It Was The Best Of Times...It Was The Worst Of Times

Trapper Creek wildness: 15 miles round trip. 2600 Elevation gain.

Difficulty of hike: almost killed me.

Ben's truck parked at the trail head.

This backpack trip started out ill fated. When I stepped out of Ben's truck at the trail head, I walked twenty feet over to a small bridge, where I promptly fell backwards to the ground. I landed on my backpack, but on the way down I managed to twisted my left knee, hurt my ankle and snap my neck back hard.

So right out of the box I started hiking injured....and we started late in the day, leaving the truck at 2:45pm.

Ben did this trail two years ago. He has always wanted to take me on this hike. You can not get a better view of all the volcanoes that call this area home, than from the top of observation peak. But to get up to this look out you have to hike up. All trails to this peak go up.
We started this hike at the far end of the Government Mineral Springs Campground. Health conscious people were first attracted to the Trapper Creek area by Bubbling Mike, a metallic tasting soda spring.
Here is a shot of Bubbling Mike. The water gushes from an old iron pump.

Yummm...a nice drink of fizzy, metallic water....that smells like rotten eggs!

Ben & Bella sitting by Bubbling Mike

The trail is fairly level for the first 3/4 mile. Here we had to cross a fat log high above the rushing Trapper Creek below.

The first stretch is through an Old Growth forest. Giant trees reach for the sky here.

The map that we were carrying says, "I can't explain why so few people have heard of Trapper Creek. It's barely an hour from Portland, it's loaded with trails, and it couldn't be any prettier."

This is what I would like to say to the guy who wrote those words:

Well clown mouth...let me tell you why people don't do this trail very often.....it is a killer.

Ben had forgotten how hard this trail becomes, and I had no idea what we were in for. We were in an area that has the highest population of black bears in this region, by 6:45pm I was wishing one would come along and chew my head off so I could just stop hiking.

A full moon rose at about 7:15pm. At 7:30pm we put our head lamps on. We still had at least another mile to go before we would reach our camp for the night.

I never complain when I am hiking....well folks, I complained this trip out. Loudly!

At one point I was doing a chant to make myself keep climbing. It went sort of like this:

"OWE,EEE,HA...OWE,EEE,HA...OWE,EEE,HA"

Ben told me to stop doing it because I sounded like a wounded animal. He was afraid a Cougar would be attracted to us!

I yelled back at him, "I AM A WOUNDED ANIMAL!!!"

The picture below says it all.

We set up camp in the dark. Ben cooked our food. I climbing in the tent, and started blowing up our air mattresses. I had hit a wall physically. I was just glad that I had lived through the last couple of hours.

~~Day two dawned warm and sunny~~

Even though we were pretty beat up when we got into Berry Camp, we managed to hang our food bag. This is it in the morning. I thought for sure, to top everything off, a bear would show up and eat our food in the night...but nope....no bears were seen or heard.

This is Bella patiently waiting for her breakfast
Berry Camp is a 'rustic' backpacking spot near the top of Observation Peak on the edge of the Trapper Creek Wilderness. There is a spring near by, so we had a water source here.

Even though it was September 24th the sun was shining. I didn't even build a fire. The weather was one of the best things about this hike. To get weather like this in September, in this part of the country was unbelievable!
Bella says, "Yummmm....breakfast!"
This is a picture of me at the bottom of the trail #132A at the bottom of Observation Peak
This is Ben at the top...waiting for me to catch up......as usual. 

Just a little further to the top.....Almost there!!!

Bella says, "Come on...move that butt!"

I might be old, fat, beat up, and slow....but here I am at the top of Observation Peak!

This is the first in a panoramic shot that Ben took of the horizon. This is
 Mt. St. Helen's and Mt. Rainer to the North of where we stood at the peak.

Mt. Adams to the East
Mt. Adams with the Indian Heaven wilderness at it's feet.
Mt. Adams as Ben pans the camera to the South East
This is the range off to the right of Mt. Adams
Mt. Hood to the South

DARN! The camera picked it up but you can't see it when I posted it to this blog, but Mt. Jefferson is off to the right of Mt. Hood in this picture. This shot is taken directly south of where we stood on the peak.

You have seen all the volcanoes in this area from this one look out in these pictures. From the North, East and South off of Observation Peak.

This is a picture of a couple named "Nancy & Terry" and their two dogs. They came up right after Ben and I. Nancy agreed that the trail is a butt kicker!

We still had a full day of hiking stretching out in front of us, so we said good-bye to all the mountains around us, and got our boots back down the trail.

Bear poop on the path! I unhooked my bear bell to let it tinkle our approach. We also sang, and practiced yodeling through this part of the woods. I can do a pretty good Tarzan yell if I put my mind to it!
The trail is very confusing though the section we now made our way through. Can you see any sign of a trail here? We had to watch closely for markers on the trees to find our way.
Many times on a hike we come across downed trees that have fallen across the path. This was a really difficult one to pick our way through because of all the limbs that had not rotted away yet.

This marked the beginning of a trail that isn't on any maps...I thought what we were hiking was pretty primitive. I actually hiked up a little ways past this tree to see if I could spot a trail....I could not see any sign of one.

What lay before us now was a few miles of very narrow, and extremely steep switch backs.

I was impossibly slow on this part of our journey. One miss step would have sent me rocketing off the side of the mountain. Slow and steady was what was called for.
Bella & Ben again patiently waiting for me to catch up to them.
Here I tried to catch the steepness of the mountain below the trail.
About half way down a beautiful waterfall greeted us.
At this point in the day we realized that because the trail had been so technical...and I had been so slow negotiating it...we were most likely going to be hiking after dark...again. We tried to up our speed to make up for the time we had lost on the switch backs.

At four o'clock I ran out of water in my water bladder, but did not want to take the time to stop and purify more, so I just carried on waterless.

At 5:45pm I was starting to hope that I would come upon a bear, and he would at least eat my face off. I figured if I got eaten I would not have to walk any more today.


It is funny how a few hours earlier I was singing my way through the forest to warn the bears I was coming, and now I wanted them to find me and finish me off!

At 6:30pm I came upon Ben laying in the middle of the trail where it forks with a different trail. We both took some Ibuprofen, hoping that it would give us the relief that we needed to carry on.

The trail just went on and on and on....and it was getting darker and darker.

Finally the trail flattened out as we raced as fast as we could toward the end of the trail.

This is the picture that we were able to take before it got too dark to snap any more. At this point we still had another mile or so to go. This is a bridge that we were very grateful for. Picking your way over rocks in a river in the dark when you are blown up and running of fumes is not fun.
On we went heading toward another bridge that Ben had walked over two years ago.  It would take us back to where we had started our hike..........except when we got there there was no bridge. This huge old car bridge had collapsed! We tried to take a picture of it because it was just so funny that just at the end of this hellish day, when we thought our pain and suffering would be over, we were now going to have to make a river crossing in almost complete darkness!

I saw a spur trail off to our left, so we head down it to see what the crossing down at the bottom of it would be like. We lucked out! Here we only had to cross over a small tributary that ran into the bigger water crossing of Trapper Creek.

It was only a hop, skip, and a jump, over the water here. We were on our way again!

About another 1/2 mile, past the warm lights shining out from the windows of a few primitive cabins that sit in the woods close to the end of the trail, and we were back to the truck!

So....you are thinking that our drama is over here right? Not so.

I turned on my cell phone to let Jim know that we were OK, and on our way home. We were much later than we thought we would be, and I knew he would be worried. I could not get cell service until the town of Carson, but as soon as I could I placed a call to Jim's phone. He didn't answer, so I called Joleen's to see what was up.

In a very shaky voice she told me that Jim and gotten very sick the day before. He had been taken to the hospital a few hours earlier and  they had given him some IV fluids.  She needed me to get home RIGHT NOW!

When I am out in the woods, off the grid, I know that the world continues on without me. An atomic bomb could be dropped but I wouldn't know it. It was very unsettling to hear that my poor Jim had been so ill, and I had no clue.

Like I said at the beginning of this write up....this whole trip was ill fated from the beginning.

I.WOULD.DO.THE.WHOLE.THING.ALL.OVER.AGAIN.


I.LOVE.BACKPACKING.

I am glad that I never know what is ahead of me until it is all over and done (sort of like life...huh?).

I need to start planning my 2011 season!