After dayhiking Sawtooth Ridge on Friday, I was expecting to encounter a lot of snow at Oregon Butte. Instead, the trail is almost entirely melted out at this point with only a few patches of snow remaining.
There was quite a bit of downfall, a mixture of trees killed in last summer's wildfire plus normal winter treefall. The fire was pretty intense in some areas and killed all of the trees, but I was happy to find that most areas experienced a patchy burn leaving lots of mature live trees and even some islands of undergrowth intact.
We set up camp near the intersection with Oregon Butte/Smooth Ridge/Mount Misery Trail and continued hiking out Mount Misery with just daypacks. We were really hoping to find some morels in the burn areas, but just weren't having any luck. We plopped down next to the trail near Table Spring to eat a snack & consider turning back to camp, and fortunately we met some other backpackers who had found the mushroom spot! It turns out we had taken our rest break about 1000' too soon. We spent the next couple hours hunting morels nearby & found quite a few.
On Sunday we hiked out but decided to do a quick search for morels on nearby Turkey Creek trail, and within 5 minutes of leaving the trailhead we found another good area to pick. So this one was both a successful backpacking trip and also a successful foraging trip! Plus the Wenaha is always one of the most beautiful areas to visit.
Other things of note:
- Oregon Spring is damaged, with the pipe leading to the water trough burned out. It's still possible to filter from the creek, but access is not as easy and equestrian access will likely be very difficult.
- We looked for water at Table Spring and couldn't find it at the location indicated on the map. I'm not sure how far down the drainage one would need to go to find water there. Table Camp looked unused for several years.
- We also looked for water at Emergency Spring and found a similar situation. I did find trash in the vicinity of the spring location on the map, and hauled out as much as I could. Who would haul in 20 AA batteries & leave them in the woods?! I only had a small trash bag with me, so there's more trash if anyone else feels like helping with the cleanup needs (several empty Mountain House packages, along with some assorted other trash).
- It's early season conditions yet with lots of downfall.
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