The trail was quite steep in places and it reminded me a lot of the Starvation Ridge trail up Defiance, but I would say it's even steeper. The trail was groomed nicely (thank you, Mazamas) and I never felt like I needed to use my hands. I was very impressed by the heavy picnic table placed at about the 3100' level by some Boy Scouts...I'm glad I didn't have to haul the pieces of that up the mountain.
The views from the top extended all the way to the trees that were about 30' in front of me. Here's a great shot over to Elk Mountain, where I would be three days later.
I waited around on top for about 30 minutes to see if the clouds would clear a bit and I was rewarded handsomely for my patience. Below is a shot of the payoff...
There were a lot of wildflowers on top and they were quite pretty...
Then on Wednesday I wanted to see what the trail up Elk was like so I headed up after work. I left the trailhead at 6:30pm for what has to be about the steepest mile-and-a-half of trail in the state. I'm very glad that I had poles for this one, especially on the way down. The trail makes its way steeply up the ridge to the summit with some sharp downhill stints as it as goes up and over a few knobby spots covering 2000' of vertical gain in 1.6 miles. I only saw one other group of three very friendly people on the trail...two were up near the top and said they had learned of the hike on this site...thier comment was something to the effect of "The description didn't give the true sense of how steep this trail really is." The third was a gentleman from India who was scooting down the trail on his backside after deciding that going higher wasn't going to happen. They didn't have poles so I don't envy their journey down.
The flowers and views on top were beautiful.
These are both great trails that I'll start doing on a regular basis to keep my legs in shape for climbing the bigger stuff.
