Upper South Fork Skokomish River, Six Ridge — Sunday, Oct. 6, 2013

Olympic Peninsula > Olympia

First of all note that the gate to FS-2361 is closed from Oct 1 thru April. I was not so excited about adding an extra 12 miles of road to this adventure. The start of 873 follows what used to be a road for just under a mile then drops down into the river valley and makes 4 major crossings in 4 miles. The first 3 have obvious logs but the 4th is a little trickier as the most obvious log to cross has potentially some dangerous consequences. The horse ford is not too bad though over my knees in the middle. This section of trail to here is mostly flat but overgrown in places. Then the climbing starts. The trail enters into the national park then crosses a few marshy meadows. If there hadn't been ribbons on the trees there would have been much more wayfinding involved. There are 2 camp sites; one at the last river crossing and another about half way up to Sundown Pass. The last push up to the pass is quite steep. Over Sundown, the trail drops through a meadow of huckleberries until I reached the intersection with the Graves Creek and Six Ridge trails. I took Six Ridge up past a beautiful camp at Sundown Lake and another ford. Another climb, through 3-4" of crunchy snow and I was at Six Ridge Pass. The view from here is great, and you can see down to McGravey Lake and even Mt. Rainier. I thought the trail would be more along the ridge but it dropped steeply before starting to climb again to McGravey Lake. Less snow here on the sunny side. I lost the trail for a bit there because of all the side trails around this beautiful little lake. Then up and down and up again, on a trail that was difficult to follow at times (no ribbon here) until I reached Belview camp. One more very steep climb and I reached the top of Six Ridge where the trail intersects with the Success Lake trail (which is also hard to follow). This was 6 hours in and 6100' of climbing over 13.3 miles one way (not counting the road) so I needed to head back to stay in the daylight. On the return I came upon 5 elk including one nice bull that were bedded down right on the trail in the meadow just below Sundown Pass. Otherwise just lots of birds and mushrooms. Thanks to the WTA Back Country team who cleared all the blow downs for me, with the exception of the giant old growth that fell lengthwise, and therefore has basically just become the trail there.