I actually began at the Snipes Mountain Trailhead instead of the Pine Way Trailhead since I am unsure whether you can cross Yakama land to reach the latter outside of the Yakama “tourist” season. (A No Trespassing sign at the Yakama boundary tells you to proceed no farther after the public access period ends.)
There’s a new trailhead sign for the Snipes Mountain Trail, which runs up the eastern edge of the Aiken Lava Bed parallel with Gotchen Creek, which has no surface water this time of year. Since the fires, the lava bed itself is much more visible from the trail, with the landscape comprised of “black snag” bunchgrass savanna and a few recovering colonies of aspen. It was interesting to note that most of the conifers on top of the lava remain unburned. The trail itself gets lost in a couple of places due to downed trees and lack of use.
When I got to the junction with the Pine Way Trail #71, about 2 ¾ miles up from the trailhead, I began heading east. The entire landscape is carpeted with mountain bunchgrass (fescue), in places dotted with clumps of rabbitbrush goldenweed and rustling stands of young aspen in the damp spots. The bunchgrass is what attracted sheepmen here in the 1880s , when these slopes supported a lightly forested ponderosa pine parkland which experienced fairly frequent ground fire. The Pine Way Trail was one of the original stock trails in the area, splitting off from a trail that led directly up to Bird Creek Meadows and leading up to Gotchen Creek. It even appears on a 1905 topo map. Decades of government-mandated fire suppression severely altered the landscape, however, with Douglas-fir and grand fir filling in the bunchgrass meadows and providing a dense canopy, so – voilà – the inevitable happened and we were landed with the great fires of the 21st century.
There are white diamonds on the black snags that mark the route, but the trail is often obscure as it meanders through the grasslands with plenty of downed snags to step over or hike around. There were a few small ponderosas coming up here and there, the only green in the landscape. I lost the trail on a wide bench above Snipes Mountain, circling almost 270 degrees to pick it up again, realizing then that it had made a 90-degree turn. I found the old sign on a fallen snag that had warned hikers of the change in course. (Actually, there are no hikers, no sign of any human passage whatsoever.)
From the bench, I descended a trail that was often deeply gullied and began to pick up the tracks and aroma of cattle. Soon the trail merged with an old jeep track and a very well-used, well-defined cattle trail that led out to the trailhead on the Yakama boundary. In this area, the snags are taller and there are patches of unburned canopy nearby. There’s already a dense understory of grand fir saplings that will no doubt supply nice tinder for the next conflagration unless they are aggressively thinned.
The cattle concession here runs across several jurisdictions, including national forest, Yakama Nation, and Washington DNR. The permit is for about 500 head, and this time of year, they are concentrated near the dwindling water resources, so I didn’t see any cows on the trail. In the early 20th century, rangeland wars erupted between the sheep men and the cattle men, the territorial dispute resulting in victory for the latter. The king in these parts was one Ben Snipes, who made a fortune supplying beef from his Washington grazing ranges to the gold operations along the Fraser River in British Columbia. Massive cattle drives, managed by dozens of cowboys, moved up through the state from these southern lands, and one can imagine the constant lowing, the clouds of dust, the odor of manure, and the camaraderie around night time camp fires. The Pine Way Trail is, after all, a trail more of the imagination these days, a route to a time when a “trail” was created by the passage of many hooves all headed to the best feed and water.
