Smoked pelican is probably a delicacy somewhere. Might be a bit fishy tasting. And chewy. Today, however, it was just Pelican Butte (8,036 ft / 2,449 m), a dormant {Heck, why not erupt in 2020 – everything else has!} shield volcano mired in a sea of wildfire smoke. Its northeastern flank was carved into a large, steep cirque by Ice Age glaciers. On one side of this cirque, a little over a mile north of the summit, sit Lakes Gladys and Francis, the two named lakes in the Cloud Lake Group. Plan A, formulated before the onset of this season’s ruinous wildfires, was to drive up to 7,600 feet on the rocky, rutted, high-centered dirt road that services the comm tower on the summit (this road was built in 1934 by the CCC). From there we’d hike the three miles round-trip (with 1,000 feet of gain on the way back) to visit Gladys and Francis. Well, I’ll bet you can guess what happened to Plan A…
Continue reading “Smoked Pelican (Southwest Oregon) 09-Oct-2020”Smoked Pelican (Southwest Oregon) 09-Oct-2020
