Here's Don looking for the ON switch.
I wont try & give directions on how to find the right forest road to drive up behind Greenleaf & Table Mountains but I'm sure Don can help. We set out from a forest road on a short steep faint boot path up the East side of Birkenfeld. We soon began to break out the trees & get views of Greenleaf & Table to our South.
Even though it was a Sunday on a Memorial day weekend these guys were all busy working.
While there is no official trail there may well have been at one time as it sure looks like a path was cut through these trees.
While there are no 360 views from the actual Summit there are views in all directions within a short distance of the Summit. Here we are looking NNW down Birkenfeld Ridge towards Table Mountain. While we didn't continue that way today the boot path does continue in that direction & a Table / Birkenfeld loop would be possible.
To the North you can see Three Corner Rock
We returned the way we came to begin the second part of our day, but stopped at one final view point on the way down.
This was a short up & down hike about 3 miles & just over 1000' of elevation.
Bob would leave us here to continue with his weekend of peak bagging while the rest of us would follow an old very steep rail line that rail cars were pulled up by cable from Hamilton Creek to the flanks of Table Mountain close to the large mysterious wooden structure close to the PCT that has been talked about here before.
Don has walked this line several times before & always finds a few new bits of steam era hardware to ponder over! I'm going ask Don to add to this part of the report if he wishes as I'll probably mess up explaining about what we were looking at! Here is a teaser though
We dropped down the Hill pretty quickly & it was hard to imagine how fully laden cars were pulled up! We took it easy on ourselves when it was time to return by walking back up the powerline road to the car, another 1000' or so of elevation.
One final bit of excitement remained for the day, on returning to Don's car we found that the same wheel he had a flat in two weeks ago on this same road was down to about 12lbs pressure. We drove quickly to the top of the hill near the Table Mountain Junction were we changed the wheel & headed for Cascade Locks!
A great day, thanks for being the guide yet again Don!
More photos of steam era bits & bobs here
Guy.
