While visiting the Ochoco National Forest, we hiked Spanish Peak. The drive up the mountain was a VERY bumpy 20 minutes and 3.5 miles to the Rim Trail trailhead mentioned in Sullivan’s book, about 1.5 mi from the summit. He writes that the road beyond that was pretty bad, and we wanted to stretch our legs, so we were going to do a loop by hiking up the road and then hiking back on the trail. But first we had to wait in the car for a thunderstorm to pass over, which it did quickly, thankfully, and then we headed up the road.
Not long after starting up, we discovered a snowdrift blocked the road. So, we couldn’t have driven to the top even if we wanted to! (We did find, though, that the last bit of road to the top wasn’t any worse than what we had driven before. If not for the snowbank, we could have made it.)
There were huge white puffy clouds to the north.
Can you spot tiny Greg against the big white cloud?
We could see the storm cloud that had passed over us earlier, and hear its thunder.
Up and up we go….
…until we reached the summit where the fire lookout used to be.
There were 360-degree views up on there. We could see Rock Creek Lake to the northwest:
And the Sheep Rock Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds, as well as Picture Gorge:
The open area on the slopes here is where the road comes up, the route we hiked to get up here:
Looking south to Wolf Mountain (our next stop):
Here’s Greg looking north. The stretch of Highway 26 between Mitchell and Dayville is down in the canyon there somewhere.
The summit was dotted with lupine and a few other wildflowers, plus manzanita bushes. Despite the clouds stacked up on the horizon, obscuring really long-range views, it was still really really awesome up there. Just a light breeze, no radio towers, no other people, high above the world.
We were unable to find where the Rim Trail connected with the road just below the summit, and we couldn’t even see where the trail was supposed to be in the landscape below us, even though we should have. So we just walked back on the road. On the way back down we saw a guy and his son in their truck stopped at the snowfield. We briefly spoke to them and told them about a jeep track we saw that would take them around the snowfield, but they already knew about it. Back at the car we could see that they had backed down the road to take that jeep track, which climbs straight up this hill. We could hear his engine roaring from a distance.
At the car we also saw another truck, driving up from below with their dogs running ahead. They paused to shout “howdy” out the window before continuing on. Guess we had good timing having the summit to ourselves!
We trekked a short distance along the Rim Trail from the car, but it was very hard to follow. There was barely a path. You can kind of see where it should be beyond Greg, the grassy strip between the bushes, but it would have been hard to keep following. I think the bad road probably keeps many people from hiking this trail.
The lupine around there sure looked nice, though.
As did the paintbrush.
