July 2, 2011
After a rough night at the Black Canyon Campground, where we learned a tough lesson about how much louder trains are when the sound is contained in a canyon, we woke up to day 2 of our trip with warm weather and sunny skies. We met up with Tanya Harvey, local botany expert, and headed up to Tire Mountain.
The hike starts out on the Alpine Trail, a popular mountain biking route. After hiking through the forest for a little bit, you come out in this gorgeous meadow with views to the east. Our timing was PERFECT and the meadow was chock full of wildflowers, especially rosy plectritis.
Views to the east include Diamond Peak (the small white blob on the horizon)…
…as well as most of the Three Sisters, Broken Top, and Mt. Bachelor:
After the meadow, we left the Alpine Trail and headed down the Tire Mountain trail, which passes through some forest…
…and several different meadows with various different wildflowers until you get to one HUGE meadow:
Not used to seeing balsamroot blooming in July, but here it is:
And of course lots of other wildflowers. This place was absolutely packed with blooms!
Looking back across the meadow:
A group of about a dozen mountain bikers came through at one point:
From this meadow our view was to the south, out over the rolling forested hills:
We climbed up to the ridge at the top of the meadow, and found a rocky point facing west where we ate out lunch in the sunshine, which felt oh so good after all the months of cold gray weather we’ve had!
While we were here, we noticed these specks of white in the sky. As they drew closer, we saw it was a flock of pelicans. Cool!
After lunch we made our way back across the meadow along the top of it before dropping down to the trail to head back. We saw still MORE wildflowers up here:
We had a peek at what Tanya said was Fairview Mountain:
Another look at the meadow, with the trail below and the ridge above:
Back on the trail we were shaded by conifers and bigleaf maples:
After we got back to the campground, we cooled off in the Middle Fork Willamette River, which felt really great:
And after dinner we checked out nearby hidden Bridge Creek Falls:
All in all a great day in the sun!
