I went up the old trail, along the ridge to Dirtybox and back, then down the new trail.
I haven’t done Mailbox since 2018. After reading a lot recently about the number of emergency services calls for people needing help on this trail, I decided on a revisit. I had never done the new trail so I wanted to have a look at that.
Apparently, the old trail hasn’t been maintained since the new one was made in 2014 but there is so much hiker traffic that it’s become a supercharged boot path. That makes it easy to follow on the way up, but every hiker I met coming down was off the trail. Years of trail runners coming down quickly have extended all the false trails to make a rats’ nest of eroded soil tracks. The trail doesn’t seem like a huge injury hazard: Gunn Peak and the Kamikaze Trail are harder. What seems like the most difficult part starts at the scree after the old and the new trails join together when they meet at the end of the trees. From then on, the views are fabulous.
The summit of Mailbox Peak has an ever-changing population of lunching hikers and hence a lot of Gray Jays. Dirtybox Peak looks temptingly accessible along a half-mile ridge to the east. It’s not a difficult traverse, especially with AllTrails giving me a route. There’s a scramble down from Mailbox to the saddle that has some class 3 moves. However, in late November this is made harder by the ice that lingers until after midday. Because it’s a lightly used route, the trail is through densely-packed conifers. Squeezing through these gives you a constant wetting with ice-cold water. Still, it’s easy. There’s no real view from the summit of Dirtybox because of the trees, and absolutely no people or Gray Jays. I wanted to keep going along the ridge to Dirty Harry’s Peak, but it really didn’t look inviting, so I headed back to Mailbox.
I decided to check out the new trail on the way down. It’s well-made and has no steep parts. It’s great for mycophiles because of the huge diversity of fungi along the whole trail. It has some sections that rival Hoh Rainforest for mossy grandeur. There are two beautifully constructed bridges. The problem is that few people seem to use it. It’s so much longer than the steep, muddy maze of the old trail. It took me a lot more time to go down than it did to get up, and with 4000 feet of elevation gain and loss, that shouldn’t be the case.
There were people starting on the new trail after 2:30pm with absolutely no hope of making it to the summit and back before darkness. There is a warning sign at the start of the old trail about the duration of the hike, but not on the new trail. Maybe that needs to change.
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