With most of the Clackamas district still closed due to after effects from the Riverside and Lionshead fire, options are extremely limited. The weather was supposed to be nice today and so I decided to head up the lower portion of the White Iris trail. I wasn’t quite sure how far I would go, but I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be a problem to get to the trailhead.

When I looked at the modeled snow depth maps, it didn’t show any snow at all at the trailhead. The modeling was obviously wrong – this is what it looked like driving to the trailhead:

The modeled snow depths did seem to get updated – I checked them after I got home and they seemed pretty accurate. I’m guessing most/all of this snow came down yesterday. This is what it looked like parked at the trailhead:

No one had been that far down 4615 recently – you could see old tracks but nothing in the last day or two. We parked and got ready and headed up – it was really easy to see the trail heading up in the snow. When Carly and I looked for this trail in the spring it was hard to see where it was. Today it was really easy.

We headed up the trail and soon I got annoyed with some of the brushiness and hanging branches, so I got out my loppers and started lopping the worst of the hanging branches. Soon, I got out the saw and I started sawing thru some small logs to clear the path. I spent a while on some of the spots since there were multiple logs I had to cut. Once we got a little higher, Thor was complaining about not moving too fast so I stopped doing so much cleanup. Here is a picture of part of that lower segment – it had a lot more snow than I was expecting:

When I was working on the hanging branches and logs, I had to be very careful with loppers and saw – the snow would eat them up REALLY easily:

Once we got up a ways, I stopped lopping completely – when we got to the big uprooted tree where the trail heads north, the tread got a lot better. It was near this point where we stopped to have lunch. I had hoped to have a little bit of sunlight but it quickly moved. We ate a quick lunch because it was kind of cold.

Past the uprooted tree, this section of forest is quite impressive. Beautiful old growth. In the fresh snow it was just incredible. There were a few sunbreaks in the forest and it was absolutely spectacular. We continued up the trail and it wasn’t long before we got to the 4614 Crossing. It was kind of interesting -someone had been there very recently:

I kind of pondered what we should do and I decided to keep going. Since I hadn’t brought my snowshoes the going was getting tougher, but we didn’t have too far before we’d hit the junction with Old Baldy, so I decided to press on.

We kept going and the snow continued to get a bit deeper as we got higher. It was tough going, post holing (I’d guess the snow was getting to about a foot deep), but I took it slow. We finally made it to the junction with the Old Baldy trail – Here is the very beginning of the north fork of Eagle creek – where Old Baldy crosses it:

And the Old Baldy trail sign – this was our turnaournd point:

As we headed down, I noticed that someone is showing this trail some love – this is a new sign it appears:

The trip down took quite a bit less time than the trip up. Partially because it was pretty much all downhill and partially because we weren’t doing any maintenance on the way down. As we came down, I had to take a picture of this section of tread – although it doesn’t even begin to do it justice. There was a sunbreak down the trail and the sun coupled with the was just beautiful.

It wasn’t long before we got back to the 4614 crossing and then it seemed REALLY quick when we got back into the cut area. We continued down and got back to the truck just before 2:00. Days are very short this time of year, so between it being quite a workout and the fact sunset was in another couple of hours, I was happy with how the day progressed.

A fantastic day out in the woods! Nothing better than fresh new snow and no one else around.