Youngs Rock and Moon Point

July 3, 2011

On day 3 of our Oakridge weekend, we headed up to Youngs Rock.

Youngs Rock is in the hills southeast of Oakridge. Probably about a 45-minute drive. There’s a trail that starts up at Warner Mountain, off Road 439 and descends about six miles down to Road 21. It’s very popular with mountain bikers. We took a back door route onto the trail: Road 2129 loosely parallels the trail and a short side road goes up and intersects the trail. The side road has very deep tire ruts, so we parked on Road 2129 and walked the 0.1 mile up the side road to pick up the trail and head north to Youngs Rock.

The mosquitoes were absolutely dreadful on this hike. I had no headnet and we were very low on bug spray. It was very warm, but I had to wear my pant legs and long sleeves for a good chunk of the hike to avoid being eaten alive.

The trail climbs up and up, passing through several meadows, some with views:

After a few miles we could see Youngs Rock ahead of us:

And then the trail was passing right below it:

The trail doesn’t get any closer to the rock than you see in the photo, to my disappointment. You can scramble up to the base of it in some places, and there’s even a goecache somewhere up on it, but we were unable to find a way to reach it.

After a viewless lunch in the forest, we decided to push on to Moon Point. The trail wrapped around to the west side of the slope and the vegetation instantly became much more lush and green:

It was getting pretty warm, and the mosquitoes were making things worse, so we took temporary relief from a stream that we crossed, splashing our faces and necks with the cold water. Oh boy did that feel good!

After climbing up through the forest, we finally reached the side trail to Moon Point and we instantly hit some large patches of snow. (We were at about 5,000 feet). UGH. Fortunately they were fairly easy to navigate and other people had come before, so we didn’t lose our way. Where snow had recently melted we saw plenty of glacier lilies:

The trees here were big and tall:

And then the trail ended at Moon Point and finally we had some views! Here is the view looking back towards Youngs Rock. Beyond is the very tip of Mt. Thielsen and a snowy peak that is either Mt. Scott or Mt. McLoughlin (we could never figure out which):

The view to the west:

Here’s Greg right after finding the geocache hidden here:

And a picture of us, courtesy of my camera propped on rocks. A breeze here kept the mosquitoes away, hence our happy smiles and uncovered skin.

After enjoying the views we headed back, swarmed by skeeters once again. Back at the car we only did the quickest of stretches before we hopped in and sped away to flee the bugs. Our totals for the day: 7.1 miles and 2,300 feet elevation gain.

On the way home we stopped at Hills Creek Lake to use the restroom at the boat ramp and I took a quick picture because the water was SOOOO blue. Mighty fine weather.