With another day of pretty good weather on tap, I drove down to Westfir and tackled the
North Fork Trail. I ended up hiking all of segment 1 and most of segment 2, for an out-and-back amounting to about 19 1/2 miles. The trail runs up the North Fork of the Middle Fork of the Willamette River, and it was a gorgeous hike (though I'm not impressed by the naming system there!). As far as I can tell from maps, this trail has segments 1 & 2, then a big gap, then segment 4, then another gap, then segment 5. No idea what happened to segment 3.
Anyhow, I hit the trail just before 8AM at what must be the cadillac of National Forest trailheads - in this case, it's shared with a city park, disc golf course, and tiny dirt track for bikes. The trail starts as gravel, goes under a railroad bridge, quickly becomes hard-packed single-track, and gets less traveled and more overgrown the farther you go upriver.
- Parking for many cars, all to myself
The trail pretty much follows the river. Sometimes it's right down to the bank, sometimes a few hundred feet above. On the other side of the river is the paved FR19, the Aufderheide Scenic Byway. On the trail side, there are a couple of other smaller paved roads. But even though I could make out the road in many spots, there was zero traffic - I saw precisely one car in 8 hours of hiking. It's easy to just forget all that and enjoy the river, which there was a lot of.
- Looking up the river. I saw a lot of river.
After a mile or so, there's a short side trail to some sort of concrete footing right down to the river. Old dam? Old bridge site? Darned if I know; I didn't see any matching footing on the other side of the river. There was also an electric wire down right across the trail here, which terminates at a box on a pole right at the footing. I stepped cautiously past and left it at that.
- Concrete footing for...something
The river had some impressive-enough rapids in this stretch (and many others). There were also ample side trails down to the river or off to established camping spots, many of them in an old road cut that, judging by the number of trees growing in it, hadn't been used in quite a few years. These tapered off after the first 3 or 4 miles. Guess campers don't make it further from the parking lot than that.
- Not a good day for swimming
There was no snow at all in the section I hiked; the maximum elevation I hit was around 1700'. Plenty of evidence of water though. Things were super-lush. At some point I'll be less impressed with this than I am now, but at the moment, memories of hikes in reforested land in Indiana are still fresh for me.
- Many green things
The trail crosses the paved FR1910 after a couple miles (where some yoyo thought it was a good idea to dump a refrigerator and some tires), and FR1912 a couple miles after that. The only trail sign I saw was at the FR1912 intersection, marking it as 4.3 miles back to the trailhead. Around the 5 mile mark I hit the only stretch I felt I had to take cautiously - a lot of crumbling rock with some fresh slides.
- Only a little dodgy
- The photo is level. The bridge is not.
There were a bunch of small log bridges...until there weren't. Right around the 7-mile mark you can see where there used to be a substantial bridge, complete with a concrete support in the middle. Now there are fallen poles, loose boards piled up, and a slightly tricky crossing. Fortunately some helpful person has left a knotted climbing rope here to make it easier to get up and down the steep bank past the missing bridge.
- Missing bridge #1
There was a similarly missing bridge about half a mile later, with no handy rope and steep banks on both sides of the rushing stream. I had to study on this one for a while, but eventually I found a safe enough route to pick my way down and back up, using all four limbs and my butt, and getting wet feet while hanging on to a log for the actual crossing at the bottom. It wasn't all that much water (maybe 8-12" deep at the center) but slipping would have been unpleasant at best and possibly much worse than that.
- Missing bridge #2
I suspect a lot of people give up without making that crossing. The trail is in much worse shape on the other side, with a lot of underbrush growing across and in the trail. Indeed, I lost the trail for a few minutes at one point on the return trip, and had to bushwhack back to it. The other bridges in this section all seemed to be in good shape, though I didn't dawdle on them. After all, the collapsed ones probably looked like they were in good shape until they weren't.
- A bridge actually bridging
I got a little ways past Leapfrog Creek when I hit my noon turnaround time. Fortunately there was a nice sunny hillside to stop at for a bit of lunch.
- Lunch break spot
After that, it was a few hours of backtracking, and I ended up back at the trailhead right around 4PM. Not a very quick pace for what is mainly a flat trail with only gentle hills, but I had to restrain myself from taking photos every ten feet. Even so, I came home with about 80 photos, and I'm sure I'll take more the next time I'm up there.
