Today’s hike would be my only opportunity to get out this week due to other commitments. I wanted to find something interesting. After looking at snow levels, I landed on hiking the upper Burnt Granite trail. The original plan was to hike up to the second rockslide, maybe a bit past and then come back down. Plans changed during the day – more on that later.

We headed out a bit later than usual, but the day got off to a bad start. Only a few miles from home, a deer jumped out in front of me and I hit it and killed it. The only good news is that other than a broken front license plate, there does not seem to be any damage to my truck. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find my license plate in all the carnage, so I’m technically illegal now. I’m not too worried about it though.

After that tragedy, we continued on and got to the trailhead about 11:00. We suited up and headed up the trail. I opted to head up the “real” trail (the original alignment). We headed up thru the dark mini forest (cut area) until we got to the old corridor. When we got into the work area, I noticed someone had planted flags along the path of the old tread:

Not sure who did it or why – maybe someone is intending on rebuilding the tread in here?

We continued up the trail – as we got higher, I noticed more recently brushing of the trail – it was so well brushed out that it looks a lot more like it would have looked like 60-70 years ago when it was in heavy use:

We kept going up – we found a bit of snow at about 4200′ – it will most likely be gone in a couple of days. We made our way up to the second rockslide that has a great view of Olallie Butte and Mt Jefferson:

We stopped here and ate lunch. It was warm in the sun and there was a nice breeze, but Thor didn’t like it in the sun so he went over into the shade. While eating lunch, I was looking at peaks around us. I saw Mt Lowe and started wondering if we could make it up there. It looked to be no more than a couple of miles (I underestimated it). Originally, I was going to turn around where we were, or maybe a bit farther up the trail, but it just seemed like the right thing to do. I don’t know, maybe the deer thing that started the day made me want to spend some more time in the woods….

After drinking some water, I packed up and we headed south. The trail had recent cutting of logs that came down over the winter. I wondered what it would look like in the spot near the south end of the trail where there is always a LOT of blowdown. As we headed down the trail, I soon had my answer – a new, pretty messy log down:

I did some pruning and moved some branches to allow for easier passage but it is still kind of difficult to get over – too high to step over, too low to duck under.

After improving that log, we encountered a couple more blowdowns in this area – thankfully they were all easy stepovers. We soon got to the end of the trail and started down the old 270 spur. The road heads down to a saddle before heading back up to the 6310 road. On the way back out of the saddle, there was some reasonably deep snow on the side of the 270 spur:

We continued up and soon got to the 6310 road. We headed south on 6310 to the 040 spur, which is where the North end of the Rho Ridge trail starts – there was a big patch of snow here as well:

We headed up the 040 spur and soon got to the beginning of the trail. We headed south. This area of the trail is just beautiful I think – the tread is in incredible shape, it goes thru some beautiful old growth and has some fantastic views. Here is some of that old growth:

We kept going – I was getting a bit worried we were running out of time, but I was confident we could make it in time. We soon got to the saddle where the 4670-220 spur meets/crosses the trail and then we were on our last push up to Mt Lowe. There were some patches of snow in this area but the trail was mostly clear. A bit further up the trail we ran into much deeper patches of snow that were across the trail:

A bit further up the trail you get a great view of Mt Hood thru the trees:

Even though there was a fair amount of snow it was still easy to follow the trail and we made our way up. It wasn’t too long before we topped out on top of Mt Lowe. I knew we couldn’t stay up here too long. We drank some water and I took a great photo of Mt Jefferson:

It was already 2:30 and we still had to go all the way back – the good news is that it was mostly downhill all the way back. As I was gathering things up, I noticed something I didn’t ever recall seeing before – it is odd the things we don’t notice. I noticed this date that was painted on a rock where the lookout used to be:

I wonder if this was the date they burned the lookout? It sounds like that was about the timeframe they would have burned it. I looked back on old pictures from the lookout and I do see this on those pictures – I just had never noticed it before.

After looking at that date for a bit we loaded up and headed back down. I was hoping we could get down in an hour and a half, but I knew that was pretty aggressive. My phone said we had done just over 6 miles, so 6 miles in 90 minutes is pretty quick. Either way, I knew we had a lot of daylight left, so I wasn’t too worried. We headed down the trail and I felt like we were making good time.

We got to the 6310 road pretty quickly and then headed down to the 270 spur – that goes up a bit and then heads back down into the saddle before going back up to the trail near the “bigfoot/vision quest pits”. We made it to the edge of the big blowdown area which was probably the high point of the trail so it would be all downhill from there, and mostly in the shade. We stopped for a quick break to drink some water and the continued down. As we headed down, my feet were getting tired – and so were my legs. We kept going down – I think we stopped one more time for water but otherwise we were just hiking, trying to get back to the truck as soon as we could. We finally arrived at the truck about 4:30 – just under 2 hours, which is pretty good for going 6 miles!

Although the day started out tough, it turned into quite a nice day – I really enjoyed getting to the top of Mt Lowe and the visibility was pretty good. It was a good recovery for the day!