This hike was a quickie “hiking light” day – before the Super Bowl. I haven’t hiked since New Years day due to weather and being sick, so I decided to do a quick trip up Mosier Creek before the Super Bowl started. It was really nice to be able to get out for a little while.

We made the short drive to the trailhead – Thor was really excited to be able to ride in the truck – he was even MORE excited when he saw all the trees! I had to put him on his leash at the beginning since I didn’t want him to run out onto the road.

We started up the old road – mountain bikers have cleared some logs and created “ramps” over others (using small sticks to build up the ramps). We soon got to the second crossing of Mosier Creek (didn’t take a picture of the first crossing):

Just past the creek crossing there was a section on the road with significant blowdown from a few years ago. There is a nice little re-route the mountain bikers did around all of it – I like the sign too – I saw two of them along this trail:

Thor decided to take the side trail down to the lake, so I followed him (I was hoping we could get to the lake):

When we got to the border of the BLM property, we were greeted with a recent clearcut – I remember this from the last time we were here – I didn’t think these trees were big enough to cut, but obviously I was wrong:

We followed a bit of a trail that quickly disappeared somewhere near where this picture was taken – looking down to the lake:

We crawled our way thru all the brush on the ground and made it down to another road, which we took down to closer above the lake. From there, we crawled thru all the brush down to the lake – but this area was difficult to go thru as well since it is now getting lots of sunlight so the brush has gone crazy. I decided to head back up, but we probably took the worse line back up – it was pretty brutal. At some point I made my way back over into the uncut area where there wasn’t brush anymore. From there we worked our way back to the trail and then had a smooth trip back down to the truck.

It was a short day, but we were fortunate to not get rained on, and it was really nice to get back into the woods – if only for an hour and a half.