Today’s hike is a milestone – if I’ve done my statistics correctly, today’s hike is my 500th hike/trip! That is pretty crazy! Wonder how long it will take me to get to 1000? It took me 22 years to get to 500, but some of those early years I didn’t do a ton of hiking.

I had debated on whether to go out today or not, but late Friday night I saw a posting from the Forest Service saying they had lifted all the closures from the Sandstone fire. I was so excited, I decided to head up to the Thunder Mountain/Skookum Lake trails (they kind of go together since you hike almost the whole Thunder Mountain trail before it connects to the Skookum Lake trail) to see what things looked like after the fire. Since it was a last minute thing, it was just Thor and I.

We headed out a bit early and got to the trailhead about 9:30. We suited up and quickly headed out. The first change (other than the brushed out roads I noticed on the way in), was a much cleaner trailhead area – you could see they had removed a bunch of brush:

What it looked like pre-fire (this was from 2011):

We headed up the trail and could see there had been a LOT of thinning/cleanup up done. You could see the road from the trail, which you’d never been able to see before. When we got into the first of the thimbleberry fields, it was obvious that they had been cleaned up a bit – you could actually see the trail! Normally, going thru these areas is a bit tough:

As we progressed higher, we started to see bits of snow here and there – nothing much, but it was a warning that winter is coming:

As we neared the junction with the Skookum Lake trail, some nice fall colors started appearing:

We decided to head up to the lookout first- I wanted to fly my drone and I was thinking the wind might be better earlier. So we headed up to the lookout and shortly after the junction we saw this short section of fire damaged trail – it looks like the fire came over the ridge and down the other side in this small area:

Thankfully that section had been repaired and it was all good.

We soon got up to the top of Thunder Mountain and the first thing I saw was this Geocache – I’m pretty sure that is new since the last time I was here:

I took some pictures of the views from on top of Thunder Mountain:


I then flew my drone – videos coming soon…
After looking around and flying my drone, Thor was anxious to keep going, so we packed up and headed back down. We quickly got back to the junction with the Skookum Lake trail and took the turn to head down to the lake. It wasn’t very long before we started seeing burn damage from the fire::


Thankfully, the areas were short and not too bad – and like the short section on Thunder mountain it looks like some repair work was done. We continued the long drop down to the lake. As we were heading down the south side of the hill, it got breezy at times which was almost chilly. We soon broke over the ridge to the north side and the wind mostly stopped.

We continued winding our way down to Skookum Lake – I forget how much elevation you lose going down to the lake. There are a bunch of short switchbacks as you head down. When you get closer to the lake, it gets VERY brushy, and I got pretty wet from moving thru all the brush. We soon came down to the lake level and hit the south end of the lake and headed around. As we walked it appears that most of the logs that got thrown into the lake sometime before 2011 in an avalanche have sunk. It used to have a LOT of floating logs and today there were only a few – or maybe they were all jammed up at the north end near the shore(s)? This is what the north end of the lake looked like:

We ate lunch at the old campsite at the north end of the lake. After lunch I decided to see if I could find the trail down to the old 350 spur – this would have been how people would have accessed the campsite(s) before all the roads were closed after the 1996 floods. I did find the trail heading down to the 350 spur, but it hasn’t been used in a long time:

After looking around a bit on the old 350 spur, we headed back up to the campsite, packed up and then started the long climb back up the hill. At the viewpoint on the switchback, I got a good picture of Olallie Butte and Mt Jefferson:

The rest of the trip down was pretty uneventful. We got back to the truck just before 1:30. It was still early and since they did such a nice job clearing out the 4620 road, I thought I’d see how far it went. It ended up going quite a bit farther than I thought, or that it showed on the map. It went almost a mile past the trailhead to an old landing:

From the landing you could get a really good look at the damage from the Sandstone fire – this was looking south:

We looked around a bit (well, I looked and Thor laid down in the truck) and then turned around and headed back. As we were driving back, I decided to stop and investigate the 360 spur – they had obviously reopened it for the fire for some reason and then closed it again:

The road was in pretty good shape – they cut out some rather large logs off the road during the fire. It was really interesting to see where it went. The view from the old landing was pretty spectacular – well worth the detour on the way home.

It was a really nice day in the woods – it didn’t rain (although I did get a bit wet from the wet brush), and we got to see some things I’d not seen before – can’t ask for more than that! Even better, the trails didn’t get adversely affected by the fires! A great day in the woods!