Today’s trip was to take a trip down the south end of Rho Ridge to check out the recent trailwork the Orogenesis group did on the south end of Rho Ridge – I was hoping with a big group they would be able to make some significant improvements in that end of the trail. Spoiler alert: I was a bit disappointed – there was not a lot of work that was done on the south end of Rho Ridge it appears – one section had about 30 logs cut out in it (and that short section was really nice!), but that is the only area that appeared to get work. I had hoped with the number of people they had and a whole weekend to work, it would have been able to get a lot more done, but they had pretty aggressive goals for the weekend. Any logs cut is an improvement on a trail and I’m always thankful for anyone who volunteers to do it.

Since it was going to be a warm day, I left a bit early. The plan was to skip the first part (from Graham Pass to Fawn Meadow) and head south from Fawn Meadow – similar to what we had done last year. We got to the decommissioned road to Fawn Meadow a little before 10:00, suited up and headed over to Fawn Meadow. The first pleasant surprise of the day was that last years brushing at Fawn Meadow is holding up really well – you couldn’t even see the trail last year due to all the fireweed:

We continued from Fawn Meadow – the trail in this area was not affected by the burn and given the brushing and lopping we did last year it was in pretty good shape.

We got a little farther, into the first burn area and found a recent cut log, which was curious:

We continued along and soon got to a spot where I remember doing some significant brushing – it is also holding up well

We continued along and soon found a number of freshly cut logs which was AWESOME:

After looking at some other postings on other sites, this area was indeed the area where the Orogenesis group did work. The odd part to me is that these logs were kind of in the middle of a bunch of other fallen logs. Normally, someone starts cutting at an access point on the trail, but there really was no access to this area other than hiking the trail, so they had to hike over downed logs in order to cut out this segment which I found very odd – but cut logs are cut logs.

We continued on and unfortunately, the cut logs did not last very long. It was back to faint tread and lots of logs down. I took a picture of this particularly nasty area of limby downed logs:

And a bit farther there was a sea of logs – yes, there is a trail down there somewhere under all those logs:

In a small area that mostly escaped the fires, some new uproots happened over the winter – the trail goes pretty much straight thru the middle of this:

A bit farther was yet another ugly blowdown on the Rho Ridge south trail:

As we approached the road crossing of the 6355-120 spur road, I saw something I hadn’t seen before – an old coil of phone wire next to the road which was kind of cool:

We continued fighting our way down the trail. At one point while we were crossing a log I saw another insulator I hadn’t noticed before:

We continued down the trail, doing a bit of moving of things off the tread as we could since I didn’t bring loppers or my handsaw. After a while, we got to the end of the burn (at least for a while) and made it to the junction with the Hawk Mountain trail. The trail in this area up to the junction wasn’t too bad – a little brushy in places and a few downed logs but not too bad. We headed up the Hawk Mountain trail and soon arrived up at the cabin.

Originally, I wasn’t planning to open up the cabin but I couldn’t resist. It was way past lunch time so I opened the cabin and we went in and had some lunch. It was nice and cool in the cabin – out in the sun it was pretty warm.

After lunch, I took a picture of my favorite view from the Hawk Mountain cabin – it was a beautiful day with great views:

Then we walked around the cabin – I did a quick drone flight (video TBD) and took some pictures.

I liked this photo of the cabin with Mt Jefferson behind it:

Since it was getting late and we still had to fight our way back north on the trail, we packed up, closed up the cabin and headed back down the mountain. I thought it was unlikely, but since Thor doesn’t do well with dogs he does not know, I decided to put him on the leash for the trip down – just in case we ran into someone. It was probably good because we did run into someone coming up the trail while we were headed down. He was as surprised as we were that someone was up there but he didn’t have a dog so it probably didn’t matter anyway. He rode his mountain bike up to the junction and left it there.

As we were going down, there is a spot where you get a good view of Mt Hood just above the trail. We walked up to the ridge and took a good photo of Mt St Helens to the left, Mt Adams in the middle and then Mt Hood:

After we got back down to the Rho Ridge trail, the trip back was pretty uneventful, even though it was still rough. A few places I had to look to see where the trail went, and still had to fight over all the downed logs, but the trip back was faster than the trip up. Partially because it was more downhill and partially because we didn’t do any clearing or flagging work on the way back. We were running out of time so we just focused on making as good of time as we could.

We got back down to the truck a little after 3:00. I had thought about heading up to see if you could still drive the 6355-120 spur road – that would be a really good place to do work heading north and south but it was too late to do that exploration – that will have to wait for another day.

It was rather disappointing to see the limited work that had been done, but on the bright side, some work had been done, and it was a beautiful day with clear views of the mountains. Spending some time in the cabin is always a good day!