Oregon Butte, Smooth Ridge — Saturday, Jul. 4, 2020

After 3-4 cancellations of other planned trips to the Blues this spring/summer, a friend & I finally landed on a good weather window to proceed with a backpack trip to the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness! We arrived mid-morning on the 4th of July to find only a handful of other vehicles at the Teepee TH for Oregon Butte. Lots of the dispersed campsites along the access road out of Dayton were also unoccupied. I was pleasantly surprised that it was so uncrowded for the holiday weekend.

The most well-maintained trail section & the highest concentration of hikers is right at the start: everyone was heading to Oregon Butte for the viewpoint. I lost track of exactly how many others we met along the way, but it was easy to maintain social distancing. We enjoyed the views from near the lookout along with several other hikers, and then we didn't see anyone for the next 48 hours! Oregon Butte is cool & all, but my favorite part of the Wenaha-Tucannon are the farther-in trails.

We opted to hike out Smooth Ridge past Danger Point and spent our first night at McBain Spring. We had a serious debate about camping there when we first arrived due to the mess we discovered in the campsite. I'm always shocked & saddened by how folks treat campsites in the Wenaha-Tucannon. With a few exceptions, I don't generally see this level of mess in the Colville National Forest where I backpack more frequently, despite generally running into more people on the trails in the Colville. (I guess I spend most of my time on the PNT route, where the backpackers are very well-versed in LNT backpacking.) I also need to learn my lesson about which backpack to bring on W-T trips, as per the usual, I ended up packing out about 10-15 pounds of extra garbage. If I'd thought to bring my trailwork backpack, I could have carried out a lot more! (It's crazy what people haul in & then leave behind: including a cast-iron skillet to complement the dutch oven I found on a 4th of July backpack trip a couple years ago!)

As for McBain: we discovered the previous campers were enamored of "bushcraft," having created a weird sleeping platform around a small campfire ring, lining the sleeping platform with cut branches, and creating a teepee structure to put over top. They put it all together with para-cord, which they left behind along with a bunch of other random trash. They dug but did not bury a cathole about 30' from the spring, sole water source for miles, and they dumped noodles from their dinner into the spring itself. And that was just the recent trash (the older trash was numerous, and included a crudely constructed privy with a black plastic garbage bag to catch the contents...left behind for someone else to deal with later). It was all just gross. I think we spent over an hour cleaning the camp before we could use the camp. But in the end it was a nice enough campsite, even though the level of filth did make me nervous about wildlife.

And the wildlife! We didn't see much during daylight hours, but close to midnight an elk herd came though. Look up an audio track on "elk barking," and imagine that sound rousing you from a deep sleep in the middle of the night! Once I realized what I was hearing I knew we were fine, but it took a minute for the sounds to register (and continued loudly for about an hour or so). 

On day 2 we decided to move camp to one of several other named springs on the map in hopes of a cleaner campsite & better open views for the full moon. We ultimately decided to camp on an open ridge above Rettkowski Spring. We could not find the spring itself, nor could we find Ruth Spring, Taylor Spring, nor Huckleberry Spring. This area was hit hard in the 2015 Grizzly Complex wildfire and if there were previously camps nearby, they were not obvious now. We camped about a quarter mile beyond a small stream (which might dry up soon), and opted for the open ridge since we were concerned about the standing dead snags closer to the water source. It made gathering water a serious chore, but it also gave us incredible views of sunset/sunrise from our camp on the edge of the ridge. We had a nocturnal visitor at this camp, too, but I never was able to sort out what it was by the sounds I was hearing from just below the ridge.

After deciding upon the ridge near Rettkowski for our campsite we did an extra hike out to Lodgepole Spring. There are two campsites close to the spring, but both are about as trashed as McBain Spring's camp. It turns out foil & aluminum cans still don't burn. I picked up a lot of micro trash and some metal trash. Someone scattered larger camp pieces from Lodgepole Spring to past Ruth Spring: the poles from their wall tent & a large camp stove were at Lodgepole, the canvas part of the tent was next to the trail near Huckleberry, and part of another giant metal campstove was sitting next to trail past Ruth. So bizarre and sad. But the rest of the landscape out here is gorgeous! The wildflowers were at full bloom in the foreground, and we could glimpse the snowy Wallowas in the distance.

On Monday we packed up early and headed back toward Teepee, still not seeing anyone until we arrived back to the Mount Misery Trail near Oregon Butte. 

Trail maintenance concerns: Mount Misery Trail from Teepee TH to Oregon Butte is in excellent shape due to recent BCHW & WTA trail maintenance trips. Smooth Ridge was basically untouched. We cut branches off of the trees that were not easy step-overs and tossed a lot of small stuff off the trail as far as Lodgepole Spring, so it's manageable but still very overgrown in spots. I've heard reports from other hikers that it's worse farther out.