I was supposed to help my father in law with cleanup from the recent ice storms, but that fell thru. I had already arranged for the day off and the weather was beautiful, so I decided to do a hike. Since last weekend was a bust due to the snow, I decided to hike Eagle Creek which I was pretty sure would be snow free.

Since Tuesdays are the normal “Granddaughter/Granddog babysitting”, I decided I would take the “Granddog” on the hike too. It worked out pretty well. It was a beautiful day – one I couldn’t pass up.

We got to the trailhead about 10:00. I had heard that the new trailhead was down at the landing a bit down the hill, but there were two vehicles at the old trailhead. I decided to park there and walk down the road. The new landing/trailhead is about a third of a mile down from the old trailhead – it has a great view looking over to Old Baldy:

Once past the landing you continue down the old road for a ways – probably another three quarters of a mile or so and then you get into the good part of the trail – some real old growth – this is kind of a typical section of the trail:

We made good time, even though I had both dogs on leashes – since there were two cars at the trailhead, I assumed there were people ahead of me on the trail, and since Thor isn’t great around dogs he doesn’t know, it is safer to just keep him on a leash.

A little farther down the trail, we encountered something rather odd – it is hard to see in this photo but there are two cedar trees that got cut down – one right next to the trail (it might have been over the trail) – the other about 30′ uphill from the trail. And they weren’t cut like you’d be cutting a log off the trail, they were cut like you were cutting down a tree. I’m not sure what the deal was with these:

A little farther down the trail we got a good view of Eagle Creek from the trail – we had been able to hear if for quite some time but this was our first good look at it:

I had intended this to be a relatively short day, and we had covered almost 3 miles and it was getting near lunchtime, so I started looking for a good spot to eat. I came across a campsite down near the creek which would have been perfect, but as we started heading down, we encountered a hunter with a dog down in the campsite, so we went back up and continued down the trail for a bit. A bit further up the trail we had to cross the biggest side creek crossing of the day – it was running pretty fast:

Shortly after that crossing, we were at almost 4 miles and I found a good log to sit on. We sat a bit off the trail (in case someone else came by) and ate lunch – the dogs got their normal lunchtime treats. This was Thor at lunchtime:

We ate lunch and then turned around and headed back up. We didn’t see any other people on the way back in, and by the time we got to the truck, both other vehicles that were there earlier had left. I got the dogs loaded up and decided to try and drive down to the new landing – it is certainly doable – the entry is a bit narrow, but not too bad – there are still some pretty big water diverters in the road as well, but as long as you go slow it is fine. We drove down to the landing and turned around and headed out.

I think I did a good job of exercising the dogs. They were pretty tired after the hike:

I stopped in Estacada to see if Fearless was open (to get some fries) but they were still closed. So we ended up just coming home.

It was an excellent, unexpected day in the woods on a beautiful spring day (even though spring is a couple weeks away still).