Today’s hike I had been looking forward to all week. Kirk and I had planned to go hiking – he asked where and I offered several options, including a couple of “wild” options. One of them was to hike up the south end of the Bagby trail up to Silver King Lake. It is a long drive and a pretty long hike and some of the trail around Silver King Lake burned, so we weren’t sure what we were in for. It was an ambitious goal, but we were pretty certain we could do it. We knew it would be a long day, so we headed out early.

We had the option of going down thru Silverton and out 22 to Detroit and back up 46, but we decided to go thru Estacada. It is shorter distance wise and there wouldn’t be nearly as much traffic even though we couldn’t go as fast on some of it. We were planning over 2 hours to get to the trailhead. We made pretty good time driving and got to the trailhead a little after 10. We parked up the narrow 2209 road at the trailhead (there is a bit of a wide spot to park). We suited up and headed up the trail. This is what the trailhead looked like:

Compare that to 2008:

The beginning of the trail gets more activity than I was expecting. I’m guessing it is campers at Elk Lake that use it. It was in really good shape. This is what it looked like a little ways up the hill:

After an initial ascent, the trail kind of levels out. Along the way, there are a few wet areas right next to the trail – this is one of them:

As we were heading up the trail we noticed some very recent trail maintenance (fresh cut logs). In some brushy areas, we also noticed some very aggressive brushing which was very nice:

I can imagine before that work was done it was really hard to navigate thru some of these areas. There are a lot of springs (most of them were still running pretty well today, even though it is September), and so there is a lot of brush that grows up around the springs.

The trail gains little elevation for a while, being mostly level and passes several small ponds and/or meadowy areas. This is one of the meadows (I think it is probably wet earlier in the year):

As we continued down the trail, we passed thru a couple of small rockslides, and then the trail passed thru this very long rockslide:

Shortly after the long rockslide, we came to the junction with the Battle Ax trail:

We toyed with the idea of taking that on the way back, making kind of a lollipop trip, but it would have added another mile or two plus probably another 1000′ of elevation gain. We figured we’d see how we felt when we got back there.

The trail continued to be in very good shape. There were a few short sections that were kind of brushy, but there were no logs to navigate as they had all been cut. After a bit, we encountered a couple of backpackers – we stopped to talk to them. They had camped at the upper Twin Lake which didn’t burn. They said the Bagby trail past the Twin Lakes junction hadn’t been maintained. They had encountered the trail crew who had done the work the previous day. They said that Silver King Lake was pretty rough. We would soon find out what they meant.

After our short conversation, we continued on. We soon got to the junction down to Twin Lakes where the trail crosses a saddle. I’m pretty sure this was the spot where we encountered a hiker back in 2010 (15 years ago!) who had just seen a black bear and was kind of freaked out.

Immediately after passing the junction with Twin Lakes, trail conditions got quite a bit worse. It was quite a bit brushier than it had been and there were now intermittent logs on the trail. It kind of alternated between not too bad and pretty brushy. There were not a lot of logs and the ones that were there were mostly relatively small and easy to navigate.

When we got to another saddle, we came to the junction with the Whetstone trail:

It was open very on this saddle and we were right on the edge of the burned area. We continued north on the trail and very quickly entered the burned area. The beginning wasn’t too bad – the tread was still there and there wasn’t too much stuff on it. We got to I think the first switchback and things changed quite a bit – this is the area where the trail switchbacked down the hill to the small basin where the trail up to Silver King Lake was. It was totally unrecognizeable from what I had remembered. It obviously burned really hot in this area – you can see Silver King Lake in the distance:

We made our way down the trail – most of the tread is still there if you look closely, but there are quite a few rather large logs and lots of debris on the trail. Here is a segment heading down to that basin below Silver King Lake:

We slowly worked our way down the hill, moving a few logs off the trail where we could to make passage a bit better. I also hung a few flags at points where the trail was indistinct to help people find their way.

At the bottom of the hill, the trail kind of disappeared. We thought we might have found some of it, but it was really rough in that area. We looked for a junction heading up to Silver King Lake but didn’t find anything, so we pretty much just went uphill – we knew the lake was at the top of the hill (we did find a few bits on the way back down):

Here is what the trail junction looked like back in 2010:

Kirk and I took different routes up the hill. I took a more direct route and he went up more sidehill. When I popped out on top, I was close to the old outhouse – amazingly it mostly survived the fire:

And soon we were at the edge of Silver King Lake which is still a pretty lake:

The burn damage here reminds me a lot of what it looks like around Memaloose lake farther north.

We looked around to see if we could see where the campsite was (I think there was just one campsite here). I think this might have been where it was:

Here are a couple of photos from our backpack trip in 2008 for comparison:


And another from a backpack trip in 2010:

It was pretty late – I think it wsa after 1:30. We had stopped at a high point about noon and were going to have lunch there, but we thought “oh, we are almost to the lake, we should just eat there” – we were thinking it would only take us 30 minutes or so to get to the lake. It took us about 90 minutes!

We ate lunch and looked around a bit before heading back down. On the way back down, we did find a couple of segments of tread, but they quickly disappeared. Since there is no vegetation in here anymore, the ground is incredibly unstable so tread can easily just fall down the hill.

Once we were back in the little basin, as we were walking, I noticed this big hole – I’m pretty sure this was a tree before the fires and it was totally consumed:

We fought our way back up the hillside – it was a little bit easier than it was on the way down only because we had done a little bit of clearing.

Once we had made it up out of that basin, things improved a bit. It wasn’t long before we got out of the burn area, which we were very happy about. By this time, it was probably about 3:30 and we still had several miles left to go.

Shortly before we got to the junction with the Twin Lakes trail, there was a small rockslide with a really neat rock formation above it:

I think we stopped in the saddle at this junction because this marked an important milestone for us. From this point back to the truck, the trail was all in pretty good shape. No more burn damage to navigate, no more logs, no more heavy brush to deal with. We stopped for a well deserved rest and some water. The weather wasn’t too warm, but we were sweating a lot since we were in the sun quite a bit and the elevation gain was pretty exhausting.

After a short rest and some water, we continued down the trail. After dealing with all the fire damage and the poorly maintained trail we had dealt with for the last few hours, we were really happy to have a nice trail. As we continued down the trail, shortly before getting to the Battle Ax trail, Kirk noticed a user side trail to a viewpoint. It gave you quite an expansive view of the area. Here is the view looking up Battle Ax creek from that viewpoint:

We tried to pick out peaks and creeks from the viewpoint but it was getting late and we still had a ways to go. We were all tired from a tough day so we were going a bit slower I think.

After the viewpoint, I think we just kind of put our heads down and hiked back to the truck. It was cool going back thru all the things we had seen earlier in the day. We finally got back to the truck a little after 6:00. We had done over 11 miles! It felt good to get in the truck and sit down on a comfy seat. We had a long drive back home. On the way home, we made a couple of short side trips. There was a rough side road up to Dunlap Lake – it looked like party central – a bit parking/camping area. We also took a short side detour over to the road that went up to Gold Butte – I thought the gate was right at the 4697 junction but it is actually the 453 spur that goes up to the lookout and that was gated. We turned around after seeing that and make our way back down the rough and bumpy 4697 road and then back to paved roads for the long trip home. The dogs both kind of passed out in the back seat – they were tired!

We stopped in Estacada for a late dinner – we were both really hungry. By the time we got to Estacada it was dark. It was a really good, epic day of hiking on an amazing old trail. It was sad to see all the burn damage but at least it was relatively limited. I think we will be back to do a loop hike on the Bagby/Battle Ax trails – that will be an interesting day….