Friday, May 28, 2021
For Memorial Day Weekend we headed over to the Ochoco National Forest. We left bright and early Friday morning so we could get a jump on the weekend crowds and find a good campsite, which we did:
After we set up camp we drove east to the Boeing Field Trailhead below Wolf Mountain:
We could see the Wolf Mountain Lookout from there (we visited it on our 2011 trip here):
Boeing Field is a big meadow and is named for a B-18 bomber that crashed near here in 1942 (even though it wasn’t manufactured by Boeing):
There were some nice wildflowers to see here:
The hike starts out on the Owl Creek Trail:
Entering the wilderness right away:
The trail descends through a burn area from a 2008 wildfire:
There was a nice field of wildflowers just off the trail:
Trail crews haven’t been here yet and there were several fallen snags we had to negotiate:
We crossed Owl Creek:
At 0.6 miles we reached the junction with the Black Canyon Trail and turned left:
We saw plenty of false hellebore:
Greg trying to photograph Brown’s Peony:
We reached the edge of the burn 0.2 miles past the junction and then had to negotiate this muddy quagmire:
We appreciated the shade of the unburned forest:
Cool fungi growing right on the trail (I believe this may be Gyromitra montana):
We crossed Owl Creek again:
There was one area where a bunch of mushrooms were pushing up earth and forest duff, which was pretty cool:
We reached the crossing of Black Canyon Creek at 2.6 miles. We had lost 1,000′ of elevation and it was already late afternoon so we decided to make this our turnaround point:
We back-tracked to the car and headed towards our campsite. On the way stopped to check out Paulina Butte, following the old disused access road 0.2 miles to the top:
There was once a 75′ tower here but it’s long gone:
The footings are still there:
Back at our campsite we made dinner and enjoyed the gorgeous summer evening. We discovered one disadvantage of a campsite with a view of Big Summit Prairie, which is private grazing land. We could hear cows mooing down there and they were pretty loud. Better than listening to human-made noise, though!