A friend and I decided to do a short backpack trip into the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness for the 4th of July, arriving the day of the holiday and remaining through Thursday. We settled on a start at Teepee TH to Oregon Butte with plans to extend our hike out along Smooth Ridge. I figured we may need to hike fairly far out onto Smooth Ridge in order to even find a campsite, as we left Spokane mid-morning and didn't arrive at the trailhead until mid-afternoon on the holiday. Wow, were we ever surprised to arrive to a completely empty parking lot on Tuesday afternoon! This meant that we had a very easy hike in, camping near the intersection of Mount Misery Trail and Smooth Ridge right at the base of Oregon Butte. We felt like we had the entire wilderness to ourselves!
The wildflowers are at their absolute peak right now, and are incredible from the parking lot all the way to the summit. There were more varieties than I can name, but some of the highlights include aster, arnica, lupine, larkspur, paintbrush, columbine, forget-me-not, flax, buckwheat, scarlet gilia, and penstemon. There were several varieties of wild mint, as well as lots of wild onion, which made for some interesting scents along the hike in addition to all of the various hues of blooms. The birds were also busy in the trees, and apparently busy eating insects. It was not very buggy and I never needed to break out the headnet. We did, however, find a few ticks; I guess that's fairly standard for this area, and they were not terrible (3 in total for 2 hikers over 3 days, but once you find one every little itch becomes suspect!).
On Wednesday we did a long dayhike from camp out to McBain Spring (not much downfall along the trail, but the side-trail to the spring has a ton of downfall making access to refill water containers a bit difficult). The tread is in poor shape in a few places near Danger Point, and overall things are quite brushy. The McBain Spring campsite is not quite so trashy as the last time I was there, but is still not what I consider a clean camp. We then continued out past McBain to the end of Yearling Ridge, where we found a truly trashy abandoned camp. The maps show Yearling Ridge as a trail, but it has not been maintained in many years. It is still possible to follow it although the route-finding can be tricky. Yearling Ridge has mostly escaped the recent rash of wildfires in the Wenaha, so it was great to see lots of old growth trees. I've also never seen such a concentration of Browns peony, although they have already finished blooming for the year. By the end of the hike we had a favorite Ponderosa pine and giant western juniper, plus plenty of gorgeous wildflowers. We did most of a sidehike to find Pearson Spring but finally abandoned that idea due to increasingly steep terrain and lots of brush, and our dayhike ended up being approximately 15 miles by the time we returned to camp.
On Thursday we had an easy hike out and decided to do a little light trailwork on our exit. I found a shovel in the trashy campsite out on Yearling Ridge, and used it to clean blocked trail drainage along the way. We also cleared two small trees from the trail with our folding handsaws, and limbed two others that were too big to cut but became easy step-overs (probably even for equestrian users) once we removed the branches.
Comments