Tag Archives: Wildflowers

Reelfoot’s Lair

Posted on by
1

Hiking Grizzly Peak in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument

It isn’t really Reelfoot’s lair. Old Reelfoot, the last known grizzly bear in Oregon, was shot in 1890 near Pilot Rock, sixteen miles south of here in a different part of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. It was another grizzly, unnamed in the accounts, who mauled a hunter on this mountain in the late 1850s and gave it the name Grizzly Peak. But the story has been attached to the wrong mountain for so long that it still seems appropriate to honor Old Reelfoot with the name of this account. After all, Grizzlies have a huge home range. It’s probable that he visited Grizzly at least once in a while.

He wouldn’t have traveled most of the way in an electric car, however.

We hiked the Grizzly Peak trail most recently on June 13, 2019. We made a full day of it, traveling first 12 miles north of Medford to Eagle Point for breakfast at the Barbed Wire Grill, then east up the Brownsville Road and Highway 140 40 miles to the Great Meadow near Lake of the Woods, where I had heard that a major camas bloom was happening. It was. Most of the west end of the immense meadow was covered with the purple flowers of Great Camas, Camassia leichtlinii. Thousands of Camassia leichtlinii. They made a spectacular show in the early morning light, under the high peaks of the Mountain Lakes Wilderness, and I was immensely grateful to Kimberly Hill, whose pictures of the meadow on the Oregon Wildflower Facebook page the day before had alerted me to their presence.

Then it was on to Grizzly down Dead Indian Memorial Road, named to honor three Native Americans whose bodies, dead from unknown causes, were found along its course in the mid-1850s (the settlers honestly thought they were being respectful). We stopped briefly by Lake of the Woods, where I walked the trail out along Rainbow Bay for some photographs of Mt McLoughlin across the water; then we didn’t stop again until we reached the Grizzly Peak trailhead, coming in by way of the upper end of Shale City Road, through an area we have long known as “Elderberry Heaven” for the great number of elderberry bushes that grow there beneath a glorious view of McLoughlin’s snowy cone. The road to the trailhead was in better shape than I’ve seen it for years; it didn’t even begin to challenge the Bolt’s considerable abilities as a backroads vehicle.

Checker lily

The hike itself took most of the rest of the day. The Grizzly Peak trail is a six-mile loop with a 750-foot elevation gain, most of it in the first mile, and as we age into our late 70s it is beginning to be a challenge. But it is worth it for the wildflower show. The trail begins in a verdant conifer forest, a northern-coast-range type forest of tall trees and rich green undergrowth, inexplicably transported to a mountain in the southern Oregon Cascades: then it traverses a loop around the edges of a high plateau covered with a graceful mix of forest and meadow. We took the loop counter-clockwise this time. Views opened out toward Medford and Roxy Ann, looking tiny and lost in an immensity of space. The scar of the 2002 Antelope burn held even more views, across green slanting meadows laced with wildflowers beneath the black snags of the burned trees, a sign that the forest is recovering well. The best view was saved for the far end of the loop. We climbed a steep hillside to the west summit, through paintbrush and balsamroot and fields of rosy plectritis, to cliffs that look out over hundreds of square miles of landscape. The view stretched from Mt Shasta in the south past Pilot Rock and the high peaks of the Siskiyous to the Rogue-Umpqua Divide in the north. A fine place to munch granola bars and contemplate how very, very small you actually are. And maybe wonder how Old Reelfoot might have felt, sitting in this very spot, 130 years ago.

Clockwise from upper left: royal polemonium, Jessica’s stickseed, sulfur flower (with passenger), and Siskiyou onion.

Statistics: we covered about 120 miles on sun-generated electrons, using roughly 27 kwh of the 60 we had available. That works out to about 4.4 miles per kwh – good enough to take us another 145 miles, had we wanted to do that. The car’s EPA-rated range is 238 miles. On this trip, we were actually getting around 265. A small difference, but I’ll take it.

Dutchman’s Peak from Grizzly Peak. Rosy plectritis in the foreground.

Porcupine Mountain

Posted on by
Reply

A little-known destination in a little-known National Monument in Oregon.

Pilot Rock

This time, the tires held up.

Not that they weren’t challenged. The road to the Pilot Rock trailhead, the closest access to the single most spectacular scenic feature of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, is vile. Two miles of rocks, ruts, and really robust potholes. But then the CSNM, as it is known locally, wasn’t established to protect scenery or hiking trails. In keeping with the actual reasons behind the passage of the Antiquities Act, back in the Theodore Roosevelt administration, the Monument encompasses an area of outstanding historical or scientific interest – in this case, botany. There are two parallel mountain chains in the Pacific West, stretching most of the way from Mexico to Canada without a break: the coast ranges along the ocean – which climb as high as 9,000 feet in northern California – and the much younger Cascade-Sierra chain, which forms the eastern side of the great western valleys, including California’s Central Valley, Oregon’s Rogue and Willamette Valleys, and Washington’s Puget Trough. There is a great knot of mountains in southern Oregon and northern California that connects the two mountain systems, but the connections are mostly low, rarely exceeding 2000 feet. Only in one spot does the east/west connection between the coast ranges and the Cascade/Siskiyou system actually reach mountain proportions: a long, high ridge that mostly parallels the Oregon-California border. The highest pass on Interstate 5, Oregon’s 4400-foot high Siskiyou Summit, goes over the lowest point on that ridge. That ridge forms a bridge for species from the coast ranges and the Cascade/Siskiyou system to meet and merge, and it is that ridge, and its adjacent areas to the east, that the CSNM protects.

Along the Pacific Crest Trail in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

And the whole thing is just 30 miles south of our house.

So it’s not surprising that a couple of wildflower enthusiasts like Melody and me would end up there on a sunny Tuesday in early June. Our plan was to start at the Pilot Rock trailhead and hike in to Porcupine Mountain, a favorite destination of ours, roughly a mile south and two miles to the east. The plan worked. After breakfast in a favorite restaurant of ours, Ashland’s Breadboard, we headed up the mountain and, despite a seemingly interminable time on the Pilot Rock Road, were on the trail by about 8:40. The pictures below will show you what we found.

The Bolt at the Pilot Rock trailhead. We were grateful for the relatively high clearance of the car (7″) and the ability of electrical drive to precisely control the application of power to the drive wheels while crawling at very low speeds over a road that really needs to be improved if the public is ever expected to find the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

Mount Eddy, a 9000-foot peak in the Klamath Mountain system, viewed from the Pacific Crest Trail at a saddle just east of Pilot Rock.

Siskiyou onion, one of the many endemics (plants limited to a specific area) found in the Siskiyou Mountains, that leaks over into a small area of the Cascades along the bridge provided by the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument.

Copland’s owl clover, bridging the other way – from the Cascades to the Siskiyous.

Elegant cat’s-ear lily, rare anywhere: it differs from the much more common Tolmie’s cat’s-ear by having pointed petal tips without hairs.

The summit of Porcupine Mountain is guarded by this 15-foot wall of basalt stretching all the way across the summit ridge. Easy enough to climb, but intriguing geologically.

Pilot Rock from Porcupine Mountain’s summit. That’s a mountain mahogany tree on the right.

About that supposed bugaboo of electric cars, range anxiety, by the way: we pulled into the garage at the end of this trip having used under 14 kwh of the 60 we had available. Just thought I should keep mentioning this….

The North Umpqua: waterfalls and wildflowers

Posted on by
Reply

In an earlier blog post (“The saga of the Bolt and the bolt“), I told about the blowout that brought an abrupt end to our waterfalls-and-wildflowers excursion on the North Umpqua River last week. This post is about the more pleasant parts of the trip that preceded the blowout.

The Bolt at the Mt Thielsen viewpoint near Diamond Lake

It started out well enough. Southern Oregon is blessed with something called the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway, made possible by the fact that two of the state’s most scenic rivers, the Rogue and the Umpqua, both head out near Diamond Lake, a large, lovely natural lake on the crest of the Cascade Mountains a short distance north of Crater Lake National Park. Beginning in the small town of Gold Hill on Interstate 5 north of Medford, the Byway uses existing highways – Oregon 234, Oregon 62, Oregon 230, and Oregon 138 – to climb the Rogue, circle Diamond Lake, and come down the Umpqua to Roseburg. The mountain scenery is spectacular around Diamond Lake, but that’s not the main draw: the main draw is waterfalls. Waterfalls of all shapes and sizes, from frothy rapids a few feet high to Watson Falls, the third-highest in the state at nearly 300 feet. Gems of white water set in dark evergreen forests and decorated with bright wildflowers. For waterfall lovers – and there are many of us – traveling the Rogue-Umpqua Scenic Byway is somewhat akin to finding the Holy Grail.

Watson Falls

We can do the full Byway as a day trip from our home, but there is so much to see that we usually overnight on the North Umpqua, and this trip was planned that way. Near the tiny community of Dry Creek, roughly 2/3 of the way from Roseburg to Diamond Lake, there is an RV park and a set of rustic cabins that together go by the name Umpqua’s Last Resort. We planned to go up the Rogue, come down the Umpqua as far as the Last Resort, and spend the night in one of their cabins. A major draw for us, driving the Bolt, was NEMA 14-50 plugs in some of the RV slots. I emailed the management and was assured that, although none of the cabins had plugs associated with them, they would let us use an RV slot to charge the car. Charging would be free with our stay. There was one quirk: we couldn’t actually rent a cabin. All of them were already reserved. They did, however, have a large travel trailer permanently set up on one of the sites, and we could rent that for the price of a cabin. So all was set.

The first day went well. We got a leisurely start, had an early lunch at Beckie’s in Union Creek, and were at the uppermost falls on Highway 138, Clearwater Falls, before 1 pm. (We had elected not to stop at any of the wateralls along the Rogue, because we’ve been visiting them all spring.) And at this point, I’m going to let the pictures take over.

Whitehorse Falls
Columnar Falls
Tokatee Falls, probably the most famous of the Umpqua waterfalls)
Clockwise from upper left: violet (shot at Whitehorse Falls); calypso orchid (Watson Falls); Pacific starflower (Tokatee Falls); and twisted stalk (Columnar Falls).
charging, with chair

The highlight was Columnar Falls. It’s only fifteen feet or so high, and carries a modest amount of water, but the interplay of water, moss, and basalt columns is magical. The trail to it uses the same parking lot as Umpqua Hot Springs, so the parking lot was full, but we had the falls to ourselves.

The evening at Umpqua’s Last Resort was pleasant. The staff was welcoming, and interested in the Bolt – it was the first non-Tesla EV that had stayed with them. We had to borrow a lawn chair from our rented RV to hold our Juicebox off the ground, but there were no other problems, and the car got a full charge overnight. Late light on the river was lovely. The next morning we backtracked to Tokatee Falls and then….but read the earlier post. I’m going to just leave this right here.

The North Umpqua River in late afternoon light