Soda Mountain Wilderness Council

Horseshoe Ranch II (Cascade-Siskiyou NM) 23-Jan-2022

2022-01-232022-01-30Posted in Hiking, Southern Oregon, U.S. National Parks & MonumentsTagged Caldera Brewing Company, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Day Hiking, Hiking, Horseshoe Ranch Wildflife Area California, Northern California, Scotch Creek, Siskiyou Crest, Slide Creek, Soda Mountain Wilderness, Soda Mountain Wilderness Council4 Comments

At about 9,100 acres (3,682 ha), Horseshoe Ranch is the largest piece of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument within California. The ranch (officially the Horseshoe Ranch Wildlife Area) was added to the Monument in 2017. We paid our first visit here late last year and enjoyed a hike up Slide Ridge and down along Scotch Creek through shrubs, oaks, and conifers. We returned today – in brilliant sunshine and unseasonable warmth – to follow another old ranch road and explore the area around Brushy Creek. We even got a California Lands Pass for this visit.

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Horseshoe Ranch I (Cascade-Siskiyou NM) 21-Nov-2021

2021-11-212022-01-24Posted in Hiking, Southern Oregon, U.S. National Parks & MonumentsTagged Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Day Hiking, Hiking, Horseshoe Ranch Wildflife Area California, Northern California, Scotch Creek, Siskiyou Crest, Slide Creek, Soda Mountain Wilderness, Soda Mountain Wilderness Council4 Comments

Although most of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is inside Oregon, the Monument’s expansion in 2017 brought the Horseshoe Ranch Wildlife Area in Northern California inside its boundary. Horseshoe Ranch covers about 9,100 acres (3,682 ha) of rolling to steep hills festooned with shrubs, oaks, and conifers surrounding Scotch and Slide Creeks and several of their tributaries. Its northern boundary abuts the Soda Mountain Wilderness. As its name suggests, this wildlife area was a working cattle ranch from 1908 to about 1976.

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Green Mountain (Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument) 13-Jun-2021

2021-06-132022-04-10Posted in Hiking, Southern Oregon, U.S. National Parks & MonumentsTagged BLM, Boccard Point Oregon, Bureau of Land Management, Caldera Brewing Company, Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, Day Hiking, Green Mountain Oregon, Hiking, Soda Mountain Wilderness, Soda Mountain Wilderness Council, Southern Oregon

We made a modest donation to the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council and they sent us a newsletter, which, among other things, listed four off-beat hikes in the Monument and Soda Mountain Wilderness. We’d done three of the four but the fourth, a loop past Green Mountain (not to be confused with Green Springs Mountain) from the road to Boccard Point, was new to us. It looked like a 4 mile (6.4 km) loop that would fit neatly into the pleasant morning of a day forecast to end with clouds, wind, and rain (which it did 😀).

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