This hike was a rather quick hike just to get out and enjoy a nice winter day. I had the day off of work (President’s Day), and the weather was supposed to be pretty good (not raining). It turned out to be much nicer than I thought – it was somewhat warm and partly sunny. A very enjoyable day in the woods.

The one thing this hike had was lots of water. Due to the recent rains, all the side creeks were running high and fast. Fish Creek was very loud all day long and so was the Clackamas River. The North Fork reservoir was very turbid, which you don’t see too often.

We started at the Calico road “trailhead” – it goes a quarter of a mile or so and then there is a side trail that the old quadders made down to the Fish Creek road. The Rimrock creek crossing was the first challenging crossing (although not too bad):

After crossing the creek and heading down to the Fish Creek road, we arrived at this campsite near the river, which I had never really explored before:

We explored a bit and then continued down the road, soon finding yet another campsite near the creek:

After exploring this campsite for a bit we continued down the “road” which is looking more and more like a trail and less like a road:


At one point there is a good viewpoint of the creek – well, it used to be better, but now the alders are growing up and obscuring the view somewhat. I took a video of how loud and fast the creek was:

We also came across this large log which someone spent a great deal of time removing – glad to see someone is keeping this accessible:

We continued down the trail until we got to the approach to the first bridge. The approach is growing in rapidly – I hardly recognized it:

We got to the first bridge and had lunch and enjoyed the sunshine. After eating lunch, I took this video of the creek – both upstream and downstream:

After enjoying the views for a while, we headed back down the trail. We explored another side trail that I’ve never explored before – what had to have been an old trail which was used by quads more recently, but is now just a beautiful mossy grove of trees:

After walking around that short loop and back down to the trail, we continued down the trail and soon came to yet another cool side trail (another one I had never explored) – it was a neat “narrows” part of the creek with a big log over it:

After enjoying that view for a bit we headed back and shortly arrived at the truck and headed home. A short day in the woods, but it was very nice.