Day-Hike to Quinnebaugh Meadows

After doing the three-nighter toward Martin Lake, the dog and I went back to Red Lodge, rested up, and then hit the trail again for one more day hike before heading home. This was was out to Quinnebaugh Meadows, which I picked mostly because the dog doesn’t like being in the car and the trailhead at West Fork of Rock Creek is pretty close to Red Lodge.

The Summary

Scenery-to-Effort Ratio: 5? Scenery is probably a 9 and effort is probably a 2 (relative to 10-mile round-trips). So: 4.5 rounded up is 5. The bang-for-buck is tremendous — it’s a pretty easy half-day that takes you through much of what’s great about the Beartooths. (Also, while this is an easy 10-miler, it’s still 10 miles at very high elevation, so that might not net out as actually “easy” for everyone.)

Elevation Gain: Very gradual 1,000′. You start at about 8,000′ and the meadow is at about 9,000′.

Obstacles: The trail was slightly damp, otherwise it’s all straightforward till you get to the meadow. (If you wanted to go further, you’d have to cross a stream.)

Popularity: Moderate compared to most places, probably heavy compared to other Beartooths hikes. Crossed paths with probably six or seven other groups on the trail.

Distance: About 10 miles round-trip (this is an out-and-back).

Location: Beartooth Mountains near Red Lodge, Mont.

Pros

• Scenery is great the whole way with no lay-off — even the burned out forest for the first mile or two past the trailhead is pretty nice.
• Great views of ridgelines and the river (creek) roars alongside the trail.
• A few nice little waterfalls/cascades.
• If you wanted an easy overnighter (or a good basecamp situation), there are some decent places to camp in the meadow.
• Saw another trail corgi (other than mine).

Cons

• The scenery is all really nice, but there’s nothing jaw-dropping.
• The and-back part of out-and-back i
• s always a little less exciting than the out.
• Not really the route to go on if you’re trying to fish.

The Rest

I dunno. Here are a bunch of photos. That should about cover it. And then we drove back to Red Lodge, ate decent Mexican food, then hung out at the hotel.

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Sigh: Hiking to Cherry Creek Falls

One day, I’ll look back on this post and be amazed at… I dunno. I can’t imagine what in this particular post is ever going to leave me thinking: yeah, that was a good use of a half-hour of my time or similar. Maybe I’m shooting too high.

Too highly? No.

This hike tl;dr –> Falls are nice, otherwise it’s kind of a steep tree prison with snakes. OTOH, lower starting elevation than a lot of the hikes around here, so it’s snow free when some other places aren’t. Also: what else did I have going on that day?

6 miles total (out-and-back), 2,000′ of elevation gain. Trail was a little overgrown with grass and weeds. Trailhead is at the Cherry Peak Ski Resort (there’s a parking lot just north of the base) near Richmond, Utah. Two creek crossings with narrow logs for bridges that the dog was too afraid of and so I had to wade across the creek both times while carrying her. Poor little dog. The water was high enough and fast enough that she made the right call.

So you spend the two miles or so in a steep tree prison. Can’t see anything but trees (sometimes the creek) and it’s pretty steep. Not my favorite kind of hiking. Eventually the trees get a little sparser and the scenery picks up.

^^ That might be Cherry Peak.

A lot of wildflowers if you’re into that sort of thing:

Sun was in the wrong place for most of the hike. Maybe it’s more of an afternoon hike than a morning one. Is that a thing? I guess it can be now.

Here we go. Eventually I turned around so the lighting wouldn’t be a problem.

And then, eventually, there’s the waterfall.

So you got that going for you.

Hard to get from the waterfall viewpoint down to the waterfall itself, so we didn’t do that. Actually Aela kind of wanted to, but I didn’t want to go down after her — it was kind of just a cliff heading down there.

And:

• Fine, it’s really just the first third of the hike that’s a chore, but still. You promise yourself things during that first third that are hard to take back later.
• The other two-thirds are mainly fine, particularly once you get out of the trees.
• I saw more snakes on the trail (two) than other humans (one).
• The trail continues up toward Cherry Peak and eventually you can get to Naomi Peak and Tony Grove this way, should you choose to do so.
• But: toward the end of June when I did this hike, there were still some serious snowfields just above this waterfall, so…
• Also: there are no campsites anywhere on the trail to these falls. Some reports online said “camping: yes”, but I have no idea what they were talking about. I think the first campsites you’d come to would be past Cherry Peak at that one lake, which is a good, I dunno, four more steep miles past this waterfall.
• Your clothes get dirty when you’re constantly having to carry a wet dog across creeks. They also get damp.

And then we got to the car and drove home.

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Another Local Hike: Jardine Juniper

This one was a few weeks ago at this point, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or that it doesn’t deserve — nay, require — coverage on my important weblog.

This is a hike in Logan Canyon. It starts low enough that it wasn’t under snow at the time we did it. It runs about 10 miles total and ends at the famous Jardine Juniper, once thought to be the oldest tree in ALL OF UTAH, but later established to not, in fact, be as old as some other trees within the state. Still, it’s like 1,500+ years old, so: it’s old.

Point being: dogs.

Did this hike with Eric and his dog (hence the second dog). Once you get high enough, you start getting views that make Logan Canyon look like Switzerland.

I mean, a little bit. Fewer tunnels, cheaper restaurants (cheaper everything).

And then here’s a badly lit photo of the old tree.

And one other photo, just because I exported it and what the heck.

Thoughts:

• There were a couple places you could camp along the way. (These aren’t all deep thoughts.)
• A lot of mountain bikers — possibly a function of going up there on a Saturday.
• Eric’s dog ran away for a while. Mine was pretty good, although she seems to enjoy peeing on the trail more than I’d prefer.
• Steep in places.
• Took my new ABC watch, which did a good job of reporting the elevation gained, which I think was why I bought it?
• There’s eventually a choice to take either the “scenic route” or the “shady route”. We took the scenic to the tree, then the shady on the way back.
• The two routes are pretty equivalent in both scenery and shadiness. For the record.
• At one point it occurred to me to wonder what the tree would tell us about all it had seen if it could talk. It then occurred to me that it would probably say stupid things like: it was cold sometimes, but not other times, and then one time it was hot and later there were some birds and then they left and… And the whole conversation would probably be the worst and awkward to get out of.

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Richards Hollow Falls: A Pleasant, Nearby Day Hike

For whatever it’s worth, I have within the last 12 months gone on a dayhike and not reported on it. OTOH, I’m reporting on this one apparently.

Richards Hollow Falls is in Richards Hollow (!!), just up the Left-Hand Fork Road in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. These are all places in Cache Valley, a little south of Logan.

Three miles round-trip, IIRC it was about 1,000′ vertical gain so steep-ish, and not all that crowded I guess. I dunno.

Yet another hike,
Ends at a small waterfall.
Some river crossings!

Even haikus can be disappointing. The hike was fine, though.

You have to go down a pretty steep little slide to get to the place where I took that last photo. There was a log that had fallen over the slide, though, which stymied the dog. Which, I mean, good. Her life is way to easy. OTOH, I had to lift her over the log and she has muddy paws and can be a little squirmy.

It came out in the wash.

I’d never been up Blacksmith Fork Canyon before. The drive in was very pretty. It’s been a wet winter and spring, so everything’s green, which I like. If the climate here has to change, I’d rather it becomes more like Seattle’s than like Arizona’s. Much rather.

Also, once you turn off the main road and onto Left-Hand Fork Road, both sides of the road were turned into makeshift campgrounds for people with toy haulers and large RVs. It was a scene, felt a little like I was in the south, which… yeah. The folks flying the confederate flag kind of added to that. People are special, I guess.

And then I went home and continued doing nothing of interest.

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Oregon Tourist Hike I: Tumalo Falls and Creek

I did nothing but tourist hikes on this trip. TBH, though, I think pretty much every hike you can do out of Bend ends up being a tourist hike. Kind of like when you go to the Wind Rivers and there are a million other people there even though it really shouldn’t be a tourist hike.

Here’s the walk-up waterfall (the actual Tumalo Falls):

(If you want a better photo of the falls, there are only a trillion of them available on the Internet. This one’s special because the dog is in it, behaving like any of the cranky septigenarians who swung by after brunch.)

This is basically at the parking lot. I mean, fine, it’s a half-mile from the parking lot, but: basically at the parking lot. Arrive early if you want parking — there was plenty at 8AM when I got there, way less right around brunch-time.

Anyway, from there there’s a trail that follows Tumalo Creek and checks off at a bunch of different, smaller waterfalls. I took this trail up to… somewhere. There was a forest service road, a parking lot, a couple of trail junctions, and a lot of mosquitoes.

Here are some photos.

This was the next waterfall up the trail:

Apparently this trail is also called North Fork Trail. So that’s cool.

Here’s my dog on a log bridge:

This was some other waterfall.

And I believe this one is called “Double Falls”.

Whoever it was that got to name all the waterfalls in the western US really let the world down. Wish we had some of those backwoods Appalachia place names out here — “Falls of Otter” would have been at least a little better.

The hike is better than I’m making it sound. The creek is pretty, there are a ton of waterfalls. The lighting is a little tough with the trees, but otoh it would’ve been a pretty hot day without the trees. And then, once we got down to the paved part of the trail, all the tourists wanted to talk to me about my dog.

On to the next.

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Logan Canyon and Temple Fork Sawmill

Every time I talk to someone local about a hike I want to do that happens to not be in Logan Canyon, they get upset and tell me that there’s lots of good hikes in Logan Canyon. I mean, sure, and there are, but (a) there’s more than one canyon in the world worth exploring, (b) there are a ton of places within a four-hour drive of here that seem pretty cool, and (c) it’s really not that big a canyon, and people who live in THE VALLEY seem to have a hard time grasping that there’s a rest of the world that stretches beyond Sardine Canyon and Bear Lake, where sometimes things are also pretty good.

Anyway, it’s nice to have some worthwhile outings available for which the trailhead is within a half-hour of my house. Some time this summer (July? June? I dunno) I took this hike up to Temple Fork Sawmill, which some website over-hyped, but that was fine anyway. It was fine. The “Temple Fork” is a fork in the (Logan) river; the sawmill is a sawmill that doesn’t exist any more, but was used in the construction of the Logan Temple a while back. Guys apparently camped up there and worked in the sawmill while their wives were down in the valley tending to the livestock or something, then sometimes the guys would go down to the valley or their wives would come to the sawmill. And then the white salamander came, people started getting called to three-year missions in Russia, and someone else’s great aunt’s ward reduced the three-hour block to only two.

Heady days.

There’s a parking lot at the trailhead. Plenty of parking. It’s not a long hike, four miles maybe. There’s a lot to look at if you start the hike within a couple months of moving here from Oklahoma. Frex: there’s a river (!), green grass (!), some trees (!), and hills (mountains?) that, you know, exist (!).

Easy hike, could take kids on it. The sawmill isn’t there any more still though.

This was in June. June 7th, 2017.

This time, the unicorn’s horn does not point the way.

This is what’s left of the sawmill (man, my beard was so short back then):

But mostly just sort of this (although, relative to Oklahoma…):

This was a favorite:

And then I got to the trailhead, someone’s dog jumped out a truck window while the truck was still going about 20 mph, and I drove home, vowing (eventual) vengeance.

For the dog? For all of us.

bkd

Hiking Logan Canyon: White Pine Lake

If you look up “best hike in northern Utah” in the dictionary, everyone agrees that that’s the High Creek Lake hike. I didn’t go on that one though.

White Pine Lake is a pretty great hike, particularly considering its trailhead is 30 minutes from my house, right next to Tony Grove Lake. It’s possibly #2.

View of Tony Grove Lake (and parking lot!). This is about a half-hour from my house.

~The Lake~

Heading back.

I don’t love the shirt.

<fishing-related story>I took my fishing pole up there with me. When I got to the lake, I went through the jam-knot marathon to tie my bubble  on behind the swivel, the leader to the swivel, then the fly to the leader. Went down to the lake side and filled up the bubble. Opened up the bail, cocked the rod behind my head, threw forward to cast, and my bubble, leader, and fly all went flying off into the water, detached from the rest of my line. I only brought the one swivel. My bad.</fishing-related story>

• It’s about an eight-mile round-trip.
• There are some decent-looking campsites at the lake.
• It’s a pretty well-used trail.
• The two mountains seen above are, I think, Mt. Gog and Mt. Magog. (Gog is the one seen most frequently above.)
• I don’t think there are actually all that many fish in that lake.

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