On Saturday, Greg and I went hiking in the Gorge with two friends and their two fun dogs. We decided to hike to the Pinnacles, starting from Herman Creek Campground.
It seemed from the weather forecast that the worst of the rain was over, so we were glad to have dry conditions as we started out on the hike. It wasn’t clear and sunny, but at least it wasn’t raining! The fog and clouds hovering over the hills looked pretty dang cool.
We crossed Herman Creek, which was much more like a river than a creek. It was RAGING. Here’s Greg’s shot of it.
Then we continued our climb upwards to meet the PCT. When we got to a certain elevation, we started seeing the work of the previous night’s freezing rain, which had encased everything in ice.
The ice was beautiful, but it had one unanticipated side effect. The ice melting off the tree branches above us gave us quite a soaking. It was strange to be “rained on” in the forest and to be completely dry out in the open rockslide areas. No amount of waterproofing has helped my rain jacket, so I ended up pretty wet by the end of the hike!
Puny little Pacific Crest Falls was flowing nicely and looked pretty impressive. Greg decided to clamber up the canyon to its base and get a photo while the rest of us continued on to the Pinnacles. I took the photo below from the trail (zoomed-in all the way), and you can just barely see Greg in black at the bottom right.
Here’s the shot he got.
We arrived at the Pinnacles and spent some time exploring and finding a geocache, which hadn’t been logged since May!
Then we headed back to the trailhead through the “rain forest”. Here’s one last shot of some awesome-looking trees above a rockslide.
We didn’t see anybody else the whole hike except towards the end when we were almost back to the car we saw a group who said they were headed up to Indian Point. It was close to 2:00 at that point and I hope they abandoned that plan since there was no way they were going to get up to Indian Point and back before dark.
