{"id":1649,"date":"2014-05-18T18:29:42","date_gmt":"2014-05-19T01:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.peachylife.net\/blog\/?p=1649"},"modified":"2014-05-18T18:29:42","modified_gmt":"2014-05-19T01:29:42","slug":"little-badger-creek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/2014\/05\/18\/little-badger-creek\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Badger Creek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday\u00a0Greg and I drove around to the east side of the mountains for some sun and wildflowers. We hiked the Little Badger Creek trail, which turned out to be a very pleasant hike.<\/p>\n

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Greg remembered his boots, but not his socks, so he hiked in his Tevas. Good thing this wasn’t a steep or rocky hike!<\/p>\n

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The forest is quite nice here and the undergrowth is still lush and green.<\/p>\n

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Funny little mushrooms.<\/p>\n

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Fairy slippers!<\/p>\n

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The trail goes right along the creek in spots, and what a delightful creek it is! I wished I had brought my tripod for some slow shutter creek shots.<\/p>\n

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At one point we were visited by a hummingbird who kept flitting about. Man those little guys move fast! I managed to get two halfway decent shots. These were zoomed in all the way on my camera, then cropped further on the computer.<\/p>\n

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Here is the shot Greg got; his lens zooms twice as far as mine.<\/p>\n

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More views of this lovely creek. This is the kind of creek that I could sit by and just go zen for a long time.<\/p>\n

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We encountered a fair amount of blowdown. This was one of the more tricky ones to get over. I don’t think this trail seems much use or maintenance. (And we only saw one other couple the entire hike, a rare thing in the Mt. Hood Forest.)<\/p>\n

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At one point the trail used to stay along the creek the whole way, which it crossed a bunch of times (topo maps still reflect this). But around the two-mile mark it’s been re-routed up the hill. The trail climbs up through the trees and passes through several meadowy areas.<\/p>\n

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We got glimpses of the surrounding hills, including a burn area. Anyone know what fire that was and when it happened?<\/p>\n

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The balsamroot and lupine were definitely past their peak, but there weren’t totally bedraggled yet. Things bloomed early this year.<\/p>\n

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We saw other wildflowers too, including silvercrown, currant, and some purple flower I don’t know.<\/p>\n

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This stretch was really pretty.<\/p>\n

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The trail descended back down to creek level and the old miner’s cabin. The cabin was built in the 1920s by Tom Kinzel, a prospector and trapper. Here is what the Kinzel cabin looked like in the 1970s:<\/p>\n

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Today it is just a jumble of logs.<\/p>\n

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We sat by the creek for awhile, eating snacks and enjoying the surroundings. Before we headed back we went down the trail a short ways to check out the old mining tunnel. Looks creepy and unstable so we didn’t go in.<\/p>\n

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Headed back, with a little bit of a view of dry Central Oregon.<\/p>\n

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Great hike for a partly cloudy day where views up higher would have been blocked. The only downside to this trail is that it’s a pretty long haul to the trailhead from Portland. In the spring, though, it’s actually a very pretty drive because the fields between The Dalles and Dufur are still very green and beautiful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday\u00a0Greg and I drove around to the east side of the mountains for some sun and wildflowers. We hiked the<\/p>\n

Continue readingLittle Badger Creek<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[45],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1649\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cherylhill.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}