Sky Lakes Wilderness – BOOTS on the TRAIL

This Yolks On You (Sky Lakes Wilderness) 16-Oct-2020

2020-10-162020-10-19Posted in Hiking, Oregon Wilderness Areas, Southern OregonTagged Crater Lake National Park, Day Hiking, Goose Egg Oregon, Goose Nest Oregon, Hiking, Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), PCT, Sky Lakes Wilderness, Southern Oregon3 Comments

DISCLAIMER: The LovedOne played no part in this hike (she’s busy trying to re-start volunteer activity at the library). Nor did she have anything to do with the title of this post. In fact, she begged me to come-up with a more mature title. But I claimed artistic license. Laughter ensued. And that’s no yolk! 🙄

Goose Nest (not to be confused with Goosenest near Mount Shasta) sits east of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in the Sky Lakes Wilderness. Last August, I made an attempt to hike to its summit from the west. That didn’t work out. 😦 But, staying with the goose theme, I saw the Goose Egg (7,124 feet / 2,171 m) sitting right next to the PCT a little farther to the south. If not the nest, then the egg! So, egged on by thoughts of omelets dancing in my head, I struck off for the Egg today in perfect hiking weather (which is one of those ying~yang, good thing~bad things in these drought-stricken times).

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Smoked Pelican (Southwest Oregon) 09-Oct-2020

2020-10-092020-10-09Posted in Other Stuff, Southern OregonTagged Day Hiking, Hiking, Pelican Butte Oregon, Sky Lakes Wilderness, Southern Oregon, Upper Klamath Lake Oregon6 Comments

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…

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Judge Waldo Revisited (Sky Lakes Wilderness) 31-Aug-2020

2020-08-312020-09-02Posted in Hiking, Oregon Wilderness Areas, Southern OregonTagged Blue Lake Group Oregon, Day Hiking, Hiking, Island Lake Oregon, Judge Waldo Tree, Sky Lakes Wilderness, Southern Oregon

Our first try at finding the inscription Judge Waldo left on a (now dead) tree in the nearby Sky Lakes Wilderness wasn’t successful. We found it on our second try in 2015. That was the last time we managed to visit the tree or the Blue Lakes Basin. 😦 It’s odd how that visit years ago seems like it happened just last week (of course, five months ago now seems like another world, but I digress…). So when the weather offered-up a dry front that temporarily dropped the air temperature and pushed the wildfire smoke south, we took it as a favorable augury for another Waldo visit. And it proved to be a superb day for a hike – mostly cool with an easy breeze, full sunshine, just a little on the warm side in the afternoon, and no mosquitoes (fiends this wilderness is unfortunately famous for). There were a few fallen trees but otherwise the trails were in good condition despite having missed a year (or two or three) of maintenance.

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A Goose Too Far (Sky Lakes Wilderness) 06-Aug-2020

2020-08-062020-11-26Posted in Hiking, Oregon Wilderness Areas, Southern Oregon, U.S. National Parks & MonumentsTagged Crater Lake National Park, Day Hiking, Hiking, Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), PCT, Pumice Flat Trail, Sky Lakes Wilderness, Southern Oregon4 Comments

Stretching south from Crater Lake, into the Sky Lakes Wilderness, are a line of small peaks. They were generated by the same volcanic forces that eventually exploded ancient Mount Mazama to create Crater Lake. A couple of years ago, I got to the summit of one of them – Mount Maude – from the south via the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). The tallest one – Goose Nest (not to be confused with the Goosenest near Mount Shasta) – sits just east of the Cascade Crest near the wilderness / park boundary. The shortest approach to Goose Nest is from the east on old logging roads. But I had always wanted to see if it could be reached from the west via the PCT, as had Maude. Map gazing and trip planning ensued…

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Finding the Wickiup Trail (Sky Lakes Wilderness) 24-Jun-2020

2020-06-242020-07-03Posted in Hiking, Oregon Wilderness Areas, Southern OregonTagged Day Hiking, Heavenly Twin Lakes Oregon, Hiking, Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), PCT, Sky Lakes Wilderness, Southern Oregon, Wickiup Trail Oregon5 Comments

I think those of us who hike (and you know who you are) all appreciate a good trail – one that’s well-graded, clear of obstacles, goes somewhere we want to go, and where its mapped incarnation matches its reality on the ground. Think of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). Then there are those trails that appear on old maps (and some new ones) but may no longer exist on the ground. Nothing like including one of those in your hiking plans only to find yourself unexpectedly thrashing cross-country for several character-building miles. Still I’m drawn (despite several interventions by The LovedOne) to occasionally (the interventions must be working) look for these old trails. It’s a bit of a geeky obsession. Calling it “hiking archeology” makes it sound, ah, more respectable? 🙄

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