Today’s hike was intended to complete the recon of the Fish Creek Mountain trail post fire. Kirk and I had attempted to complete this trip a few weeks ago but ran out of time. Since the gate at the 4620 road has been open for the last few weeks, we decided to try and see if we could drive up to the real Fish Creek Mountain trailhead and hike up from there.

The forecast for the day was supposed to be hot, so we headed out early, leaving about 7am and hoping we would be done before the hottest part of the day.

When we got to the 4620 road, the gate was indeed open so we headed up the road. I should have taken some pictures – they cut pretty aggressively all up 4620 until you get out of the burned area. What was interesting was that at the trailhead itself, it did not burn:

We suited up and headed out. We headed up the trail – the first part was in good shape – no downed logs, no burn damage. That changed pretty quickly when we started entering the burn area:

We had a track of the trail pre-fire, and that helped a bit. We were able to locate the tread for a bit but soon got confused in a flat area (I seem to recall this being a bit rough when this trail was first reclaimed/recovered) – we worked our way thru that and found tread again but soon came to our first real impediment:

Zack cut out a couple logs and I did some lopping (and flagging) and we soon got past that – the route up the hill was pretty indistinct – we did find intermittent tread but the first couple of switchbacks are definitely very vague. After that impediment, it seemed we were on tread. We worked our way up the hill – I think we were finally on the trail:

When we got nearer the spot where we pop over to the old road on the ridge, things got a bit indistinct for a while but we found our way over to the road and started following it. Kirk and I had come down this road about a month ago when we came in via the “side door” – walking an old road from the south end of the 4620 road. Surprisingly, this road isn’t in too bad of shape after the fires. A lot of stuff burned but there is still some green trees and shade and you can easily see the path down the road. It could use some brushing in places but overall is in reasonably good shape, especially since it hasn’t had any boots on it for almost 4 years now.

We went down the road and soon came to the spot where the road forks and the “real” trail takes off between the roads. We headed up the trail and the first bit of trail is actually in really good shape – easy to follow with just a bit of stuff growing in the tread. There are still many green trees in here so there is still some shade as well, which helped a lot with the heat. The other nice thing was that there was a periodic nice breeze which helped keep us cool.

Kirk and I had made it about three quarters of a mile up this portion of the trail before we had to turn around where the tread started to get indistinct. We continued past that spot and continued hanging flags. At some point, I noticed this tree with a very interesting burn pattern:

A little farther up the trail, Zack noticed this insulator right next to the trail – I don’t think I’d ever noticed this one before:

And at some point along the ridge, Thor decided to view his “kingdom” – I thought it was kind of funny:

Here is a segment of the trail along the ridge before the burn got more intense:

As we progressed higher, the burn intensity increased, but the tread was actually better in this area since there was very little brush – this is a segment heading up that was really good:

We continued up the trail – the going was pretty good. About a third of a mile before the lookout, there is a “junction” that heads down to high lake. This is what the junction looked like – not much of a junction:

Once past the mess at the junction, the tread actually improved quite a bit for a while. This is what a decent portion of the tread down to high lake looked like:

It was maybe half way down where the tread kind of disappeared, either being covered with debris from the fire or just obliterated. We looked for tread but couldn’t really find much, so we followed (mostly) the path of the trail (using old tracks) and soon got down to High Lake:


We stopped here for lunch at the old campsite, which was hardly recognizable. Once we finished lunch we headed north to see if we could find any parts of the Back door trail. Thankfully, we were able to find some pretty good tread heading north:

We weren’t intending to follow it all the way out, but we decided to head north a bit and then just head uphill to the ridge to get to the lookout. When we hiked to the lookout in 2023, we ended up hiking up the ridge and due to all the fires, it was pretty easy. There was almost no brush and the grade isn’t too bad.

The climb up to the ridge was pretty steep in places but probably not a whole lot harder than going back up the trail would have been. As we were ascending the hill, I noticed this interesting rock formation east of high lake – It has never been visible before – I don’t think it has a name:

Soon, we attained the ridge and completed the trip up to the lookout. We looked around a bit, mostly at all the garbage that was deposited over the years which is now all visible due to the fires. The memorial stone from the Brubakers is still here and in good shape – it looks like one edge had a little bit of chipping but is otherwise in fine shape:

Here is the remains of the lookout foundation:

Zack found this interesting flat spot, which looks a lot like the campsite on the 511 trail that we found. I wonder if they created this as a place for “overflow” – maybe tents for people that wouldn’t fit in the lookout:

While we were up there, I flew my drone, but didn’t really get any good panoramic shots – it was too smoky – I should have done a 360 photo but with all the smoke I don’t think it would have been very good. I did get a decent shot of the top of Fish Creek Mountain:

As well as a nice shot of High Lake:

After looking around a bit more, I was ready to head down and get out of the heat. We started our way down. This was near the lookout as we headed out:

The trip back down was relatively uneventful – it took a bit longer than I thought it would but we made good time. It was a great day of exploration – we (Zack) found several insulators that I don’t think I’d ever seen before. The weather was pretty warm, but the nice breeze we had a lot of the day made it feel a lot better. The only real downer of the day was how smoky it was. I was guessing it must have been smoke from the fires east of us since the winds at the beginning of the day seemed to be coming from the east.

I thought I had brought a lot of water for the day but I drank up everything I had and could have used more. I didn’t bring water specifically for Thor – I gave him some of mine earlier in the day and as we were heading down, Zack gave him a bit of his water. On the way home, we stopped at Whale Creek near the southern Clackamas River trailhead and Thor laid in the water for a bit and got a really good drink.

This trail will need some pretty good work to keep it viable. I think we are up to the task….