The weather today was supposed to be sunny and unseasonably hot. I wanted to get up into snow somewhere, and decided to either do the White Iris trail or the Bissell trail, depending on which we could get to. It turned out that there was ZERO snow on the 4615 road, so we had no problems getting to the Bissell trailhead, which is where we started the trip. Since Kirk had to get back for some family festivities, we headed out a little early. I wasn’t planning to bring my snowshoes, but Kirk brought his, so I ended up bringing mine as well (more on that later).

We got to the Bissell trailhead a little after 9 and suited up and headed out. At the very beginning of the old spur road (which is where the trail starts) there looked like some tread to the left of the road, so we followed that for a bit. It kind of died out, so we headed back to the road and shortly picked up the trail at the end of the short spur. We headed up the trail,up thru the old “spring” area where I encountered the ATVs several years ago, and about a half mile in, Kirk noticed what kind of looked like tread and some flags heading north. We decided to follow it to see where it went. It was a very wide, very well built bench – our theory is that it was built by ATVers as a trail. This is one of the spots on the trail:

We followed it for a while, wondering where it went. After about a half mile, it started heading downhill and kind of west. We were thinking maybe it looped back to the 4615 road. We didn’t really want to lose all that elevation, so we decided to head straight uphill to the ridge that went up to Old Baldy. The old maps show the Old Baldy trail continuing west after Old Baldy and we thought we might be able to find some pieces of tread. Once we got on the ridge, we found this interesting rock outcropping:

We looked around a bit and got a glimpse of Mt Hood thru the trees:

We then followed the ridge up to Old Baldy, passing the ridge above the lake below Old Baldy, the one we visited in 2017 – it was one of Thor’s early trips and he fell thru the ice on the lake (which kind of freaked me out, but didn’t seem to phase him). We tried to look for the lake below, but it was hiding in the trees – the bowl it sits in is pretty steep.

We continued up the ridge and shortly made it to the summit of Old Baldy. We didn’t really find anything resembling tread along the way – we did find some blazes but we weren’t sure if those were marking the old Wilderness boundary or something else.

This is what it looked like on top of Old Baldy:

We stopped, had a snack/early lunch and then headed back down. We followed the Old Baldy trail as it (mostly) follows the ridge. At some point, we passed this very interesting looking snag:

We continued on the trail, encountering zero snow, until we started getting closer to the White Iris junction. This was our first real snow on the trail:

Which very shortly turned into this:

It was somewhere in this area where we decided to put on our snowshoes. While we could have continued without them – the snow was mostly pretty well compacted, the snowshoes did make it easier.

The snow kept getting deeper as we approached the White Iris Junction. This is what it looked like there – probably 4-5′ of snow in some places – the only bare spots were where water had been running (the creek and the area west of the creek next to the trail which is usually very wet:

We walked around a bit and decided we needed to head back. The trip back was mostly uneventful, however it was really nice to walk in all the beautiful trees on a beautiful spring day.

As we were headed back, Kirk noticed a viewpoint to the north. We stopped and got some great views of the Eagle Creek drainage as well as the mountains. Visibility was pretty good.

First, Thor decided to make a nest in the snow – I think he was hot and tired:

Next, the mountains from the viewpoint. First, Mt Hood:


Next, here are the 3 other mountains you could see from that viewpoint – St Helens, Ranier (kind of faint – it was better in person) and Adams:

After soaking in the views, we continued down the trail, doing a little maintenance here and there. We managed to notice the Bissell junction as we were heading west, but as we got lower, the trail kind of became indistinct – we had to do a bit of searching to find it in a few places, but eventually followed it all the way down.

We made it to the truck just a few minutes later than we planned, but it all worked out well. A great day in the woods on a BEAUTIFUL day!