Today’s hike was kind of a spur of the moment hike. The weather report was supposed to be sunny (spoiler alert – it was wrong), so I thought I’d head out somewhere. I was considering heading up to Burnt Granite again to swap out the battery in my trail cam since it is getting low, but then I noticed the modeled snow depth map showed zero snow on the road up to Baty Butte – I know that map is not 100% accurate but it is usually kind of conservative – meaning if it says there is no snow, there probably isn’t any. I think it gets less accurate in the spring however, as large areas were bare, but there were areas with 6-12″ of snow still.

We headed out a bit later than usual since this was a last minute decision. As we came into the Clackamas canyon, it looked pretty foggy – I was hoping that things would clear up as we headed south, but that didn’t really happen. There was zero snow all the way up the 7010 road – we turned onto the 160 spur and headed up. It wasn’t too far up the road where we started seeing a little bit of snow on the sides of the road. Just under 2 miles up the road, we ran into this on the road – since I was by myself I didn’t really want to push it. I might have been able to get thru this but I decided to be smart – I’m guessing the snow was about 6″ deep in here:

We parked at a wide area, suited up and started up the road. My truck said it was 36 degrees when we stopped. Thor did his usual while I was getting ready, and then when we started up, the first (OK, second) surprise of the day happened. He was running around it the snow on the road like he likes to do, and he yelped – not once, but several times. He came back to me and was limping on his left rear leg. I looked at his foot and it looked fine – I have no idea what he did – I decided to continue up the road to see if he could “walk it off” (he is a big weenie).

As we headed up the hill, I took this photo of Baty Butte in the clouds – it really was a pretty foggy day:

We continued up the road, crossing intermittent patches of snow similar to where we parked – but a lot of the road was completely clear. When we got to the spot where we usually park for the Baty Butte trail, things changed a bit – the snow here was probably 8″ deep ore more and completely covering the road:

From this spot, you usually get a good view of Thunder Mountain as well, but today it was hiding in the clouds too:

Although Thor was staying close to me, he hadn’t really been limping on that rear leg so I decided to continue up the trail. We headed up the connector trail (part of the old South Fork Mountain trail). The trail was mostly clear with a few spots of snow (usually in the more exposed areas).

When we were approaching the connector trail to the trail heading south, we encountered more patchy snow, but this was deeper – up to 6″ deep:

Thor seemed to be doing OK, so we continued. We took the short trail west to the continuation that heads south. We walked thru an area that had significant maintenance last year – this was mostly still in good shape – I think there was only one new log in this area near where it drops out onto the firebreak along the bluff. Once on the firebreak, there were a couple of trees that had come down – they weren’t too large so I decided to cut them out – Tree 1 before:

Tree 1 after cutting it out:

Tree 2 before cutting it out:

And Tree 2 after cutting it out:

After cutting those two trees out, we continued up the trail. There were a few rotten logs that had fallen before the trail heads up the steep uphill. I think I was able to remove all those logs, but I do remember there was a new log at that bottom switchback. It wasn’t hard to get over though.

We headed up the steep uphill – I removed a few things off the trail but there was still the top of one tree that was over the trail. We soon got up to the top where the trail follows the edge of the bluff for a while. I took a picture – there wasn’t much of a view today – just fog:

Once we were along the bluff, the trail is relatively level – unfortunately there were quite a few new downed logs in this area – none of them were large but there were a number of them. As we went along, it was interesting to see fresh snow in the trees. I’m very sure that snow had come down the night before – it was pretty cool down lower and we had a fair amount of rain. It must have been above freezing though as the trees were dripping, even though it didn’t feel like it.

We continued along and soon started another uphill climb (the trail pretty much follows the ridge so it does a lot of up and down). The trail was heading up to a couple of switchbacks and then to the first meadow – I had thought the meadow would be a good place to eat lunch and then turnaround, but on the way to the switchback, we encountered a couple of new blowdowns which were larger and harder to get around/over:

Since I was still worried about Thor’s leg and the weather didn’t seem to be letting up at all – and it was COLD, I decided not to try and fight thru those logs – we turned around here. We went back to a spot on the bluff where it was kind of open – there was a nice rock for a seat so we stopped and ate lunch. While we were sitting there we had a brief glimpse of the sun – it seemed like things were slowly trying to burn off but it was still very foggy and cold.

While we were eating, I thought it might be interesting to see what the bluff looked like from the air. I brought my drone, hoping to fly around the meadow and get some nice shots but since it was so foggy none of that would have turned out well. I took off from the trail and did a short video of what the bluff looked like – it is kind of interesting I think (video to come). I also did a 360 picture from off the trail. You can see it here.

After flying the drone, we packed up and headed back down. Thor was doing OK but he was VERY careful getting over logs (more careful than he usually is) – I think it is probably good we turned around where we did. The trip back down was uneventful – I did cut out a few more logs off the trail on the way back down and also limbed up a couple that made them easier to get over.

We got back to the truck about 1:30, packed up and headed out. One thing I noticed was that it was considerably warmer at the truck than it was up higher (I’m guessing partly due to all the snow up higher) – the truck said 37 degrees when we got into it so it hadn’t warmed up much. The interesting thing was that we didn’t have to go too far down the road and the temperature went up to 42.

We drove down the 160 spur and soon got to the 7010 road – we headed down – at one corner, we crossed Stroupe Creek – I had to take a picture of it – it was pretty but it was also interesting to see how much bigger it had become. We crossed it along the 160 spur but it was only a couple of feet wide there – down lower it was a nice creek:

A little after crossing Stroupe Creek, Zack had asked me to send him locations of trees down (for firewood), so I sent him some pictures of logs across the road. After that, it was just a normal drive home.

It was great to see this trail early in the season, although I was hoping for better weather. I hope Thor didn’t seriously hurt his leg – time will tell on that one I guess.

Lastly, I started tagging trip reports with a wildlife tag if I saw any wildlife. On this trip, on the way back along the Collawash I saw two Canadian geese along the road.