So I'll admit it, the sign at the trailhead freaked me out a little bit. I slept in the car Friday night; I never sleep in the car! I noticed a note someone left in the trailhead register at the North Fork trail this morning; the person who left it made some very good points about how the forest service needs to post a little more information about the cougar "encounter." I agree wholeheartedly. If the sign had said cougar "sighting" I would have understood and probably not been so scared; "recent encounter" seems like a totally different situation, and I wanted to know how recent and what happened. At any rate, I slept very well inside the car, and I didn't have any encounter of my own.
Today Jeff met me at the trailhead and we hiked the North Fork Silver Creek trail up to the summit of Abercrombie Mountain. Abercrombie is the second tallest peak in Eastern Washington; Gypsy Peak beats it out by one foot. I have only hiked Abercrombie once before, and when I last did it I used the other trailhead. This hike is much longer, and I think I like it better besides! It would make it difficult to do the Abercrombie/Hooknose combo hike from this trailhead (there is no trail to Hooknose, although there is an obvious route--about 2 miles each way).
The best aspect of this hike is the forest. The trail is completely different from the South Fork Trail even though they start only a few hundred feet apart. This trail is almost completely dry (only two very small water sources in 7.7 miles). There are portions of the trail that are thickly treed, but there are also sections of amazing ponderosa pines that must be hundreds of years old. Additionally, there is a large section of aspen trees, and some of them are huge! Near the intersection with the Abercrombie trail there is a section of open meadow with a few giant, moss-covered old trees. The meadow has a few wildflowers left; I'm sure it was spectacular a couple of weeks ago. There are also sagebrush plants up there--I love seeing sagebrush up above 6,000'!
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| Aspen grove in b&w |
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| Another view of the aspen grove. I want to come back in October to see what this looks like at that time! |
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| Our first view of Abercrombie |
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| Trail intersection. Apparently someone had a lot of nails left over and wasn't sure what else to do with them. |
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| Pretty butterfly! I've never seen a brown one of these before. |
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| At the summit of Abercrombie. |
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| The aspen grove on our way back down. |
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| I saw this on my way home. Too funny--plastic kid chained to a garbage can. Child abuse? I think so. |
Read my trip report
here.
Today's Mileage = 15.4 miles
August Total Mileage = 232.55 miles
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