After spending the last two days moving 11 yards of dirt to fill in the pond, I was ready for a relatively easy hike today. I decided that heading up the east end of the Rimrock trail to the overlook sounded like a great option. It is pretty steep but I hadn’t been on that section of trail for a while and it was relatively short (~ 4 miles out and back to the overlook). If I had time and still felt good, I figured I could head down Cottonwood Meadows a bit. It was supposed to be a beautiful fall day.

We headed out at our usual time and made it up to the trailhead a bit after 10. I cleaned up a downed log at the beginning of the trail and then we headed up the trail. This end of the trail is kind of interesting. It is very aggressive and then goes thru short flat areas before hitting the edge of the ridge. In one of the flat areas there was this interesting wet area (totally dry today):

And in that same area, you could see the beautiful fall colors in the huckleberries:

We soon got up the steep climb and hit the edge of the ridge. There is a rockslide in this area so you get some good views – here is Mt Hood to the north:

We continued our way up the trail. I had forgotten to mention – I cleaned up that first log on the trail, but as we went up, I did a little bit of clearing here and there. I wasn’t really planning to do any trail maintenance, but by the end of the day, I had cleared 25 logs off the trail! Some were rotten, some were small, but they added up pretty quickly. I was really surprised.

Once past the rockslide, the trail follows a flat area for a bit and then heads gradually downhill to its junction with the overlook trail. There were a couple of pretty significant/messy blowdown areas in this segment. Here is the worst of the two of them:

We soon got to the junction with the overlook trail and headed up. This segment of trail had recently been cut out so it was nice to go up to the overlook with no downed logs. The area shortly before the overlook always seems to get a lot of blowdown – you can see all the cut logs.

We headed up to the overlook just in time for lunch. We had a good lunch and then I decided to take in the scenery. I was looking down at Oak Grove Butte – on the south side of this was the Austin fire – I was looking for damage you could see. When I looked at the perimeters of the fire map, it showed the fire coming over the summit of Oak Grove Butte – I took several pictures of the area, including a few zoomed in pretty good to see if I could see damage. Thankfully, the burn damage seemed to be somewhat limited – maybe it will look worse next year but the area directly north of Oak Grove Butte (the side I could see) didn’t really look burned at all – maybe it was just a ground fire in there.

Here are a couple of pictures of the area around Oak Grove Butte:


Of course I had to take a picture of one of my favorite views – this is looking west back to the rest of the rocky outcropping:

And a nice view to the south where you could see Olallie Butte, Mt Jefferson and the Three Sisters:

I could have stayed up there longer just enjoying the view, but Thor was getting really hot. It was sunny and there was not much of a breeze today (which is kind of unusual for up there). So, we headed back down so Thor didn’t get overheated.

We went down and quickly got back to the main Rimrock trail and headed east. We made good time. When got to the edge of the ridge and started our descent. Shortly after our descent started there was a short, relatively flat area. I don’t know why, but I just liked this view of the fall colors in this area – I don’t think it made a terribly good picture, but being there in person was just very pleasing to me:

We made it back down to the 5830 road. It was still pretty early and I was feeling pretty good, so even though Thor headed over to the truck, I decided to continue on, going down the Cottonwood Meadows trail. We headed across the road and started down the trail. The trail at the beginning is pretty level but after a bit it starts heading down to the fist meadow. It was on this downhill where we encountered a new downed log that was kind of difficult to get over. At first I was going to leave it, but then I started thinking I could make one cut on it and make it a lot easier to pass. This is what it looked like before it was cut (I started cutting and then realized I should take a picture):

And this is what it looked like after I got done cutting and moving the one piece up the hill a way – it needs to be cut off more, but this was the best I could do with my handsaw – still a good improvement:

Shortly after that log, we arrived at the first Meadow, which had its fall colors in full bloom:

We headed across the meadow and continued down the trail. From this meadow, the trail heads downhill to the un-named lake – I always call it Cottonwood Meadows lake:

As we were walking past the lake, I saw a Blue Heron fly away – that was pretty cool – too bad I couldn’t get a picture of it…. We continued past the lake and arrived at the beginning of the third meadow – this was the turnaround point. One of the reasons I wanted to get to this point was I wanted to count how many logs were down on the trail. I was pretty sure there were no logs down south of this point. I know there are none south of the 260 spur crossing for sure. We turned around and headed back up the trail, counting logs as we went. When we got back up to the road I had counted 35 logs on the trail, most of them pretty small – only a few larger ones.

It was a relatively short day in the woods, but extremely enjoyable. I love hiking in the fall – the colors are beautiful, the bugs are gone and it is generally a lot cooler – easier to hike. (Although today I still managed to sweat quite a bit – that climb up the east end of Rimrock is tough). This was a great option for the day – not too long or strenuous but a couple of beautiful destinations on a gorgeous fall day.