Today’s hike was an outing to enjoy the fruits of our labor. A few weeks ago, 5 of us did quite a bit of work on the Baty Butte trail. I thought it would be fun to enjoy the fruits of that labor and to try and make it all the way down to Joyce lake – I have only done that one time, and it was way back in 2009. It seemed far overdue to attempt it again.

Since I knew it was going to be a long day, we started a bit early – in hindsight, we should have started even earlier. We met Oliver in Estacada and Kirk drove the blue bus to the trailhead. When we got there, we were all pretty surprised at how cool/cold it was. I ended up putting on a long sleeve shirt for a bit until I warmed up. We suited up and headed up the trail, enjoying the work we had done a few weeks ago. The trail was easy to follow for the first 1.5 miles. After the cut logs stopped, we were amazed at how much farther the brush work had been done – at least another half mile, maybe even more.

We got to the first hillside meadow, and continued on. A bit farther up the trail, there is a rocky outcropping with great views. I took a picture of Olallie Butte and Mt Jefferson in the clouds – we were almost in the clouds ourselves, just a little bit below the cloud deck:

I think these rock outcroppings were below the rocks where I took the photo above – I thought they looked pretty cool:

A bit farther down the trail we got to another open area. I remember in 2009 when I hiked it, there were “rock arrows” pointing both directions – we didn’t see this today, although we did see rocks that I think were the arrows, they just got moved around a bit:

As we were pretty focused on making time, we were trying hard not to do any trail work, however we were kicking sticks off the trail and moving the occasional log. We didn’t do any lopping – We only brought a small pair of loppers in case it was adventageous to cut out some brush, but otherwise, we were not doing any lopping. After that open area, I knew we were going to have a somewhat indistinct area – I’ve been in this area a few times and it is always bad. It starts with a pretty steep downhill which is rather indistinct, followed by an area that is always choked with vine maple, alder and thimbleberry. We soon got to this area and it was probably worse than ever – we had a hard time locating the trail down the hill, and once we found it, the area with the vine maple, etc was totally overgrown – to make things worse, it was riddled with mountain beaver holes. You couldn’t see where you were walking and we all stepped in more than one mountain beaver hole getting thru there. Thor was having an exceptionally difficult time – I had to go back and encourage him to continue.

Once we got past that area (I should have taken a picture of it), the trail crosses a small rockslide which is very visible and then goes back into the woods. Not too far past this area, there was a very large tree across the trail:

Fortunately, it wasn’t too hard to duck under it. We continued down the trail and pretty soon were approaching the cut area:

It was after noon, so we found a good spot and stopped to have lunch. This cut area is not as long as I remembered, but it is pretty rough in spots. The good news is that there is tread most of the way thru the cut. There are a few spots that the tread has disappeared but they are short. There is a lot of brush in places as well, but it shouldn’t be too hard to fix this section. The weird thing about this cut area is that it wasn’t a clear cut – they left a lot of trees. It was more than a thinning but less than a clearcut.

After we got thru the cut area, we got back into uncut forest – there are some areas that again were pretty brushy and there were quite a few logs, but it wasn’t too hard to follow. We soon got to the powerline corridor:

We crossed this and continued down the road. We had to look a bit for the continuation of the trail but it wasn’t too hard to find – there was an opening in the trees with a couple of cut logs. After the initial rough spot off the road, the trail was in pretty good shape in here. A few spots with heavier brush and a few small logs but not too bad at all.

We followed the trail pretty easily until it started the descent to Joyce lake. We headed down the ridge but on the way back we found the tread (covered in rhodies) that was a bit below the ridge. We got out onto the old “road” (not exactly sure what it is, but it is a cleared corridor) and started looking for the trail that switchbacked down the hill. We thought we found it, but it was pretty rough – we got a little ways and it disappeared – we scouted around and finally found the tread down a bit lower.

This portion of the trail had just been worked when I did this back in 2009 and I remember it being in really good shape. 16 years with no maintenance really takes its toll…. It was pretty rough, indistinct and brushy in a lot of places. We got to a rockslide area – here is a picture from 2009 of that area:

It was so choked with vine maple we did a bit of cutting and lopping in here. This was the spot where I ended up breaking my hiking pole too (I accidentally stepped on it). We tried not to do TOO much, but we did pretty much clear that rockslide section. After that, the trail re-entered the woods and it was pretty clear (other than a few logs) down to the lake. The trail takes an interesting loop around before hitting the lake access trail almost at the road.

We got to the lake a little after 3:00 – we had taken over 5 hours to get to the lake! We walked around the lake trail and stopped at a little “beach” – the dogs cooled off in the lake:

We originally were going to see if the trail continued all the way around the lake, but since it was late we went about halfway and then turned back. There was a side trail we thought might connect up with the trail so we took it. We thought it might have saved us some time, but I don’t think it did. The trail kind of died not too far from the lake trail. The topo map shows it to be pretty flat in that area and it wasn’t very far to the trail, so we decided to head cross country. The map does not accurately represent the terrain in that area unfortunately. There are several washes or drainages with pretty deep and steep gulleys we had to navigate. It took us a bit but we finally managed to get back to the trail. I had to backtrack a bit to go get my broken hiking pole, which I left where we did that cutting work. Kirk and Oliver continued up the trail. I caught up to them at some point and we ended up going back on the trail we missed coming in. It was pretty overgrown where it met the “road” coming down the ridge which is probably why we missed it. There had been some kind of thinning work done a few years ago and there were several slash piles with plastic in them – one of them was almost blocking the entrance to the trail.

We headed back up the “road” – a little farther up this is what it looked like:

Just past this we kind of lost the tread again – we found it after heading uphill – this is where we found it covered in rhodies.

At this point it was after 4:00 and we still had almost the whole way to get back to the van. We knew we had to just hike (no trail work) in order to make good time, so we just hiked, following (mostly) the route we came in on – there were a few areas where we lost the trail for a bit before re-finding it, but we made quite a bit better time on the way back than we did on the way in. Once we got back to the area we had worked a few weeks ago, it felt like a freeway compared to what we’d dealt with down lower.

When we got to the hillside meadow, I had to take a picture of this cut log – we cut this a few weeks ago and I don’t remember the uphill side being in the air like this:

After that hillside meadow, it was pretty much all downhill, which was good – we were all tired and it was getting late. I was thinking we would get back to the van about 7:00 but we beat that by 10-15 minutes. It felt good to sit down in a seat. We had been on the trail for about 9 hours!

It was a pretty amazing day – the morning was really nice – really cool, but that is perfect hiking weather. It cleared up after noon and turned into a really nice day – not too hot, even though the sun was out. We had a nice breeze on much of the trail, which is really nice.

In planning for future work, we are thinking we could come in on the powerline access road and head north and south to continue maintenance. We could start by doing brushing which will make it a lot easier to get saws in there. Looking forward to doing more work on this trail to make it a lot easier to hike – it has some fantastic views and interesting terrain.