Oregon Hikers

drm, you're right that spotting the tallest trees has historically been a very long shot. But the odds improved somewhat in recent years with the use of aerial lidar imagery. I think Michael Taylor is pretty confident that by now he has spotted the tallest sugar pines, ponderosa pines, and redwoods....

I have one friend here in Portland who did a version of that route decades ago. Also pretty sure I've read a trip report of doing it in spring, with skis. Try searching on nwhikers.net That upper Suiattle area ("the Great Fill" on some maps) gave me an overpowering sense of quiet and of being very l...

A caveat about my recommendation of the High Pass route. I've crossed HP many times, but never so early in the season that the snowfield just north of the pass felt like risking my life. If you attempt it when there's still a lot of snow, best to have an ice axe and good self-arrest skills. My oldes...

Thanks a million! Great gift, helping me revisit all my memories of those places. I have a few tips for others interested in this loop. I'll do the current ones first, then a report of how the trails compared in 1980 when I circumambulated GP. The High Pass route between Buck Creek Pass and Boulder ...

B. sagittata is a hundred miles farther east or south. Here's the map from the Oregon Flora Project Atlas, with sagittata in red and careyana in yellow. (The Rowena dot is green because I had selected it, and it's careyana). The two species are hard to tell apart, and there has been some confusion o...

Great mountain range! Both times I went to the same area because I'm a lazy bum and I figure the Big Sandy trailhead is by far the closest and easiest access to the core of the range. In 1999 there were maybe a dozen cars parked at the trailhead. In 2015, same time of year, there were 80 or 100. Hum...

retired jerry wrote: is there anything half way to car camp at altitude? Sure! First off, do take Hwy 20 which is a few miles shorter and much nicer. Go to Ketchum and then northeast across Trail Creek Pass, which has several USFS campgrounds and also dispersed camping. Or, on rougher roads with far...

My house is a few hundred feet from the water-towered summit of Cornell Mtn., a Boring volcano that happens to be perched on top of the West Hills. The extra bump makes it the highest point, I think, in the West Hills=Tualatin Mtns., or at least highest within the built-up Portland area, at 1280+. T...

And Dixhuit, I agree about your perfect timing, just as the snow finishes melting and the early flowers explode and the misquotes haven't quite exploded yet and the horse packers are just starting to gear up. I don't have time to drive all the way there, so I've been thinking about the Naches R.D., ...

As for geologic diffs, Splintercat, the Pasayten and NoCas are not radically different the way the Siskiyous are. You could say there may be a terrane-bounding fault (the Hozomeen) dividing them, approximately, but really both the Pasayten and the NoCas are jumbles of mainly Mesozoic terranes, and i...