Fire and Snow

Forest fires still plague much of Oregon with smoke, and Oakridge is no exception.  I left town at 5am  to get up to the crest of the Cascade Mountains, onto the Pacific Crest Trail early, because smoke is worse in the afternoon.

Bears and fires roam these mountains.

Some folks travel light

The Pacific Crest Trail runs all the way from Mexico to Canada and passes near Oakridge along the crest of  the Cascade Mountains.  A few people hike the entire distance in one summer, but this guy won’t go that far with all the stuff he’s carrying. 

Snow falls very deep here, and the trail is not visible in winter, so  rangers have put these blue tags on trees to guide winter travelers.  You can see from my walking pole leaned on this tree how high the tags are—about fifteen feet.  They must have carried a ladder.

Tags are nailed to the trees leaving room for the tree to grow in diameter, as shown in the left picture.  In the old days, trails were marked with blazes—vertical cuts, chopped with an ax.  This one is completely healed.

In February of 2011 the snow was about eight feet deep and impossible to walk on without sinking.  I used Nordic skis then, and was guided by the blue tags.

See the blue tag in this picture.

These snow pictures are from the same section of trail that I hiked this week.   

After 4 miles, we come to Lower Rosary Lake, where in one direction, clear air gives the mirror view we expect from a compliant lake.  In another direction, smoke paints the hills with another beauty, portentous of the natural end of many trees.  

Ducks having breakfast on the lake.  See one of them diving.  

We come next to Middle Rosary Lake, with backpackers camped on the far side.  They even carried a rubber boat all the way up here.   

An old Douglass fir lost its top many years ago and would have died, except for a few branches that were still alive below the break.  You can see the break way up there above the foliage that now almost obscures it.  These branches became like the senses of hearing, feeling and intuition that have taken the duties of sight, akin the top of a tree, and made it their task to grow three new tops.