I went out to the far eastern edges of the Mt. Hood National Forest to do a short loop involving several trails I had never been on before: Post Camp, Pine Creek, Mud Spring, and Three Mile. Most of this hike was on established trails, I did an off-trail extension to the top of Badger Butte, and one trail, Mud Spring, has been abandoned - so be extremely cautious and possess excellent route-finding skills if you want to complete this loop.
Both the Post Camp and Three Mile Trails are mere remnants of much longer trails (Three Mile doesn’t touch Three Mile Creek anymore and Post Camp is way down in the valley). My reference was Ken and Ruth Love’s little gem
A Guide to the Trails of Badger Creek (1979, revised edition), which was the first and last guidebook to contain any description of these trails.
I drove up FR 4811 and then off to the right on the 015 spur (which the USFS has designated as the Mud Spring Trail #466A - this is a road, however, not a trail). There’s a parking area where Post Camp and Three Mile Trails meet. I took the Post Camp down the slope into the Pine Creek drainage, switchbacking once in an 80-year-or-so burn and then entering cool old growth with some large cedars and Douglas-firs. A rocky outcrop gives a view across to the Divide Ridge from Lookout Mountain to the Palisades and Flag Point. There are seven springs on the trail in this section. I reached the junction with the Pine Creek Trail at the wide footbridge over Pine Creek. Almost immediately, the Pine Creek Trail requires a ford upstream from the bridge, so since it was not time to get my feet wet yet, I went back to the bridge and bushwhacked up to the trail as it looped below a rocky meadow.
The trail rises very gradually up the north side of the Pine Creek valley. Some bouldery viewpoints offer views up the pristine upper valley of Pine Creek. The forest is the diverse mix of conifers one associates with this area: ponderosa pine, western white pine, Engelmann spruce, mountain hemlock, Douglas-fir, western larch, noble fir, etc. There was scattered blowdown across the trail, but both this and the Post Camp trails have been maintained although they are little traveled. The trail gets lost in a meadow where you need to keep heading up, not across, and soon you are alternating dry ridge forest with some small glades with Rainiera and Mertensia leafing out. I hit the 140 spur of FR 4860 and turned left.
Along the road I began to encounter large patches of snow and no vehicles had traveled here so far this year. Last August, the road was closed for extensive logging of dead trees and the logs are piled in various places. The Pine Creek trailhead sign was taken down during this process and is still lying under a tree. There are two copious springs which feed Pine Creek north of the road, the second one being the former site of the Valley View Cabin, which has been completely dismembered. Scratching about in the woods, I did find the location of the Valley View Outhouse and a ceramic sink.
About this time, I heard an engine racing and soon afterward, the tinny melody of a shovel hitting snow. I ventured down the road and found a jeep perched atop an eight-foot pile of snow with its friendly owner digging a track. He did not need my assistance as he had already defeated larger obstacles on his way to being the first this season to conquer the road. From Valley View, I headed up cross-country through the woods, almost entirely on snow, to the summit of Badger Butte, which is crowned by old-growth mountain hemlocks. I worked my way around to the southwest corner of the butte, a rocky but open pinemat manzanita slope, which offers clear views down the Pine Creek valley and on to Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington, and the Three Sisters. Working my way around to the west side of the butte summit, I could see across to Grasshopper Point, Echo Point, the talus slopes above the Boulder Lakes, Bonney Butte and then cloud-capped Mt. Hood looming above Gunsight Butte. Badger Lake was out of sight, screened by trees and the angle of the slope. Somewhere under snow was the actual site of the old lookout.
I dropped down to the 140 spur again, meeting on the way the intrepid jeep driver making his way up the butte. At the road, I headed west. Before the junction with FR 4860, a post marks the descent of the Mud Spring Trail (not to be confused with the #466A trail mentioned in the 3rd paragraph above), which the USFS now seems to call the north branch of the Three Mile Trail. In any case, this short section of trail, about 1.3 miles, has not been maintained in eons. The first half of the descent was under snow, but I picked my way down easily enough, looking for polled branches when in doubt. About halfway down the trail simply disappeared. I made ever-widening circles in woods and found no signs of ancient trail maintenance. Eventually I guessed that Mud Spring, which was flowing copiously west of the trail, had taken over the tread. I followed the most likely channel down and, soon enough, a trail tread peeled off to the right. On the bottom half of this trail, I felt like an ant wending my way through a game of pick-up sticks, blowdown everywhere. I spent a lot of time walking up and down large logs looking for sawn-off log ends that would mark the old tread somewhere under the debris. This was slow going, but the trail eventually fetched up on the rim above Pine Creek and then met the Three Mile Trail at a signed junction. It’s one mile west from here to Road 4860 and 2.2 miles on a gentle gradient down the rim to the trailhead and completion of the loop.
I was relieved to see a disintegrating pile of last year’s horse dung on the trail and so deduced I would have only one winter’s worth of blowdown to contend with. In fact, it was plain sailing. Three Mile is essentially the boundary of the Badger Creek Wilderness here. It would be a huckleberry feast in late summer. To the right is an extensive selectively-logged cut. To the left is wilderness and the occasional bouldery view across to the Divide Ridge.
The whole hike, including the diversion to the top of Badger Butte, was only about 10 miles, but with the long drive and much backtracking at Mud Spring, it took the better part of a day. As far as Mud Spring goes, the trail may be a little easier to find at the top end when the snow is gone. However, if you need to bail out, head back up to the 140 road, bushwhacking if need be, go left to 4860, go left again and walk about ¾ mile south to find the west end of the Three Mile Trail. The sign for this is set about 50 feet down the trail, so you could easily miss it. Three Mile has been maintained within recent memory so you will not become a statistic using this route.
