Oregon Hikers

Just off of the western section of the Tarbell trail.

This weeks total:

From the JS Burres trail: It's always fun to look at a map to try and figure out where these might originate from. With the prevailing West wind and up river wind my guess on this one is The Dalles.

From Trapper Creek:

Something else I stumbled across in my ridge wandering was this piece of what looks like a chunk of granite (an erratic) 500' above the current river level and miles from the Columbia. Would be interesting to find out if this was part of the Missoula floods or something else.

Seasonally appropriate find off trail in the forest on the southwest side of Helens.

Found near the Basin Lakes in Indian Heaven.

Somewhere in the Larch Mtn crater.

the end of a long dry spell

It's been almost a month without a balloon, but today I found three!

Once again demonstrating that rubber balloons dominate mylar.
This was above 8000' on Adams.
I've seen quite a few rubber balloons around 7900'-8100', but that's the limit. Given my small sample size, I don't know if that's just by chance, or if a typical consumer-grade balloon reaches its limit there. Admittedly, I don't really spend a lot of time higher than that, so even if balloons were often landing at 9k-10k, my chances of finding them would be slim.
I guess I could go sign up on a mountaineering board and ask people if they see balloons up there.

I set a personal record today.
How many? I have no idea. A bunch.

From a distance, this looked suspiciously out of place. I know it looks more like a rock than a balloon, but something about it looked unnatural. Well drat, it was just a scrap of aluminum sheet. Maybe more interesting than a balloon though. I mean, how the heck did it get here? Was near Adams Creek on Mt Adams, a little upslope from the RTM trail.