Saturday, June 24, 2023
Greg and I headed up to the Vista Ridge Trail to check out the Avalanche Lilies.
At first we saw signs of recent maintenance:
We reached the junction with the Vista Ridge Trail where we started to see signs of lots of blowdown, and all evidence of recent maintenance stopped:
Looks like it may be a good beargrass year up here:
We kept hiking south towards the Timberline Trail climbing over blowdown and pushing through brush:
We saw one heather plant in bloom:
In the years after the 2011 wildfire there were way more lilies to see. This photo is from 2017:
But now they are getting pretty covered by the brush, mostly huckleberry bushes:
But we did come across some nice lilies along the trail:
After 1.9 miles we hit our first patch of snow at 5,300′:
Just after that we reached non-stop snow and decided to make this our turnaround point:
An avalanche lily popping up through the snow:
We headed back to the car and finally started seeing a few other hikers. Up to that point we’d just seen a couple of trail runners starting out from the trailhead as we got ready. All in all we saw less than a dozen people today.
On the drive out of course we had to stop at the roadside viewpoint to gawk at Mt. Hood:
Gaia stats: 3.8 miles, 745′ elevation gain
