I got a late dispensation to take off a few days after Labor Day and decided to do some leisurely (except for the driving) explorations in the Wallowas and Blue Mountains. I drove south from Enterprise to the Hurricane Creek Trail and then took the left turn up the semi-abandoned Thorp Creek Trail about 1 ¾ miles in. The Thorp Creek Trail is no longer shown on the Forest Service maps, but still appears on the Topo map. It is mentioned in Fred Barstad’s book
Hiking Oregon's Eagle Cap Wilderness as part of the climbing route to the Sacajawea summit, and is also part of the summit route for Sacajawea, the Hurwal Divide, and Chief Joseph Mountain in Barbara Bonds’
75 Scrambles in Oregon.
First, you need to ford Hurricane Creek, and then comes the only possibility of getting lost as you reach a meadow that is also a wide, cobbled wash from Twin Creek. The books direct you to angle up to the right, but Twin Creek has burst its banks in recent years and taken down a lot of trees. The current route goes straight across the meadow, and then there’s a clear path into the trees winding up to Twin Creek. There’s some clambering over logs here, but then the path, now well-used, takes you up a number of steep, dusty switchbacks, along a grassy moraine, and then up some more, with frequent detours around blowdown. It traverses slopes in subalpine parklands and fetches up in Thorp Creek Meadows.
The meadows are nestled below the marble headwall of Sacajawea, with the Hurwal Divide hemming them in to the west and south. On weekdays during the busy summer hiking season in the Wallowas, you may be the only person camping here, so it is one of the most peaceful destinations in these mountains. Several times, I was inspected, at a distance, by a large mule deer buck with a huge rack, and my every move drew a chattering response from my local red squirrel. Along the creek, summer blooms were still in force, and the burrows of Columbian ground squirrels lace through the meadows. I was only going to spend two nights, and my full day was going to be spent up on the ridges. I checked out the Hurwal Divide (HURricane-WALlowa - get it?) and decided, early the next morning, to follow fell fields up the steep slope straight from the meadow. I passed through whitebark pinelands screeching with Clarks’ nutcrackers and then stayed on the alpine tussocks, with many plants still in bloom, to avoid the scree which composes most of Hurwal’s slopes. Here is a clump of mountain balm:
It was a straight shot up to Hurwal’s north ridge. Scrambling up, there were magnificent views across to Sacajawea’s marble headwall, with her ridge extending to an intermediate peak and then the Matterhorn. Glacier Peak and Eagle Cap bracket Hurwal’s south peak:
I popped up from behind a rock outcrop and spotted some goats ahead, so crept closer to snap a picture:
They made off as soon as my camera got their attention, but this high alpine meadow was a major hangout for them, with grasses and sedges, and pockmarked with wallows.
Knitting bee, anyone?
It was a short ascent from the goat meadow to the summit of the Hurwal Divide. It is listed as Oregon’s 7th highest peak at 9,776’ but had no summit register. I put some lined paper in an old drinking bottle and anchored it with slabs of Hurwal shale, fashioning as inconspicuous a cairn as possible. The entire Wallowa panorama was visible and the weather was warm, with high clouds and a couple of showers over the southern and western valleys of the range. My goats, in the meantime, were making their way along the Hurwal Divide towards Ice Lake:
From the Hurwal summit, my next task was Chief Joseph Mountain, two miles down to a saddle and then along the Chief Joseph ridge:
This walk takes in all five of the rock types that compose these mountains: Hurwal shale, greenstone, the Martin Bridge limestones (metamorphosed into marble on Sacajawea and the Matterhorn), granodiorite, and Columbia River basalt. It is thus one of the most geologically interesting areas in all of North America. From the saddle between Hurwal and Chief Joseph, there are three intermediate peaks before the Chief Joseph summit. The first is composed of granodiorite with grassy alpine meadows and copses of whitebark pine. From here I could look ahead to the Chief Joseph summit:
and back to the Hurwal’s highest peak:
The purple alpine paintbrush is found only on these ridges in the Wallowas and nowhere else in the world:
One gets views east down the BC Creek bowl towards the Wallowa River valley:
Heading up, there’s a spectacular view of Chief Joseph’s southwestern face, showing bands of shale, limestone, and greenstone:
The Chief Joseph summit is a remnant cap of Columbia River basalt:
I found Portland Hiker Eric Peterson’s entry in the register (8/31 I think) requesting advice on a descent route. I was about to scratch out a reply, but thought a response in person would be more useful. I searched around but could not find him (or his mortal remains), but recent posts by his avatar intimate that he survived the trip. There were two Labor Day entries after Peterson’s, both of these parties having come up from Thorp Creek.
Here’s the view south from Chief Joseph. In the center is the Hurwal summit. To the left are Bonneville Mt., Pete’s Point, Sentinel Peak, Cusick Mt. and Red Mt. (in the far distance); to the right of Hurwal are Eagle Cap, the intermediate point between the Matterhorn and Sacajawea, and Sacajawea (shielding the Matterhorn).
I had planned to spend a couple of hours messing about on Chief Joseph’s north ridge botanizing and searching for the elusive mountain sheep that are supposed to live there, but the wind had come up, and a squall that had been loitering over the Minam had now reached the Lostine and was blowing my way, so I decided to get down. I headed back the Chief Joseph ridge to the saddle and then angled down fell fields, pine and subalpine fir parklands, and a few chutes until I intersected the Thorp Creek Trail about a quarter mile from the meadows. The rain hit and then dissipated, and I spent the rest of the day wandering about the upper reaches of the creek below Sacajawea’s cirque, which in the past I have used as a descent route from her summit.
My next destination on this short trip was in the Blue Mountains, which I shall post about separately if I have the time.
