Tatoosh Ridge — Sunday, Jun. 28, 2015

South Cascades > White Pass/Cowlitz River Valley

We were miserable on this hike. Bad? Terrible? Hell? All perfectly describe what we endured. The directions to get to the trailhead were fine. Coming from Puyallup, we took 410 and then 123 to get to Packwood, and then followed the directions to Skate Creek Road and whatnot. The road is impassible at least a mile before the trailhead on FR 5270 (see attached pictures), which gave us a terrible start to the hike before even officially starting the hike! We were exhausted by the time we made it to the trailhead, and with the seriously steep incline toward the mythical ridge we were done before making it through the entire hike. It should be noted that we never made it to the top of the ridge - we never came across the reported trail junction at 2.5 miles in. In total, we measured that we went about 8 miles, but we definitely did not make it to the top of the ridge! The hike to the trailhead made up most of that. We did pass the creeks described in the trail description, but there was no water. What we did happen to come across were flies - hordes of them - that made us reconsider our love of hiking and the outdoors. We recommend going on this hike when it's not hot out (say in the winter?) because the amount of flies landing on us made it just horrible. We both agree that this hike and the views of the mountains must be beautiful, but I think we have too much trauma to ever go back... Anyway, the trail itself was in moderately good condition. The more you go up, the more meadow-like everything gets; more flowers, less brush, etc. etc. It would have been an absolutely fantastic hike had it not been so hot and had there not been the world's largest gathering of the world's largest flies. If you're wanting to go on a hot day, invest in some bug spray and sheer will to save yourself from what happened to us.