Today’s hike has become an annual tradition. It started in 2011 (I think) to do a “start the new year right” hike. Looking back over the last 15 years, I’ve done one every year except two (2012 and 2017 – I know one was weather related and I think the other one I was sick). Every other one I’ve been able to go, and Kirk has been on all of them with me – sometimes someone others have joined us, but we’ve done a pretty good job making this an annual tradition.
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The choice for 2026 was to hike the Rooster Rock trail up to the Pechuck Lookout. We were hoping for a nice day but the forecast didn’t cooperate so we were prepared for a pretty wet day. We were expecting it to be a snowshoe trip, but with the recent warmer weather, there was very little snow. We drove up the Molalla, and after missing a turn, we arrived at what I called the “false” trailhead:

It really looked like this was the trailhead but while we were suiting and and getting ready I looked at the track from the only other time I hiked this trail (back in 2018) and realized the real trailhead was a bit farther up the road. Since we didn’t want to load everyone and everything back up, we just walked up the road to the real trailhead:

After looking at the halfway destroyed trailhead sign (with no signage on it), we headed up the trail. The trail heads up the hill to the ridge. It gains quite a bit of elevation but for the most part is well graded. It does go through some pretty big old trees in a few places:

And crosses what appears to be a very old road about half way up:

After an hour or so of climbing, we finally made it up to the ridge and headed east:

A bit further along the ridge, we finally ran into the first real bit of snow – this was about 4000′:

After being relatively level for a bit the trail heads down a ridge. Somewhere along this ridge we ran into this recent blowdown which was quite a mess:

I was kind of surprised we didn’t see much else in the way of blowdown until this. There was a lot of green branches on the trail but not really any blowdown. Things would be changing soon…

We soon got to the spot where the trail crosses the road that continues up to the lookout:

A bit further up the trail we started entering the really burned area around the lookout and things got considerably worse. This huge mess we had to totally bypass – I don’t even know how many trees were down in this one area – probably 20+ I’m guessing:

Just past that mess, the trail skirts this kind of cool outcropping as it continues the climb to the lookout:

As you get closer to the lookout, the trail comes out on the road which continues almost to the top. We encountered even more blowdown here. You can actually see the lookout at the top of the hill, but we had to negotiate all the downed logs – this is all recent:

After much fighting with blowdown, but very little snow, we finally arrived at the lookout:

It wasn’t too windy at the top but it was raining, as it had been all morning – we opened up the lookout and it was nice to get out of the rain and wind for a bit. This is what it looked like inside:

We stopped to eat lunch – as we were getting ready to eat, Kirk started seeing rat poop everywhere (it really was all over just about everything). It wasn’t very appetizing but we tried to steer clear of it. I finally remembered to bring my JetBoil and some coffee and hot chocolate which I thought would be nice to have on a cold, wet day. We ate lunch and drank our hot beverages. Kirk poked around in the cupola, but you couldn’t see much since it was all boarded up for the winter. We were able to raise one of the window shields to make it a little brighter inside but it was still pretty dark.

After we ate lunch, we packed up and headed down. While we were in the lookout there was a small map on the back of the door – it showed a “spring trail” which was supposed to head down to a spring below the road. We thought we’d head down that way to see if we could find the spring. It wasn’t long before that trail was littered with blowdown as well – we navigated it and then entered a burned area where the trail kind of got lost in the snow. We followed what we thought was the trail and soon popped out onto the road. The snow was deeper over here. We walked up and down the road, looking for a trail down to a spring but we didn’t find any. We decided to give up the search and headed back west on the road.

As we were walking along the road we noticed what I think is probably the biggest elk print I’ve ever seen:

He was walking along the road – the print wasn’t really fresh, but fresh enough to see how big he was.

I forgot to mention that Kirk dropped his snowshoes when we encountered all the blowdown on the way up to the lookout because they were making it difficult to navigate the logs. We figured we would be coming back the same way so he just left them on the trail. When we decided to go look at the spring, we weren’t heading back the same way, so as we were walking back the road we took a “4WD” road back up to the road to the lookout. The trail hit the road at the top of this 4WD road and his snowshoes were just below that spot, so we planned it pretty well.

After picking up his snowshoes (I had left mine in the truck since it didn’t appear we would need them and my buckle broke), we had a pretty uneventful trip back down the hill. We did have a bit of uphill after we crossed the road, but otherwise it was basically all downhill. We got back to the truck pretty quickly. The dogs were ready to get out of the rain and into a warm truck. I think we were both ready for a warm truck too. It was a pretty wet day.

It would have been nice to have more snow, but I think it worked out pretty well. If we had to wear our snowshoes up near the lookout, I’m not sure we could have made it with all the blowdown – it is really hard to get over downed logs with snowshoes on.

All in all, it was a really nice hike – a great way to start a new year!