunch and discuss where we should go exploring.

Wanderings - our track is in black

Fred had been up in this area last fall with a friend just as the logging was getting started and he was interested in trying to find the paths they had used; I was still leaning toward the bee-line approach. Since we had plenty of time, we settled on going back to the road and following it toward the claw thing and see if we could get to that area where the green trail turned east and then explore to the east.

We strolled along the road through a gentle S-curve, all the while studying the tree line for signs of openings that might have been trails. Just after reaching the place where the green trail should have been we saw something trail-ish heading east and followed it over a rise and down into a gully, but it soon petered out. We then tried to head north – the slope was too steep for me so I headed back up the gully while Fred went straight up the hill.

Neither of us found anything promising, so we regrouped on top of the hill and once again studied the tree line, which was pretty close now. I was by now close to certain that the old trail was along or pretty close to the new road and that we could easily get there in just a few minutes. So it was a good time to explore for the other trail. We picked a spot on the tree line and headed for it.

When we got there, I couldn’t see anything promising and was tempted to head straight west along the tree line back to the road, but Fred headed straight north into the woods and I followed merrily along – it was still early and we were close enough to the goal that we couldn’t get into any serious trouble. And sure enough we soon stumbled across a nice, wide trail heading east and west (at the point labeled 00510, if you’e following the map.) To the east it headed steeply downhill, heading in the general direction of the old green trail. We followed it for a couple hundred yards to get a better idea of its destination, but I was not eager to follow it too far – going all the way down and around Lost Lake would had several more miles to our outing and backtracking would not be easy (did I mention “steep”).

So we headed back west and in short order popped out on the old green trail, within sight of the sign marking the boundary of the state park. We had gotten to this point from the north last January on a little exploratory side trip from a hike to Lost Lake. (At that time the trail was posted with warning signs but they are no longer there.)

For good measure, we walked back out into the clearcut, where the trail very shortly joined the new road, and on to the point where we’d left the road earlier. We were fairly pleased with ourselves, having found some viable hiking routes, so we headed out to the north and took the Fragrance Lake and the Interurban trails back to the car. We went a total of almost 10 miles, but that includes all our wandering and backtracking.

Conclusions

The old Burnout Road loop is doable. On the positive side there are great new views from The Stump and along the new road (less than half a mile). The negatives are the 4 miles up Burnout Road itself and, in the short term, the truck activity on that road. The industrial activity was not a big deal in the clearcut; just the occasional slow moving truck. The chipping operation, which has to be pretty noisy, is a good ways down the road.

Another possibility would be coming up the Fragrance Lake trail and up to The Stump for the view, and back the same way. This would avoid most of the the truck traffic and almost all of the road hiking.

And it looks like the old green trail around Lost Lake has been at least partially replaced by a different trail through the woods. But this will require further investigation.

At the most recent planning meeting for the Trailblazers we responded to the heavy snow conditions in the Cascades by pushing the high country hikes back a couple of weeks into June and tentatively replacing them by Burnout Road and Cub Creek. The main reason we went on this Expotition was to check the viability of that choice. My reaction is positive. Any discussion?

Whither go we?

Olsen Creek Trails

After all the time I’ve spent on Stewart Mountain the last few weeks, as described in my previous posts, Act I and Act II, the only thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want to take the senior hikers on my bushwhack route. (Actually, I could be talked into that but I’m not holding my breath waiting for an eager chorus of volunteers.)

There are three nice big lollipop hikes in the Olsen Creek valley, all fairly hard and 8-10 miles long.

The northernmost is the old trail up along the creek to the North Summit and the new trails back down through recent clearcuts. This is about 9 mile total, rising to 3000 feet, with views to the north and west of the Nooksack Valley and the mountains of the Lower Mainland of BC and Vancouver Island.

The center loop is the one we did last New Year’s – About 8 miles with almost no views, and a challenging ford of Olsen Creek followed by an extremely steep trail that goes up 4-500 feet in about a quarter mile.

The southern trip has the best potential view, at the point labeled “Sisters View”, and no huge difficulties. But we would have to hike along the new logging road (the blue line furthest to the east). This would be about 10 miles.

The middle option basically stinks. If it looks like we might get a decent view to the east, then I would tip toward the last option.

Bushwhacking Olsen Creek – Act II

Scene 1

I was not satisfied with the route I’d found on my previous trip up Trail #8 in the Olsen Creek trail “system” so I headed back there on April 18th. Since I had gained a fair amount of altitude early on and lost it all later, I thought that if I started the same way but just kept pressing uphill I might come out on a higher point on the Ogallala trail, thus cutting off a bit of distance and avoiding the elevation loss. On my computer I used my mapping software to draw a trail that made a steady ascent from my starting point on Trail #8 (Point A) to a point a couple of switchbacks higher on the Ogallala than my previous destination (Point B). With the addition of a couple of broad switchbacks, the resulting path would gain about 375 feet in a little over half a mile, which sounds manageable.

Sisters View

The fact that I am not even honoring this third point with its own letter of the alphabet or showing you a map should give a hint to the success of this venture. I did make it to the intended point but it was not a trip that I would wish on an enemy. As hard as I “pressed into” the hill, I just couldn’t net any significant gain – by the time I got as far south as I wanted to go, I was still a hundred or more feet below the target. I had long since given up on finding a usable route but I was too stubborn to just give up, and I somehow managed to drag my butt up the slope (which was doing an excellent imitation of vertical) and onto the trail, a mere three hours later. That works out to a wicked pace of 6 hpm (not a misprint).

I forgot to mention that I had started this hike in a raging spring snow shower – the fresh snow did not assist my climb up that last fern-covered slope.

In retrospect that 375 feet gain works out to about 7-800 feet per mile, which is steeper than most logging roads (Pine & Cedar Lakes excepted) but gentler than Church Mountain, for example. But on those hikes you are walking on a tread which is mostly level (from side to side) and you are not stepping over logs and under branches. Walking along the side of a steep slope with nothing level in sight is another story altogether.

Determined to salvage something of the day, I marched on up the trail to the Sisters viewpoint to be greeted by one of the nicest cloudscapes I’d seen for at least a week and then walked back to the car on the Ogallala trail. It was very good exercise.

Trillium on Trail #8

Scene 2

Unable to leave poor enough alone I decided to spend last Sunday, one of the first really nice days of the season, in the same area. My plan was to walk the path I’d taken in Act I and see if there was any way I could drag my hiking friends up there this Thursday. My recollection was that that path was more or less doable, with the possible exception of the first stream crossing. Actually it was not the stream crossing itself that concerned me, but the very steep, leaf-covered, wet slope one has to traverse to get out of the stream’s narrow notch.

So the plan was to hike back out to that point and, trying my hardest to impersonate someone sensible, assess the situation and find a gentler crossing, if needed.

Cutting right to the chase, it was needed. Looking across the stream valley I found it hard to believe that I’d ever crossed there. And looking upstream, it seemed to just get worse.

But down below me things looked better. The slope didn’t look too steep, the woods was open and I thought I could see a spot where the stream leveled out a bit and the valley widened. The only problem was that it was quite aways down there and I hated to give up that much elevation. But it looked like the only way.

Switching back and forth down to the new crossing point was not a problem and the crossing was indeed better and the slopes gentler on both sides. As I proceeded on I found what appeared to be possible remnants of an old trail, heading roughly the direction I wanted to go. Despite my certain knowledge that I had lost a good bit of altitude and my recent experience with the difficulty of regaining altitude off trail, I allowed myself to be seduced along that “trail”. To no one’s surprise, least of all my own, I once again ended up a hundred feet or more below my intended destination (Point B).

Some of you will remember the hike last year when Ward gave us an impromptu gymnastics demonstration by falling off the trail and tumbling down an impossibly steep slope – that’s roughly where I was. At the time I was surprised that Ward managed to climb straight back up the hill to the trail but now I am utterly amazed! Rather than go straight up, I traversed to a lower point and barely dragged myself onto the trail.

Once again I had blown the whole morning and found yet another unusable route. Sigh.

Scene 3

After a quick lunch I was tempted to give up and head back down the Ogallala but I couldn’t resist one last try. I now knew that I could get from Point A to the new stream crossing with no great difficulty or danger. Maybe if I hiked back up to Point B I could find decent route across and down to the stream crossing.

That worked pretty well. I headed north from Point B, descending gradually, until I was within sight of the stream. I was still quite a bit above the new crossing, but getting down to it was not hard.

So there may be a decent route, after all. Bear in mind that the complete trip would require converting one of those descents to the stream crossing into an ascent, and all that that entails, but I think it is worth one more look.

But it is certainly not ready for prime time. So this Thursday the Senior Trailblazers will not have the pleasure of this particular jaunt through the woods. We will be doing something in the Olsen Creek area, assuming that we are not slammed by another spring snow storm in the meantime.

Lake Whatcom and the San Juans

Epilogue

As if I had not had enough entertainment for the day, I was headed back down Trail 8, about 2.5 miles from the car, when I heard a crashing in the distance and looked up to see the hind end of a black bear galloping away down the slope. It was too far away to get a good idea of its size but way too close for comfort. It had clearly heard or seen me first and did not seem at all interested in deepening our acquaintance but I had to stop and consider my options.

It was most tempting to turn around and go out a different way, but I had just come down the steepest part of the trail and a reversal would replace a 2.5 mile downhill stroll with 6 or 8 miles of hard hiking. And I was pretty tired already. And who was to say that there were no bears there.

On the other hand, I had less than a half mile to go in the woods before reaching the open logging road which wouldn’t seem to have as mush appeal for the bear as it did for me. And it had galloped away from me, but off to the right and steeply down the hill, whereas the trail veered to the left at about that point.

So after a bit I headed cautiously and as noisily as I could manage on down the trail. My heart was getting a terrific spate of exercise and every dark stump in my peripheral vision gave me a start, but I saw no more of my black friend (or worse, a smaller version of same).

On the logging road I ran into the first humans I’d seen all day – four horses, three riders and big dog enjoying the sunny day. The trailhead and some of the these trails are generously maintained by the Whatcom Chapter of the Backcountry Horsemen of Washington but I hadn’t encountered any horses here in years. But when I got back to the trailhead I could hardly find my car for all the horse trailers.

The Backcountry Horsemen

Bushwhacking Olsen Creek – Act I

On our last Senior Trailblazers hike of 2010 we explored some trails on Stewart Mountain east of Lake Whatcom in hopes of getting to a spot with a nice view of the Twin Sisters. But we were not successful – the trails that I thought would join just below the view don’t quite. But there is a point where they are only about a quarter mile apart at about the same elevation. The woods at this point looked pretty open – the usual number of fallen trees and debris but not a lot of underbrush – so I had been planning for the last few months to get back up there and see if I could find a usable path between the trails. By last Tuesday (4/12) the mountain, which is visible from the north side of Bellingham, seemed to be largely free of snow so I packed up my GPS, some orange flagging tape, a pruning shears and a small saw and set off to see what I could see.

The bushwhack is the pink line

I got a late start (9:30) so it took me until about 11:00 to cover the 3.2 miles from the Whatcom Backcountry Horsemen’s trailhead on Y Road to the point where Trail #8 comes closest to what I call the Ogallala Trail (near its start some displaced Nebraskan has tacked up a sign “Ogallala 1,450 mi”).

On the right is a map of the area. The brownish line coming in from the top of the map  is Trail #5, the one that crosses Olsen Creek and climbs very steeply up to join Trail #8 (near wear the yellow track comes in from the east) and proceeds on south and turns and heads off the west side of the map. See DJan’s blog for a description of our recent adventure in this area. The green track is the Ogallala Trail that goes to the Sisters View at its eastern end and leads back to the west to the Y Road trailhead. The yellow line is a road that goes through a new clearcut – see this blog post for a description that misadventure.

My plan was to go from the north end of the pink line to the south end. If you enlarge the map (by clicking it) you can see that the two ends are at about the same elevation, roughly 2100-2150 feet. I intended to follow along the contour and try to keep pressing uphill (to the east) and gain some elevation as I went – if I got high enough I might hit one of the other of the Ogallala’s zigs and zags, which would be cool; if I were to veer too far to the west I would lose elevation and miss that part of the Ogallala altogether, which would be very uncool.

The plan worked pretty well, if I do say so myself. There is an inviting open swale leading slightly uphill in a southerly direction. The going was slow since I stopped to put up a lot of pieces of flagging tape, and sometimes backtracked when I found a better path, but the going was not very difficult.

The worst spots were the two stream crossing – the streams are small and easy to step across once you get to them, but their steep little “canyons” present a bit of challenge. Instead of just charging down to the stream and climbing back up the other side, I tried to keep to a contour line and travel back up the “canyon” (really more of a “notch”) to meet the stream on my level. And then there are the logs that inevitably gravitate, quite literally, to the bottom of any stream bed.

After a little over an hour I ended up a bit on the high side of the destination, but not as much as I’d hoped, even though I was consciously pressing uphill the whole way. It was striking to me how easy it is to lose elevation when you are off trail. Every time you step around an obstacle, chances are you’ll choose the downhill side and it all adds up. Or subtracts down. Or whatever.

The senior hiking group is scheduled to go Olsen Creek tomorrow, but we didn’t specify which of the several trails. Perhaps if it turns out to be a fine day the lure of a great mountain view will enable me to talk my friends into trying this loop. The whole thing (up Trail #8, over to the Ogallala, up to the Sisters View and back down the Ogallala) would add up to about 9-10 miles.

GPS Aggravation

My Garmin GPSMap 60CSx is supposed to be the best thing for hikers since convertible pants but I have had issues with its accuracy since I got it. Well, not really the accuracy: the problem is inconsistency and internal disagreements. For the length of a hike, I will normally get very different readings from the odometer (and other readings which add up all the little distances as you go along) and the length of the track log (which saves points at intervals as you go along and then adds up the distances between the saved points). The latter will usually be much lower, since the gadget seems to interpret the fact that I am moving very slowly (being a very old person going up very steep hills) as if I were stopped, so it doesn’t add anything to the total distance.

On the other hand the track log usually overstates the distance because there are small errors in each position reading (maybe 10 to 30 feet) so when I really AM stopped it sees my location as randomly popping 10 feet this way and 20 feet that way, etc., etc. and adds in all those spurious distances when calculating the total. This is still, I believe, the more accurate reading especially since I can easily find and delete the extra stuff after I upload the track to my computer, where they seldom changes the length by more that a tenth of a mile.

I just hate those “usually”s – the rare instances when the odometer is actually reads higher than the track log completely boggle my mind.

(BTW, Garmin and REI have both demonstrated a stunning lack of interest in such things. The fact that everything works perfectly and consistently when using the device in a car or even when walking quickly shows that it is software failure in the way they are handling the (admittedly difficult) problem of using a (necessarily) imperfect location to detect whether one is truly stopped or just puttering around like a drunken snail. Did I mention that this device is NOT an automotive GPS and is marketed specifically to hikers?)

The most definitive, but by no means unique, errors I’ve seen are these two: One day at the start of the Goat Mountain hike, which starts with some very broad switchbacks, I noticed after 4 or 5 switchbacks that the odometer reading was significantly less than the straight-line distance back to the trailhead. Mr. Euclid would have something to say about that.

More is not better

On the Boundary Way hike one time, I happened to notice that the trailhead was very close to 4300 feet elevation (according to Garmin) and the summit was almost exactly 5300′. The overall grand total elevation gain was 750′, however. Mr. Euclid would be no less displeased with that outcome.

Anyways, on this bushwhack it occurred to me to try fiddling with the GPS’s settings. It allows you to choose to have it save points more or less often than “normal” and I wanted a very accurate track, so I selected the option of “most often”. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the result was pretty awful. The second illustration is an enlargement of a portion of the resulting track. Admittedly I was not moving in a very straight line, but that’s ridiculous! The straight line distance for the trip (the pink line in the upper map) is 0.2 mile but the GPS track log distance was 1.6 miles. Maybe “less often” would work better.