Today’s hike had one objective – see if we could find the remainder of the old Dickey Lake trail. We had found part of it a couple of years ago when we did a wintertime trip to Bagby. We had to turn around due to too much snow and ice on the trail so Kirk suggested we try and find the old trail heading east. We did end up finding some trail but we ran out of time and had to turn around and head back. Today’s trip was to see if we could find it all the way up to the 6341 road – the thought was that it would be an excellent access point for the Bagby trail without having to deal with the Bagby trailhead and all the craziness that has.

We started out at our normal time and got to the Bagby trailhead/parking lot a little after 10. I had forgotten there was a fee to park there. I talked with one of the hosts there – she was very nice – normally it is $5 per person (but that includes soaking in the hot springs which we weren’t going to do) – she said we could either park there for $5, with some of that going for trail maintenance, or park up the road for free. I’m a sucker for trail maintenance so I paid the $5. I was surprised how many cars were at the trailhead on a Tuesday morning at 10:00 (I think there were 4 or 5). We suited up and headed down the “freeway” of a trail that goes from the parking lot to the hot springs. This portion of the trail is in excellent condition – we even saw someone using an battery powered blower blowing stuff off the trail at one point. It is kind of nice they have a good presence there now – the issues at the trailhead have to be a lot better controlled now.

We made it to the hot springs and headed east. This was our view heading east from just across the small un-named creek east of the hot springs:

I recalled when we were looking last trip we didn’t find anything right away. We fortunately had the track from that last trip to help guide us and we soon found the tread. We followed the tread and were doing some cutting and lopping (2nd day in a row of lopping for me!).

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a ton of pictures. I was more focused on looking for tread and flagging and lopping out what we had found. I hadn’t remembered the tread as being quite so rough the last time we were here, but it was during the winter, so some of the ground brush was less active. We found a bit more tread than we had last time but then at one point the tread just stopped abruptly. We searched around but didn’t find anything. After a while of searching we decided to just try and power our way up to 6341 as the day was kind of getting away from us (good thing it stays light late these days). We struggled through brush and some steep hillsides but soon got to the headwaters of Shower Creek:

The dogs enjoyed this a lot – the water was cool and they laid in it for a while to cool off and got a good long drink from it. I had thankfully brought two bottles of water – Kirk forgot his so I gave him one of mine. It was a pretty warm day so we were sweating quite a bit.

We fought our way back up the hill from Shower creek and at some point entered a cut area – I didn’t realize there was any cut area below 6341 – since this was all wilderness I assumed it was all uncut forest. We followed some sort of old skid road for a bit but since that was taking us the wrong way we ended up just going pretty much straight uphill. At some point we ended up at the end of the 6341-018 spur road and walked that out to 6341:

This was another disappointment of the day. This is quite a ways up 6341 and it is obvious no one has been up this far for a while. Even if we had found tread all the way thru, we would have also had to clear out the road in order to be able to access the trail.

We looked for anything that looked like it might be a trailhead on 6341 but didn’t really find anything. It was getting late, and we had to fight our way back thru everything we had come thru – AGAIN – so we decided to head back down. Fortunately. we chose a different route back down and even though it was pretty steep, it was relatively open – this was us heading back down to Shower Creek (this hillside was a lot steeper than it looks in this picture):

Once we got down the steepest parts, it got darker but it was a lot easier walking on the north side of shower creek than it was on the south side (no real rhodies here):

We soon found the beginning of Shower Creek:

A bit farther downstream we stopped to refill our water bottles – the dogs were liking the water but they kept wanting to walk in the creek while we were trying to filter water….

After drinking a bunch of water and hopefully having enough to get us back down to the truck, we continued down the trail. We didn’t find any blazes or semblance of tread other than “maybe, could be” areas. Kirk had put a waypoint where we lost the trail earlier and we soon found then end of the found tread. It appears we found about another tenth of a mile of tread from where we turned around last time, but still have another .6 mile of trail to find before we get up to 6341. We only found about a half mile of tread thus far.

As we worked our way back down the real tread, we did a bit of lopping and flagging for future reference. Here are some of the pictures showing the trail:


In this picture you can actually see an old blaze next to the trail:

We continued down, doing some flagging and lopping. At some point, it was getting late and we were both tired so we put away the saw and loppers and just headed down the trail. As we approached the hot springs, Kirk commented on this really neat, mossy section of trail – it was pretty cool:

We soon got back to the hot springs and then headed back down the trail. I think we encountered two groups of people coming up the trail as we were heading back. I got a picture of the Hot Springs fork from the bridge as we were leaving the hot springs:

We soon got back to the parking lot and headed out. We tried to stop at Time Travelers but they were closed (on a Tuesday?) – we ended up stopping at the Old Mill Saloon for dinner. It had been a long day but it was good to locate a bit more tread on this trail. I may try and find more remnants of this trail at some point, but regardless it was a good day out, even though it was disappointing.