Paddy-Go-Easy Pass, Meadow Creek & French Creek — Saturday, Sep. 2, 2023

My fellow sawyer, Greg M. and I, hiked over Paddy-Go-Easy pass and down to the other side of the pass to the intersection with the Meadow Creek trail #1559 on our way to meet up with a Backcountry Horsemen(BCH) work party. Our plan was to finish a large trail project near the intersection with French Creek trail and Meadow creek trail. The Paddy-Go-Easy trail was thought to be a shorter route to the work project site than the 12 mile trek in from Black Pine Horse camp where the rest of our work group would be starting. We decided to carry our crosscut saws with us rather than have them packed in from Black Pine. This proved to make our hike in more tiring due to the large number of log obstructions on the trail up to the pass and down to French Creek.
We knew that there was a WTA work party working on this trail just a couple week prior to our trip and hoped that the trail would be mostly clear. It wasn't. In spite of a tremendous effort by the WTA work team, we still encountered 73 logs across the trail up to the pass and another 22 logs on the other side down to French creek. It appeared the French creek side of the trail was not as widely used as the Cle Elum side and was difficult to navigate and in need of a serious brushing project. We encountered several large logs over 24" dia. on this section. Greg and I finally got to the project site, found our gear stash that had been packed in and got our camp set up and dinner as we were losing daylight. We started our work project on the Meadow Creek trail the next morning, working with the rest of the BCH crew and finished after 2 days of hard sawyer and tread work. After packing up our gear to be packed out on the mules, Greg and I headed out again for the grueling hike over 22 logs up to the pass and the 73 logs again going down to the trail head.
We will be planning a work party next year (2024) to clear both sides of this trail and would welcome any help we can get. Just drop me a message and we'll make sure you get to join our team!
Since there are already many great pictures of the surrounding area, I'll throw some in showing the trail logs.