Goat Creek — Friday, May. 19, 2006

South Cascades > Mount St. Helens

This trail harbours one of the secret treasures of the South Cascades. It is not difficult hiking, but the trail maintenance is neither predictable nor easy to check on. While it is in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, it is hard to reach a staff person by phone who knows its status. The next challenge to hiking there is finding the trailhead. Drive east on Highway 12 five miles past Morton and turn right on Kosmos Road. Take an almost immediate left turn on the Campion Haul Road and follow it to the bridge over the end of Riffe Lake. (Taidnapum Park is just before the bridge, it has a well maintained restroom, if you are so inclined.) After crossing the bridge, turn right onto a dirt road. Go exactly 8/10 mile and turn left on unsigned FR2750. Drive 3.6 miles through private forest on a currently poorly maintained gravel road (potholes, ruts) to the trailhead and park on the left. This trail is sometimes popular with the Backcountry Horsemen, so there is lots of parking space. It is clear that someone came through and cleared the trail this spring, but there was a wash-out about a half mile in that needed more work the day that we were there. The secret treasure appears at about one mile on the trail. I'm not going to say what it is, but I have never seen anything quite like it elsewhere and the site is identified as 'an exquisite site and unique in the Mt. St. Helens Monument' in the one guidebook that I have found that describes this trail. We continued to the split in the trail at 2.25 miles, and took the left branch to the ford, about another quarter mile around the corner. While we sat there eating our lunch we heard a Crack! and looked up to see a large snag descend through the trees about a tenth of a mile from us. When we headed back up the trail we found a 30"" diameter tree trunk (measured by my trekking pole) blocking most of the trail. We cleared away the branches that obscured the trail and checked the upper trail before leaving the area. Only the rotten parts of the snag had landed on the upper trail, so it remained quite passable.