Seabury Blair - Day Hike! Columbia Gorge: The Best Trails You Can Hike in a Day

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Table of Contents

OVERVIEW MAP

HIKES AT A GLANCE

Easy

Moderate

Moderately Difficult

Difficult

Extreme

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As always, I am most grateful to all of the U.S. Forest Service trail crews and volunteers who make day-hiking a pleasant experience for all of usand a great job for me. Thanks, too, to my wife, Marlene (aka B. B. Hardbody), for her love, support, and the excellent maps included in this book. And, of course, thanks to Gary Luke and the sharp-eyed editors at Sasquatch Books.

INTRODUCTION

My first memories of the Columbia Gorge date from a family outing to Seaside, Oregon, in 1949. Dad and Mom piled my brother and me into the 1946 Plymouth and headed across Horse Heaven Hills from Spokane to motor along the beautiful Columbia River Highway. We stopped at Multnomah Fallswho doesnt?and climbed up the trail to gawk. I dont remember much about that splendid cascade but can recount to this day exactly how many streamlined Pullmans passed by below, tugged along by an early Union Pacific diesel-electric engine.

It wasnt until the spring of 1961 that I returned to the Gorge to spend a couple of nights with Ted Sperrys family in their White Salmon home overlooking the shining Columbia. Though I dimly recall a spectacular sunset glowing off Mount Hood, the clearest memory I have of that trip was of my college friends wooden skis slipping out of the rack and catching fire on the Beetles exhaust pipe as we drove to Bend. That and the encounter we had with a snowdrift at Timberline Lodge, when Sperry sliced his finger trying to dig snow from the broken headlight and piloted the VW all the way to Deschutes Crossing with the only bandage we hada piece of Wonderbreadwrapped around his digit.

So I didnt discover the day-hiking treasure of the Columbia Gorge until nearly five decades later, when I coaxed my old body and constant companion, Stummick, into walking all of the trails in this book. Incidentally, though Stummick growled on every hike, he always arrived at trails end in front of me. I commuted from my West Puget Sound home to the Gorge, camping at Trout Lake and Ainsworth, Memaloose and Deschutes River state parks. I hiked three and sometimes four days a week, often tromping two trails a day. Except for a couple of hot, dry days on Mount Adams, it was a great way to spend the summer and fall.

Indeed, the Gorge, the south side of Mount Adams, and the north side of Mount Hood serve up some of the best day-hiking in the nation. Most trails are well-maintained and share a trait that we who take our woodland walks in daily chunks appreciate: You get all of your uphill sweating out of the way the first half of the hike.

Another plus for wildland pedestrians: Most of you are no more than ninety minutes from the farthest-flung trailhead. That means more time to photograph wildflowers, admire the view, explore the waterfalls, and slap at mosquitoes. Now, get out there and start making your own memories, sure to be more vivid than mine.

Seabury Blair Jr.

USING THIS GUIDE

The beginning of each trail description is intended to give you quick information that can help you decide whether the specific day hike is one that interests you. Heres what youll find:

Trail Number & Name

Trails are numbered in this guide following a geographical order; see the Overview Map on page vii for general location. Trail names usually reflect those names used by the national forest service and other land managers. In some cases, portions of very long trails or multiple sections of separate trails have been combined into a single hike and assigned a new name.

Overall Rating

Assigning an overall rating to a hike is a difficult task given the fact that one hikers preferred trail is anothers dungheap. Yet every hike in this guide is worth taking (were still working on the dungheap trail guide). Here, the difference between a five-star hike and one with four stars might only be the number and variety of wildflowers along the trail, or the height of the tripping tree roots arrayed on the path before you. The trails in this book are the best youll find in the Columbia Gorge, the north side of Mount Hood, and the south side of Mount Adams. Some might not be as good as others, but they are all better than the trails weve excluded.

Another problem is attempting to be objective in rating the trails. Some of us are pushovers for trails above timberline, where the wildflowers wave in gentle summer breezes, where mountains claw clouds, and where cooling snowfields linger through summer. Hikes with these features may be rated higher than you might rate them. If youre a hiker who loves walking along rattling rivers, or padding on leafy trails softened by mosses while trying to find the sky through a canopy of 300-foot-tall evergreens, you might add one star to every forest hike listed here, and subtract one star from every alpine hike.

Finally, many factors must be considered in assigning an overall rating. Besides all that aesthetic stuff like scenery and wildlife, there are objective criteria like trail condition, length, and steepness, and obstacles like creek crossings or deadfall. On the other hand, you can forget all that junk and just take our word for it:

This hike is worth taking, even with your in-laws.

Expect to discover socially and culturally redeeming values on this hike. Or, at least, very fine scenery.

You would be willing to get up before sunrise to take this hike, even if you watched all of Letterman the night before.

Here is the Hagen-Dazs of hikes; if you dont like ice cream, a hike with this rating will give more pleasure than any favorite comfort food.

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