2025 Trips
Sunday, June 1st, 2025: 2025 Trips, Regions, Road Trips, Sky Islands.
Turns out my knee problem was misdiagnosed, last summer, as merely inflammation – a closer look at the MRI shows an actual tear in the tendon that’s never been allowed to heal. My only chance of healing is to wear a knee immobilizer brace for at least three months, and give up hiking for six months.
I already gave up hiking for six months, from fall through winter, while I was traveling. But wearing this brace is going to be harder. I’m still partly in denial, partly in shock. I don’t even want to imagine what it’s going to be like.
I asked the doc what about driving, and he said I could take it off, since driving mostly uses the ankles. So I did another road trip, over to the magical “pine park” in the sky that I discovered last summer. This is a lush meadow right below the 9,000 foot crest of the range, accessed via a very rocky track, surrounded by tall pines and Doug-fir. It’s a dark place at the foot of a dramatic peak, and I hadn’t really explored it last summer. I guessed there had been a campground below the meadow that was abandoned after the big wildfire in 2011. I’d seen rough tracks leading from the meadow down into the darkness of the forest, but those tracks looked too sketchy for my vehicle at the time.
Now, with my lifted suspension, I started following one of the tracks down into the darkness, and immediately came upon some cast-concrete picnic tables and the foundations of cabins. The farther I went, the more of these I glimpsed through the trees, farther down the dark slope. Apparently, before the campground, there had been something like a scout camp up here, with a dozen or so cabins.
There turned out to be a network of dirt tracks winding among the tall conifers, leading to more and more campsites. Two or three had been used in recent years, but none had been used much, because the vast majority of campers here use trailers, and there’s no way you could get a camping trailer down to the park now. Some of the campsites had been buried under deadfall. It felt like I’d stumbled upon the ruins of a lost civilization of campers – both spooky and idyllic.
At the farthest end of the old campground, I found myself driving up a rise, and came to a dead end in a little clearing on a knoll. I had a spectacular view of the west side of the crest, darkening under a rain cloud that was moving up from the south. As I was taking photos, sparse raindrops began to fall.
I’m only now discovering how rugged the west side of this range is. It gets few visitors compared to the more easily accessible east side. There’s an old network of trails, but they’re all abandoned and blocked by deadfall and regrowth. Of course, that makes the whole area really attractive to me – if I’m ever able to hike again.
Above the tall trees, I’d glimpsed the south slope of the peak above the park – rimrock at the top and a broad talus slope below – but to get a full view of it I needed to pull on the brace and carefully traverse a grassy slope over deadfall and embedded rocks. I almost lost my balance a couple times, but it was worth it.
Unable to hike, I still need to get out into nature. So expect a lot of road trips for the rest of the year.
The rain was just a brief tease, as usual this time of year. But the clouds on the way back down from the crest remained spectacular.
I had a burrito in the cafe as usual, and on the way back, stopped in the pass guarded by granite cliffs and boulders.
