This exploration continues a series of excursions over the last few years in the area between Badger Lake and Barlow Creek. Many of the trails here are little used and some are abandoned. This particular loop cobbles together the lower three miles of the Boulder Creek Trail, the Boulder Lake/Little Boulder Lake Trails and old forest roads as well as parts of the Forest Creek and Hidden Meadows Trails.
Being a purist, I decided to begin at the official south end of the Boulder Creek Trail even though I knew it had been mostly obliterated by a 45-year-old clearcut on a square of private holding within the national forest. I drove up FR 4870, which departs from the infamous Badger Lake Road (FR 4860) near Wamic Road, motoring my way through the encroaching snowbrush and actually found a trailhead sign where it was supposed to be.
The verbiage dates the sign: Crane Creek’s name was changed back to Boulder Creek in 1977 (It had been Boulder Creek before, until 1924, when the Forest Service decided there were too many Boulder Creeks in Oregon). You can tell the place is little visited: the sign is in pristine condition and is punctuated by not a single bullet! The “trail” used an old forest road, which very soon enters the clearcut, to descend to the creek in about ¾ mile. The clearcut was not replanted, and woody shrubbery, dominated by snowbrush and manzanita, makes navigation difficult. Someone has pruned out the first few snowbrush bushes, but after that I was tunneling, shoving, and blundering my way through. Where the remains of the road track seem to end, I traversed a short distance to a talus slope and descended along its edge to the creek.
There’s another old trail sign here and soon I entered unlogged old growth at USFS boundary markers, passing the pair of low cairns which would herald the closure of my loop. The old mile markers are all still in place: tiny etchings on them, dated between 1977 and 2007 attest mainly to the frustrations of hunters (“no bear” “no deer” “no elk”: I’ve seen all these critters down this valley, but today it was just a lot of deer). Also, once on USFS land, the trail is actually maintained!
It’s a steady 2 ¼ mile lope through the shady woods to the junction with the Boulder Lake Trail. The old growth is dominated by some large Douglas-fir, noble fir, and Engelmann spruce. For the most part, the trail keeps away from the creek and sticks to the drier forest at the foot of the slope, but as you get closer to the junction you pass through the pocket meadows and bogs that are typical of this valley floor all the way up to Crane Prairie. At the footbridge over Boulder Creek, I chatted with a couple of mountain bikers, a group that uses these trails far more than hikers, and then headed up to Boulder Lake.
The lake was sparkling and visitor-free. I made the traverse over to Little Boulder Lake. The huckleberries are ripe, but sparse – I’m guessing it’s going to be an “off” year. From the second lake, I headed out to the closed FR 4881-123 spur and made the traverse above the valley, getting splendid views across to Grasshopper Point. I took the Forest Creek Trail where it crosses the spur road and descended to the 4881-121. The lower end of the Forest Creek Trail has been obliterated by clearcuts, so you have to walk the road ¼ mile across Swamp Creek to pick up the Hidden Meadows Trail.
This trail descends through clearcut territory with the same private ownership as at the beginning of my loop. It veers away from the original track of the trail and follows an old logging road. I took a diversion and crossed Swamp Creek on a rotting road bridge to try and find any remains of the old Ledford Cabin. I found nothing definitive (This section was clearcut at least 35 years ago), but near the site of the cabin at a small bog, someone had set up a critter cam over what looked like an elk convening spot. My next goal was to search out the “sign museum” on the old alignment of the Hidden Meadows Trail: this is described in Ken and Ruth Love’s classic
Guide to the Trails of Badger Creek (1979, rev. ed.). Floundering about, I stumbled upon the old junction sign for the Forest Creek and Hidden Meadow Trails. All signs of trail treads have been expunged, so that discovery was pure serendipity. I bushwhacked back across Swamp Creek, but soon realized that any of the artifacts that the Loves describe would have been removed or destroyed with the clearcutting: most of the trees here are under 30 years old.
Back on the Hidden Meadows Trail, I descend to FR 4880, the road to the Boulder Lake Trailhead. There was a hiker sign at the pullout here last year, but that has now disappeared. I walked down 4880 to the first spur on the left, 4880-013. This spur traverses north up the valley on a level contour. At first it is vehicle accessible in shady secondary woodland, but soon it degenerates into one of those snowbrush tunnels and ends at a scrappy bracken meadow. Although there is no trail here, the loop using this road is occasionally used by adventurous mountain bikers, and I descended straight down to the creek across a large log with a constructed ramp. A massive log hangs ten feet above a brushy bottomland and reaches Boulder Creek itself. Another broken tree bridges the creek and an enterprising biker has carved a staircase up the opposite bank. This leads to the two cairns mentioned earlier.
Then it was the floundering up to the old road bed, more battles with snowbrush, and back to the trailhead. A more merciful loop (and a better drive) would be to leave out this part and begin the loop at the Boulder Lake Trailhead.
(sketch, not a GPS track)
