Derek and I did a great hike today. We went up Zig Zag to where the Hall Creek trail splits and, having never explored that trail, decided to take the plunge.
Along the way we met up with three mountain goats, a euwe and two kids. Derek was able to capture some video, if I can figure out how to upload it I will. Very cool, they were right there in front of us on the trail, not more than 25 or 30 yards away, and they did not disappear for almost a minute. In fact, at one point we were fumbling around like Abbott and Costello, pulling out the bear spray, because we thought the adult was charging us. (she wasn’t).
This trail is great, even if unofficial, but with all the snow we had to rely upon clipped branches and pink flagging tape to follow along. And at about 2,500 feet we definitely needed the snow shoes:
Our track was basically a big loop and towards the end of the western portion, where we needed to go sharply uphill to intersect the service road (NF9021/Hall Creek Road) we were able to follow the flagging tape up the ridge.
We were way out there, didn’t see anyone (except two hikers right at the beginning) the entire way. We were able to get some of our landmarks into context, such as Greenway Mountain, which was above and west of us when we hit the service road:
We also got a great view of Hall’s Point and the Olallie View Point we scrambled to a couple of weeks ago (Hall’s Point is the prominence on the left, that is, south of Olallie View Point):
Snow shoes are de rigeur up there:
The Garmin hosed up again, the track shows the drive from home to the trail head but here is a close-up from Google Earth of our track:
Great hike, we learned a new trail and added another piece of the puzzle of the complex topography between Mt. Washington and McClellan Butte.
