Today’s hike was simply a “get out in the woods” hike. I’ve been feeling like I’m getting sick and I was hoping that maybe a day in the woods in the fresh air might do me some good. The weather forecast for the day looked pretty good and I’ve been wanting to hike the Red Lake trail post fire (after I stopped there on my way to the south end of Rho Ridge last summer and saw that it had work done on it). Given how I was feeling, I wasn’t sure how far I would get, but I figured I’d give it a try.

We headed out a bit earlier since the days are pretty short now. If I was going to do the whole trail, I was figuring it would be a bit over 11 miles. Rounding things, I was hoping we could average 2MPH so that meant 6 hours of hiking. I figured it was probably 90 mins each way so that added another 3 hours. We got to the 380 spur and as we were driving down it, I had to cut a log off the road (I didn’t get the before picture, just this one after) – it was a heavily burnt log that had come down – it was an easy cut:

After quickly cutting out the log we got to the trailhead about 10:00 and quickly suited up and headed out. This is what I saw last year which gave me hope that the trail wouldn’t be too bad (as well as hiking kind of the center section of it a couple months ago when we went up to Potato Butte):

When we got there it wasn’t quite as nice as it had been last year – a few new logs were down right at the start – Not a good way to start the day:

The good news is that past those initial logs, the initial ascent in this area wasn’t too bad. You could tell that quite a bit of work had been done in this first section. There were some more logs down, but they were all pretty easy to step over and the tread was mostly visible and easy to follow.

This first section is a pretty good uphill climb. It wasn’t too long before we got up to the 076 spur near the powerlines. You follow this road up 100′ or so to another road that crosses the powerlines (that doesn’t show up on the map). The trail continues across the powerline from this road. Both roads have been recently improved and the mystery road had this interesting treatment – they put big rocks in kind of a culvert across the road – it didn’t look like a drainage point but there must ave been a reason for them doing it:

And here is where the trail takes off from that road to cross the powerline corridor:

The trail across the powerline corridor wasn’t too bad and then it re-enters what used to be forest but is now all burnt. This part of the trail until you get to Red Lake is kind of steep:

When we were part way up, we did our first crossing of a small creek – I wasn’t sure what this was when we were hiking but I looked back and this is the creek that flows down thru all the lakes and becomes Cub Creek – this trail was originally called the Cub Creek trail – now I can see why:

Past that creek crossing the trail had gotten some pretty good maintenance and even though it was all burnt in there, it was pretty good heading up to Red Lake:

As we were walking we saw LOTS of elk sign – more on this later:

The trail eventually kind of flattens out when it gets to the “lake plateau” where all the lakes are. When we got up on top, near Red Lake, it was quite a mess – this was the roughest part of the trail for sure:

We couldn’t find the side trail to the lake (although I didn’t look too hard). We kept moving thru the area – there were several rough spots – at one point we lost the trail – I ended up looking at the old track to figure out where we went wrong – the trail took a slight turn and we kept going straight. We found the trail again and continued on. It wasn’t too long before we were approaching Averill Lake, which hadn’t burned too much:

And of course it wouldn’t be appropriate to not take a picture of Averill Lake:

This is the Campsite at Averill where we camped here with scouts back in 2011 – it was mostly unburned:

We continued down the trail and did another crossing of Cub Creek between the lakes:

It wasn’t long before we got to Wall Lake:

And very quickly arrived at Sheep lake – this is where the trail to Potato Butte heads up. When I was here a couple of months ago with Zack, this sign was sitting on the ground – someone had set it on a nail in the tree:

We continued past Sheep Lake and did another crossing of Cub Creek below Fork Lake:

And it wasn’t long before we arrived at Fork Lake, which was mostly unburned:

After leaving Fork Lake, we got to the very confusing trail junction where the Lodgepole trail ends. To continue on the Red Lake trail, you basically make a U turn, which seems kind of odd, but that is how they did the junction. Once you leave that junction the trail starts heading up to the next lakes basin near Olallie. Heading up from here the trail gets very rocky in places and can get a bit steep:

It was somewhere in this segment where we stopped for lunch. There was a mostly sunny spot and it was about noon, so we stopped for a quick lunch. I had been watching the clock pretty carefully since I wanted to make sure we were back to the truck by 4. The days are very short this time of year. We were making really good progress. Our turnaround time was 1:00 and I was pretty sure we would beat that.

After a quick lunch, we continued east on the trail. There is kind of an interesting un-named pond with Twin Peaks behind it – a great photo op:

And on the east end of this pond – I remember this from earlier trips – the trail goes right thru the end of the pond this time of year:

We walked around the end of the trail because it was too deep to walk thru without getting VERY wet. Once we got to this pond, the trail kind of leveled out again. We crossed the PCT and continued on the trail. The PCT crossing was pretty much the high point of the trail. At some point there was a peek at Mt Jefferson but it was mostly hiding in the clouds:

We soon got to another confusing junction with the Top Lake trail. We briefly went the wrong way but quickly corrected and headed along the north side of Top Lake:

At the east end of Top Lake we got a bit of a surprise – a recent elk harvest – it was very fresh -someone thought it might have been from earlier in the day. It got Thor all excited when he smelled it. He interrupted a big bird (Turkey Vulture maybe?) that was feasting on the remains – the bird wasn’t too happy with us interrupting his meal:

After getting Thor off the elk carcass, we continued east. At some point we ran into another water crossing – I think this one was at least 8-10″ deep – when Thor walked thru it, it was up to his chest – I opted to walk around it:

Once past that water obstacle it was pretty clear sailing down to Olallie Lake. The trail heads downhill a bit past several small un-named ponds. We soon popped out onto the 4220 road at Olallie lake – the eastern trailhead:

We walked up the road a bit to a clear spot and I took this nice view of Olallie Butte, Olallie Resort and Olallie Lake – the afternoon had shaped up to be very nice – hardly a cloud in the sky:

We had beaten our turnaround time by about 15 minutes – it was about 12:45 so we started heading back. I was guessing we would make up even more time since most of the trip back would be downhill. We had to climb back up to the high point where the trail crosses the PCT and from then on, it would be pretty much all downhill back to the truck.

It was pretty easy to get back to the high point – it was only about a 300′ climb. We got back to the high point and made really good time back to the truck. We made up another 45 minutes and got back to the truck right about 3:00. We had done 11.5 miles in almost exactly 5 hours, averaging 2.3 miles an hour – pretty good! By the time we were back at the truck Thor and I were both ready to be done – it was a good workout. I was tired but I was feeling pretty good. Once at the truck, we packed up and headed out.

A great day of exploration on a trail I hadn’t visited in almost 15 years! Even with the burn, it is still a worthwhile destination.