Palouse to Cascades Trail - Rattlesnake Lake, Olallie State Park - Olallie Trail, Cedar Butte, Southside Trail & West Ridge Trail — Wednesday, Mar. 13, 2024

A couple times a year my hiking buddy Jeno and I like to take the trails (Southside and West Ridge) less traveled around the backside of Cedar Butte.  The Southside trail is accessed from Saddle Junction on Cedar Butte.  It’s where the Cedar Butte and Boxley Blowout trails meet right before you head up to Cedar Butte summit.  The West Ridge trail is accessed off of the Olallie trail and unless you know where it is, locating it can be a bit of an issue as the cairn that once marked it is gone again.    If you do this hike make sure you have a compass,  GPS or good route-finding skills as it can be a challenge staying on track especially the West Ridge portion.

Now that my PSA is out of the way it’s time to get on with our hike.   Jeno and I met at 6:00 at the Cedar Falls trailhead and headed down the Palouse to Cascades trail via headlamp in a light rain/snow mix.  The bathrooms were clean and stocked at Cedar Falls and as we expected, we were the first two cars in the parking lot at that early hour.   We like to do this loop route via the Olallie trail so it’s a long flat walk down the PTC to where that mixed use trail takes off uphill.       

The Olallie trail has a gentle grade up to where we turned off and headed down the West Ridge trail.  The West Ridge trail is the roughest trail we hiked this morning.   You really have to pay attention to stay on track.  The trail meanders around back in there and with trees and debris down it can be confusing.   A couple of times I had to stop and look around to make sure we were going the right way.  It was interesting as in some spots Jeno commented it looked heavily used and in others it looked like no one had been on the trail in ages.   We did notice for the first time in a couple of years some new flagging ribbons along portions of the trail.  There are not as many as were there previously but they are in place.

The trail skirts a couple of small ponds which had a little water in them before you reach a hill that you climb up (going our direction).  It’s as steep as the Mt Margaret trail for comparison’s sake.  I thought about taking a photo to show how steep it was and stopped part way up to do so and started to slide back down so I said the heck with that and kept going.  At the top you hit the Southside trail.  It’s easy to follow but my gosh it is overgrown especially on the Saddle Junction end.  My boots, socks and shorts got soaked on this trail.  

We made it to Saddle Junction and then it’s a short jaunt up to the Cedar Butte summit.   No views this morning as things were socked in.   We had some snacks and water before we headed back down to Saddle Junction.  We debated going down via the Boxley Blowout route but we were so wet from the Southside trail we elected to just head down the Cedar Butte trail.  To our surprise it had more trees down on it then all the other trails we hiked today combined.  Nothing major to get around or over but just be aware.

After letting up for a while the rain/snow mix started again as we neared the parking lot.  We got back at 9:00 AM on the nose not seeing one person this morning.  Our two cars were still the only ones there.  I noticed on the drive in this morning the overflow lot at Rattlesnake had two cars.  There was eight cars there when I left with only one in the large lot so not only a quiet day for us but it looked like a quiet day over at Rattlesnake as well.

Stay safe everyone.  See you on the trail.      SR