Today’s hike was another long day of driving to explore the east side of the district after the Riverside fire. We did a similar tour two weeks ago, trying to rest my ankles. My ankles have been doing pretty well, so I thought doing a short hike, if I was careful would be OK. We went to different areas and had a few surprises during the day.

As with last time, we didn’t have much of a plan, but I kind of wanted to see the Collowash river. With that vague goal in mind, we set off on the long drive around Mt Hood. We made it to the turnoff at the 42 road and headed south. When we got to Clackamas Lake, we zipped by, but I thought I saw some sigh about a closure. A little farther up the road, there was a sign saying “road closed 20 miles ahead”. Since they JUST opened this us, I figured it must have been something on 46 – maybe doing some cleanup or something – I was wrong.

We made it about a mile from the junction with road 46 and then came to a road closed sign – and the road is definitely closed! They are working on replacing the bridge at Last Creek:

After looking at that area for a bit, we had to figure out how to get down to 46. The only way we could see was to go back to road 4220, take that down to 4690 and take 4690 down to 46 – a detour on an already long detour. The good news is that 4220 used to be a pretty bad road, but they had done quite a bit of work on it last summer during the Lionshead fire. It looks like they were going to use it as a firebreak if needed. This made the detour not nearly as bad as we were fearing – the last time I drove 4220 it was a rocky, potholed mess of a road.

We got to the junction with 4690 and saw the gate to Olallie closed. We continued down 4690 to 46 – part way there we were greeted by a truck with its flashers on and he said there was a semi truck behind him so we needed to move over. Fortunately there was plenty of room to get off the road at that point. The semi passed with what looked like a big grader – we were guessing maybe they were going to work on the road to Olallie.

We got to 46, headed north and soon got to 4670. From there we headed west – one interesting thing we saw along the way – someone was parked at the old road up to Tarzan Springs – we were wondering if someone was hiking the old trail up to Burnt Granite. At the same place we stopped for lunch two weeks ago, we stopped again – this is the spot the Rho Ridge trail almost comes to the road – it is right above the road and there is an old trail sign there. We hiked north on the trail to the summit of Mt Lowe – I haven’t been there in a long time – if my reports are correct I’ve only been there once and it was in 2007!

This is what the old Old lookout site on Mt Lowe looks like now:

We stopped and ate lunch and after lunch we looked around and also noted all the mountain views. I got this cool annotated peak view from Mt Lowe of the Fish Creek Mountain ridge:

After enjoying the view for a bit, we decided to head back. The dogs were hot due to the sun and we had more places to see. On the way back, eagle eye Kirk noticed this old yellow diamond trail marker and insulator:

And at an open spot on the way back to the truck, we got this spectacular view of Mt Jefferson, Broken top and Three Sisters from Rho Ridge trail:

We soon got back to the truck and packed up and started heading down to the Collowash – down 6350 to 63. Along the way we did see (surprisgly enough) a few campers along the river. Little Fan campsite had several people and there was at least one other dispersed camping area that had someone, but it is NOTHING like it would have been on a normal 4th of July weekend.

We finally made it to the road closure at the junction of the 63 and 46 roads:

We walked past the gate up to road 46. This is what the burned area to the north of that area looks like:

And then looking north on 46:

Kirk wanted to go swimming for a bit, so we went down to the river and I put my feet in the river while the dogs cooled off a bit:

Kirk swam across the Collowash and then went all the way over to the other side of the Clackamas. Ollie was a little stressed about that. You can’t really see this in the photo, but Ollie swam all the way across the river to the other side to be with Kirk:

After a quick swim, we loaded back up into the truck and started our trip home. On the way in, there was a spot called “Bob Meadow” which looked like it was close to a spur road that we thought was open, so we decided to check it out. Unfortunately, the spur road was tank trapped pretty quickly, so we just ended up walking up the road. At one point we had to go cross country to Bob Meadow. We finally found it, but was a bit of a let down. It wasn’t really anything special, just a swampy area:

It was pretty buggy too, so we didn’t stay very long. We found the easiest way back to the road and then walked back to the truck. By this time it was after 4:00 and we still had a fair amount of driving to get home. We went back the long detour. When we got back to Clackamas Lake, we stopped to look at the sign I buzzed by on the way in. If we had paid attention this sign it would have saved us about 7 miles of driving:

Oh well, it was a day of exploration and it was kind of cool to see that bridge under construction. We made it back over Mt Hood and decided to stop at Fearless for dinner. By the time we got there it was almost 7:00 I think. It was a long day of driving – I didn’t keep exact count, but I think it was about 260 miles.

It was an interesting day of exploration and it was cool to see part of Rho Ridge and Mt Lowe as well as the Collowash.