Sunny weather. Good view at top of Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson. Lower section of Trail . first two miles . is very overgrown with brush. Wear long pants to protect your legs. Upper section is steep with loose soil which makes for slippery descent.  Upper section is also over grown in places but not as bad as lower section. WTA performed additional brush removal in lower section on July 13th. As well as River Crossing enhancements. Thank you WTA. 

WTA work continued Thursday, 6/22 with more re-shaping of the trial, clearing over-growth and dealing with a seeping hillside that spreads across the trail. 

The two stream crossings are easier to tread as summer goes on with the water level dropping. About .05 mile in we cleared a lot of over-growth and exposed an area of trail that has another spring seeping down the middle, so it's a little muddy in this area. At about the 3/4 mile in is where you'll hit the river. The water leve continues to drop with this dry weather. I'm hoping to ford it beginning of July sometime. 

Overall this will be another beautiful trail that the WTA is bringing back for us and our families to enjoy for years to come. 🌲🌲

Cheers! 

WTA volunteers have been hard are work restoring this trail since last year. The first mile is a old abandoned road and like many road-to-trail conversions the default path is straight down the middle. Alder trees, salmon berry and other such early colonizers grow in from the edges and what you end up with is a long straight tunnel of green.

Taking a cue from trail guru Troy Scott Parker we re-aligned much of the trail to have a mix of curves and squiggles (all within the old road bed) to give the route a more natural shape - see his excellent book Natural Surface Trails by Design.

In addition to break up the long straight sight lines, we occasionally bent the trail to the road edge so you get a peek at the river, a vista out onto the forest below, or a better soundscape of the water when the river is beyond sight.

We also incorporated drainage features into the new alignment so that former stretches of long straight trail now have dips and curves where water is allowed to drain off the trail.

The river crossing at 0.8 miles in remains high water so I don't recommend trying to ford it. We will be back this Thursday to continue our work, but then put the project on hold until later in the summer when it is safe to cross.

(2017 project work on this trail supported by a Matching Awards Program Grant (MAP) from the National Forest Foundation)