July, 13, 1999
Erik and Rik all ready for our adventure, off to Hells Canyon -
here's a picture of
the two of us starting out. We took the Nissan, and
Erik drove most of the way down, which was a treat for me, although I am not a real great
passenger. Erik surprised me by bringing a nice sack lunch for two! We made great time and
stopped for lunch around the Tri-Cities and then down into Oregon. Eastern Washington is
quite an interesting change from the "wet side" of the Cascades, and neither of
us would particularly like to live there. We did agree that one of the nicest places we
saw on the trip was the small Oregon town of Milton-Freewater. Very well maintained houses
and lots of community pride was obvious.
After lunch, I took over the driving, and once we started in on the Oregon back roads
we encountered lots of construction traffic, so it ended up taking us over 8 hours to take
a trip we planned to take 5 or 6. We drove through Enterprise, Joseph, Imnaha, and
finally, after 24 miles of forest road full of dust and potholes, we arrived at the
Hat Point Lookout. From this forest service fire-lookout tower we could see all the way to the
bottom of the canyon, and let me tell you it was quite an impressive site, very beautiful
country. Here's a view from Hat
Point, the river is over a mile below us!. A little-known fact is that Hells Canyon is actually deeper than the Grand Canyon
– this was news to me. We were both quite tired from the long drive, so we decided to
just spend the night at the Saddle Creek campground. The place was deserted, only one
other couple there. The evening was quite balmy, and it was early to bed in preparation
for an early morning start. Elevation of the first night and the beginning of our trek was
6559 ft.
July 14
Up at 5 am and on the trail by 7: all "saddled
up" and ready to hit the trail. The trailhead was about a half-mile from the
campground, and once we parked the truck we had a small bit of a problem finding the actual
trail. The alpine grasses were quite high, and we could see the trailhead sign, but we had
to search a while for the trail. Erik was worried when I told him that we could just
navigate cross-country and we would do okay, but the worry turned out to be unnecessary,
as we did eventually find the track. The first two miles on Summit Ridge trail was very
pleasant, (Erik on the trail) nice shade, trees, a cool breeze, we were psyched! The wild flowers were at
their peak, and what a wonderland of colors! Two miles down to Freezout Saddle, elevation
lost about 1000-ft. Then the serious downhill began as we lost the next 1000-ft. in the
following mile. We continued to follow the Saddle Creek trail down another 8 miles to end
up at the Snake River at 1500-ft. elevation. More wild flowers, grasses, sage, and lots of
heat! We missed where the trail branched off from the high country trail in the tall
grass, but being the experienced outdoorsmen that we are, quickly realized the error and
got back on the correct trail. The heat was taking its toll on us, so we stopped for a two
and a half hour lunch to let the sun pass over and get us through the hottest part of the
day - Erik
and Dad at the watering hole. Eleven miles of trail and one mile elevation lost total for the day! Whew! The Snake
River and Saddle Creek confluence was a wonderful, cool camp, and we both arrived
exhausted. As we were in this weary state of mind and body, the strangest things became
funny, Erik said the expression of the day was "Uff da, Umatilla Imnaha" –
you had to be there. Skinny-dipping in a pool (Erik cooling
off in the Snake River) that someone had made at the end of the
creek was a welcome end to a hot and blistering hike. Little did we know what was in store
for the next day… Here is a view of
the Snake river looking south and
another view looking north.
Dinner was the most horrible one of the trip, freeze-dried spaghetti – ugh! That
one goes in the "don’t even think about it" category. Our camp was about 25
yards from the Snake River, a great Leave no Trace camp on river rocks. The evening was
cool, and the wind was something else. We had both left the rain fly off of our tents
(that was nice to be able to see the stars through the top of the tent every night), and
the wind was so strong we were getting spray from the rapids in the river. A beautiful
night sky, no light pollution from the cities, and we saw bats dining on the mosquitoes. A
truly great camp and we both slept like babies.
July 15
The map showed fairly insufficient detail about the Snake River trail, but we could
see that there was a starting point at Saddle Creek and ending point at Sluice Creek, and
a loss of about 300 ft. elevation. So I told Erik that we would have a nice easy
down-stream 5 mile walk today… NOT! This was by far the hardest, hottest, most
scrabbley rocky nasty, up and down, gain a 100 ft. lose a 100 ft., nasty, downright
insegrevious section of trail of our trip. The caption on this
is "Not a Good Sign" -- 'nuff said! We started out hiking at 7 am again, and there
was not a bit of shade, nor was there any water on this leg. It was strange to be a
hundred or so feet off the river and not be able to get to the water because it was so
steep and rocky. There were headlands all the way to cross, and the trails were so steep,
there were concrete steps in parts of them. And where there were no steps, there was a
great deal of rock scree, which made the trail fairly treacherous. And the exposure, there
were very narrow sections with extremely sharp drop offs to the river and big rocks. If
you get the idea that we didn’t enjoy this section very much you would be right on!
To give the Snake River appropriate credit, the views were spectacular, and we saw several
tourist-laden jet boats taking tours on the Snake – now that would be the preferred
way to see this section of trail. To add to the misery, Erik was in the infamous
"Day-2 Funk," and in his own words was "a very cranky idiot." (I
personally hit the day-2 thing by myself when I did a 3-day solo hike on the 9th -
11th.)
We had a nice (but short) mid-morning break at Marks Creek (no water) where we found
the only shade on this trail next to a large rock outcropping. After 4 hours to hike the 5
miles and a net elevation loss of 300 ft., we were down to the last few drops of water,
and we were both hot and thirsty. Our arrival at Sluice Creek with its shade trees and
fresh water was most welcome - Erik standing by
some early pioneer relics. Here we saw the first other people on the trail, two 60+
year olds from Issaquah of all places! We initially thought about making our camp in an
existing horse camp, but even though it was a nice shady spot, the place was such a dirty
mess, old bones from some huge animal, lots of junk and a real dump, we decided to look
elsewhere. So we rested there for a while and then found a nice camp, next to the creek
and in the shade and near an old cabin - a
picture of Rik by the old settler's cabin. After setting up camp, we spent the afternoon sitting on some rocks in
the creek, it was very cool and refreshing. We had dinner and then early to bed again. The
evening was cooler and some clouds started rolling in, but no rain like Seattle had all
week. We decided to start out earlier tomorrow to avoid the heat.
July 16
Today we started to get up at 4am to try to beat some of the heat. Also known as
"oh-dark-thirty." We quickly packed up our camp, had a quick breakfast of cold
granola, and by 5:30 the light was with us and we were hiking on the trail. Today was the
day to start back up out of the canyon and regain that mile of elevation. What an uphill
grind! My knees were making so much noise, I thought they were going to explode. There
were also massive amounts of poison ivy (we had been warned, so we hiked in long pants on
all but the last day) and blackberry bush tunnels in the lower canyon. We stopped by an
old settler’s log cabin, a very nice old building and in pretty good shape, although
the horse people seem to want to bring in a lot of trash and just leave it there. So, a
very long uphill grind, and we followed elk track all day but never saw them. We
did see a natural occurring
Bonsai and a really great stone
wall though. We gained
almost 3000 ft. of our elevation back, and again took a nice long two-hour break at lunch.
As we started to get up out of the deep canyon, there were more wild flowers again and
today I found some really small but incredibly sweet wild strawberries. I had been seeing
the plants all week, but this was the first fruit.
Although I would have liked to spend the night and take two more days to come out, Erik
was "smelling the barn," so we pushed on another 3 or 4 miles to Big Creek. We
met a really nice Ranger who was doing campsite inventories with her son, and chatted for
about a half-hour or so. These were the only other people we saw all week; this is a real
remote and deserted area. Today water was not a problem, almost every creek we crossed was
flowing. Erik found an old, worn 1873 English halfpenny on the trail. I thought a hiker
dropped it, and he thought it was part of an old settler’s treasure. The jury is
still out. We cruised into the Big Creek ravine and just set up a real makeshift camp next
to the trail, we were both pretty tired. We have another big day of uphill tomorrow, so it
was a quick dinner and early to bed.
July 17
Erik’s death march. He really wanted to get out a day early so he could spend
Sunday with his sweetie, so we hiked all the way out today, over 6 miles and all up hill
- Erik on the trail.
We gained the balance of the mile, 2000+ ft. but it seemed like a whole lot more. We were
up at 4 am again and on the trail by 5:30, so we had some cooler hiking time. The sun was
quite hot, but there was a nice cool breeze most of the day, and again the wild flowers
were simply spectacular! I just couldn’t believe the variety, the massive quantities,
and the variety of colors: red, orange, purple, white, yellow, blue, pink, combinations of
these colors, it was like a fairyland, our timing was perfect, I do so love to see the
mountain flowers. We reached the truck by 11:30 and had a snack to tide us over till the
pizza waiting for us in Joseph.
Epilogue
So, in the course of five days, we hiked over 30 miles in distance and two miles in
elevation. What a couple of studs! The terrain we covered was extremely varied, we hiked
in high alpine forest, meadows, desert, mountainous trails. After the hike was over, I
felt pretty good, I wasn’t even very sore. Erik complained that he was sore for a few
days, and claimed "it is because you hike so much, Dad." All in all, it was a
wonderful experience, we had a great time together, we enjoyed each other’s company,
but we both agreed that it was not a hike we would do again – we really like the
forests and lakes of the traditional hikes in the Northwest.
