Today’s hike was a relatively simple plan – one which I’ve done before. The idea is to drive up the 4614 road as far as you can to catch the Fanton trail, and then hike it up as far as you have time/energy for. One year we made it all the way up to Squaw Mountain, but most years we don’t get that far as we have a ways to hike up the Fanton trail and then getting over to Squaw Mountain is difficult in the snow. Days are short in the winter and snowshoeing takes much more energy than just hiking does.

I don’t know exactly why, but today’s hike was just a huge joy for me. Even though the weather didn’t provide any views, the sheer beauty of the pristine snow, the huge old trees, coupled with seeing the joy of the dogs romping and playing in the snow just made my heart sing. It was a good day for me – one which I am thankful for.

We made it farther up the road than I thought, but I didn’t feel too comfortable going any farther than the 4614-150 spur – there was probably 6+” of snow here – deeper in spots on the road:

We let the dogs out, suited up and headed down the 150 spur. The snow on this road was deeper and no one had driven on it for a while. About a half mile down the road, we came to the trail crossing and headed into the woods:

The snow looked a lot deeper on the other side of the road!

We headed east on the trail, heading up a bit. Once we got into the big trees, the snow pretty much disappeared, which was kind of weird:

As we made our way east, there are a few spots that on a clear day give you a bit of a view. We didn’t get much of a view today – it was very foggy:

We continued east, going up and down a bit, mostly following 4614 which was just a bit to our north. It wasn’t too long before we reached “the corner” – this is the spot where 4614 turns north and the Fanton trail continues east. This is what road 4614 looked like at the corner:

There is a short spur road to an old landing where we had lunch:

This was our view at lunch (not much):

We ate lunch, and since it was still relatively early we decided to continue east on the Fanton trail – we knew we couldn’t make it to Squaw Mountain, but our goal was to make it to the junction with the Old Baldy trail. We continued up, following a small creek for a bit and then heading uphill. As we got higher, the snow got quite a bit deeper:

We soon made it to the Old Baldy junction. There is a saddle near the junction and Kirk wanted to see if we could see anything looking over the saddle. We headed north on old Baldy to the saddle, but there were WAY too many trees to see anything. We walked the ridge a little ways and then just came straight downhill back to the Fanton trail and started our trip back down.

A little ways down the hill, there is a meadow to the south. I’ve seen it before and always kind of wondered what it was. Kirk thought we should go explore it on the way down. It was an interesting meadow – wasn’t a ton to see today since everything was covered in snow, but it would be a good place to do some exploring another day:

After exploring the meadow a bit we found the trail again and continued west. When we got to the corner, we contemplated wlaking the road back, but I wanted to take the “missing” piece of trail we did on the way in. In one spot we took an old road, but the trail took off the road at one spot which we missed. So we headed back to find that. Once past that spot, we looked for another access point back to 4614. We didn’t have to wait long and found an old spur which headed back down to 4614. This was the place we started on our new years day trip in 2016. We headed down the spur to 4614 and then started walking it back. A little ways down the road we encountered a truck trying to come up the road – he was having reasonable success, although slow. We continued down the road after he passed us and we didn’t encounter any more vehicles. It wasn’t too long before we got back to the truck. I think we were all ready for a break. My feet were tired of wearing snowshoes and my legs were pretty tired.

On the way back down I thought I’d try the “gimmicky” features on my truck that they call Terrain Management and Trail Control. I set it to Grass, Gravel and Snow mode and set Trail Control (kind of like an off road cruise control) to 7 MPH and let it go. It took off and didn’t even spin the tires in the snow. It did so well, I asked Kirk if he wanted to go up to the bottom end of the Fanton trail – I expected more snow there and that was uphill, so we headed up 4613. It did just as well up that hill, in reasonably deep snow without even spinning a tire. I was really impressed and will be using this again – especially in snow.

We continued down 4613 just to see what it was like, but there was a lot less snow once we got over the high point. We decided to just continue and head back down 4610 to 224. It was a rather slow ride, as 4610 has gotten pretty bad with lots of potholes in it.

We made it back to Estacada and Time Travel Brewing for an early dinner. It was a great way to end an awesome day of exploring.