The rain clouds were piling up against the Cascade crest and spilling over to the east side so, while it was a decent day overall, there were limited views from the high points of the loop. We began at the Fret Creek Trailhead on FR 2730, just past the Fifteenmile Creek Forest Camp. Mosquitoes were pests lower down, but mainly they attacked Don and left me alone. The huckleberry underbrush was wet, so we got a soaking from the thighs down in short order. There are a few impressive old-growth larch trees along this trail although I was a little dismayed to find many had also perished. The trail was in good condition with some brushiness and a handful of downed trees. Oval Lake lay serene under a ceiling of low cloud.
Heading east on the Divide Trail, we went out to a couple of points with their “cow patty” rock formations, but got no views. We got to the Flag Point Lookout Road where four trails coincide (Divide, Badger Creek Cutoff, Tygh Creek, and Little Badger). Then it was ¾ mile up to the lookout, where the person on duty for the summer was unpacking his truck. He invited us up the tower, and we signed the register. He does five days on, two days off, perhaps into October, depending on the weather. There were better views from here to the east and the area of Tygh Valley and the Pine Hollow Reservoir. There’s also a brand new toilet at the lookout, and we inspected the beginnings of the Douglas Cabin Trail, signed for Sunrise Spring. The charnel house of downed logs which had effectively obliterated the upper section of that trail has now been cleared! I never thought it would happen in my lifetime, but it was the first example of some industrious logging out that we were to see that day. Many thanks to those crews!
We walked back down to the multi-trail junction and took the Tygh Creek Trail. This trail is now a breeze (at least as far as we went) having been logged out this season. We descended across some openings blooming with balsamroot and sunflower with views back to the lookout tower. When we got to the junction with the Tygh Creek Way, a connector with the Little Badger Trail, we saw the horrible blowdown on that trail had also been dealt with. (Don was trying to track the route on his GPS, but we found that Caltopo, Gaia, etc. merely duplicate the USGS “approximate” routes and were way off for obscure trails like the Tygh Creek Way and Jordan Cutoff.)
Farther east along the ridge, the trail gets close to Tygh Creek and passes through diseased woods of Engelmann spruce. Where the predominate conifer is ponderosa pine, the damage is not so bad. After a couple more grassy ponderosa glades, I noticed a fresh blaze on a ponderosa pine marking the Jordan Cutoff Trail (Don’s Gaia showed it quite a bit farther east.) We hiked over the broad ridge, passing a couple of wilderness signs and reaching FR 2720 where there was a sign announcing the Jordan Cutoff. Trail crews use this access point so the upper section of the Cutoff Trail was logged out.
It was a different story going down the slope to Jordan Creek. The trail is a mess and hasn’t been tackled in years (with an upper access point on 2720, there’s little incentive to maintain the lower section). We counted over 50 logs across the trail, most of them easy to go over or around. The trail crosses a couple of clearcuts regenerating with larch and then a skunk-cabbage bog. We crossed Jordan Creek at the remains of what may have been a footbridge. The trail is supposed to angle up through unlogged forest to FR 2730-170, but we couldn’t find it and instead just followed a clearcut the short distance to the road.
We decided to head east a little way to begin the bushwhack portion of the loop. A signpost without a sign indicated the official beginning of the Jordan Cutoff Trail. Where we saw some clearings, we began our ascent up the slope, generally a painless weaving between manzanita and some blowdown until we reached paved FR 2730. Then it was about a 2 ¼ mile walk back along the road to the Fret Creek Trailhead. The clouds were lifting, and we got some good views from some rocky palisades down the Jordan Creek valley and across to the Tygh ridge, Jordan Butte, and Flag Point.
About 13 miles, 2,200 feet elevation gain. I had told Don that this was an ecosystem that harbored at least 11 species of conifers, but in fact I counted 14 in the course of the loop: ponderosa pine, lodgepole pine, western white pine, mountain hemlock, western hemlock, Douglas-fir, silver fir, noble fir, grand fir, subalpine fir, Engelmann spruce, western red cedar, western larch, western juniper!
