North Umpqua Trail (Jessie Wright Segment)

 

"Water heal my body, water heal my soul.
When I go down to the water, by the water I feel whole"

The River
by Coco Love Alcorn

On the way home from this hike, I switched on the radio and the first thing I heard were the above lyrics. Serendipity, the words perfectly summed up my relationship with the North Umpqua River and its namesake trail. The North Umpqua River is always near the North Umpqua Trail and the constant soothing sound of water moving past the forested slopes is like a metaphysical back rub to the soul, although I am nowhere near as eloquent as Coco Love Alcorn, a statement readily confirmed by a random reading of any of my blog entries.

Lots of plants!

Roll the tape back to the middle of the week when I got a text from young Coral Rae who requested her grandfather (me!) take her hiking. Well, when that rare and wondrous event happens, the only proper response is to make it happen. Coral wanted to hike where there were "lots of plants" so we decided on the Deer Leap Segment of the North Umpqua Trail.

A herd of fawn lilies graced the mouth of a cave

I had been on the Dear Leap several years ago and at Medicine Creek, a ginormous boulder had crushed the bridge spanning the small creek. I held hope that perhaps the bridge had been replaced but once we arrived at the site, my hopes were as crushed as the bridge, which was still in pieces right under the guilty slab of rock. I was game for bushwhacking across rain-swollen Medicine Creek, but Coral's shoes were not sufficiently waterproof for that endeavor. 

Not a lot of plants!

No biggie, though, we hiked back to the car and improvised by driving to the Jessie Wright Trailhead, where Wright was right, as far as giant boulders rolling onto trail bridges were concerned. I assured Coral Rae we would see lots of plants but she had her doubts at the start, for the forest was scorched, charred, and mostly dead. Fire is a frequent visitor here and the Jack Fire had hung out here last summer, leaving the trees worse off for the fiery visit.

This trillium patrolled by guard spider

But, as I've stated before, life still thrives in a burn zone and this blackened forest was no different. The ground was carpeted with trillium plants, all displaying flowers with tri-petaled elegance, except for one double-flowered mutant that sported least three-hundred frizzled petals. Crab spiders lurked within the flowers and I found several of them for Coral to gawk at. However, if you are a flower-visiting insect, death also thrives in a burn zone, meted out by the fangs of hungry crab spiders.

Go see what's inside the cave!

At the intersection with the trail coming in from Illahee Flat, there is a large cave sited at the bottom of a sheer cliff. Impressive, to be sure, but the cave's inky black maw was upstaged by a large patch of fawn lilies blooming right in front, the flowers nodding in unison as if to agree with the wise words that leave my mouth, and I liked that. I sent Coral Rae into the cave to check for bears and am glad to report she did not find any.

Water, heal my soul

As stated, the hike began in a burn zone but within a half-mile of hiking, there was sufficient vegetation and live trees to satisfy Coral Rae's plant-centric criteria for the day's hike. The trail contoured up and down before dropping down to river level at a river viewpoint that is one of my favorite places on the North Umpqua Trail. The river widens out here and fans out over several white-watered stair-steps before disappearing around a scenic bend. 

The weirdest flower ever

A sunlit cliff next to the trail provided an opportunity for Grandpa Richard to point out all the plant life clinging to a moist cliff, while Coral Rae surely rolled her eyes behind my back. The flora-based education of Miss Coral continued when I showed her how to find the brown and hairy flowers of wild ginger, and the tiny cups of birds nest fungi. 

Wild strawberry, in its pre-berry phase

This hike was never intended to be an epic test of manhood (or girlhood), so we turned back here. On the way back, we enjoyed the beautiful scenery all over again and the uphill hiking not as much. Coral was excited to find a wild strawberry flower and stated we had to come back to eat the tiny but very tasty berries. Sounds like a good plan to me and like the request to go hiking, it'll be my job to make that happen.

The always scenic North Umpqua River

Inspired by Coco Love Alcorn, I took a post-hike stab at writing beautiful heartfelt lyrics in homage to the river:

"Water heal my back, water heal my knee.

Drink enough water, then I have to pee."

I think I better stick to my day job, even though I don't have one. Plus, I really can't sing either.

The North Umpqua River, 'nuff said

For more photos of this hike, please visit the Flickr album.

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North Umpqua Trail (Marsters Segment)

About a month prior to this hike, I had hiked the Marsters Segment of the North Umpqua Trail. And it had been like five years since the last Marsters hike before that one. In between those two prior hikes, fire had come to play and frolic upon the Marsters, much to the chagrin of the resident flora and fauna. So, much of the most recent hike was spent making horrified comparisons to the pre-fire and post-fire versions of the Marsters. However, on this mid-December day, the element of fire-damage surprise was gone so there was more of a general appreciation for the hiking aspects of this particular segment of the 78 mile long North Umpqua Trail (NUT). Well, make that the 40 mile long North Umpqua Trail, for half of the NUT is currently off limits due to fire damage from last summer's Archie Creek Fire. 

Views were hard to come by on this day

At the start, the morning was as chilly as an ex-spouse's glare, and river fog misted up the canyon and surrounding forest. Higher up, it looked like it might be a sunny day but not for us, that would require sun reaching the bottom of the canyon. And what do the North Umpqua River and an unempathetic jogging philosopher have in common? Why, they both run cold and deep! The river was obviously in winter mode with the strong current flowing dark and black like it typically does in cold weather. It's also that time of year where sunlight does not reach river-level and we'd (the Friends of the Umpqua Hiking Club) best be planning to hike in the frosty shade all day. 

River fog ruled

While cold, it wasn't quite freezing so on the plus side, icicles did not form off of the tips of our runny noses as we hiked. Even though this was the second time within a couple of months that I had set my handsome feet on the Marsters, the devastation from the fire was still stunning. Maybe, the burned forest seemed even starker if only for the reason it was set against the murky background of the dark canyon and cold forbidding river, with thick river fog occluding much of the surrounding topography and what little sunlight there was.

Where landslide meets river

Several miles into the hike, the trail crossed a landslide that didn't really seem like it was yet done with its earth-moving business. A small stream of running water trickled down the face of the slide, which is always a bad sign. The trail was narrow and the path shifted and moved beneath our boots as we carefully made our way across. Shortly after this hike, the Marsters was closed because a large landslide had covered the road to the trailhead and I couldn't help but wonder if this landslide was the culprit (It wasn't).

Supernatural creatures inhabit the woods

So there we are, hiking in the mysteriously foggy woods, the kind of setting that makes it easy to believe in supernatural and spectral creatures, so don't blame me if I thought I saw a Sasquatch. We were hiking through a fire-blackened acreage of dead trees when suddenly on the ridge crest above, the sounds of a large creature stampeding across the landscape could clearly be heard. I whipped my head around toward the sound just in time to see the silhouette of a large apelike creature disappear into the thin sunlight illuminating the higher reaches. Actually, it was just a large tree falling, but just for a moment there, I believed. Besides which, falling trees when one is hiking is a spooky enough event, anyway.

Just another drippy day in paradise

Just like the hike from a month ago, the turnaround point was the trailhead at Calf Creek. While everybody else ate, I tried to take some photographs of ferns, mushrooms, and virtually anything else, but the increased moisture in the air was clouding up the camera lens within seconds of uncapping the lens. Sheesh, it was cold and now I can't take pictures either? What am I supposed to do? Just hike? The questions are rhetorical, no need replying to your sniveling whiny blogster, but I did make do by frequently wiping the lens (and my glasses, too) clean of condensation, darn early dew point anyway.

Fire does not age-discriminate

Near the Calf Creek Trailhead, a large pile of fallen fire-blackened trees covered the trail, and the climb over them was fairly tedious. Penny decided she would rather walk around them instead of clambering over like the rest of us mere mortals. The tree pile pushed her route away from the trail and onto an increasingly sheer slope, so she had to abashedly make her way back to the pile and scramble over like the rest of us lesser beings, much to our amusement. Life lesson: If you are going to do something like that, first make sure no one is watching!

It's not every hike where you can observe
mountain goats in their native habitat

I'm assuming everybody enjoyed the hike or if they didn't, they were kind enough not to complain within earshot, which was easy to do since I was leading from the rear anyway as per my usual customary wont. Despite the chilly weather and all the other harbingers of winter, it had been an enjoyable hike on our old friend, the North Umpqua Trail.

For more pictures of this hike, please visit the Flickr album.

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North Umpqua Trail (Marsters Segment)

Four years ago, I hiked on the Marsters Segment of the North Umpqua Trail (NUT). Back then, the forest was lush and mostly green (sporting a little bit of autumn yellow, too) while dense and vibrant undergrowth of fern and salal carpeted the forest floor. It was so peaceful and beautiful and so impressed was I by the rampant vegetation and forest that four years later, I was given to say at a planning meeting "Say, I have a great idea for a hike!" I really should know better.

The North Umpqua on a cold late autumn morn

Sometime during the intervening years after that 2016 hike, fire had come to visit, plunder, and pillage this once and former green section of the NUT. Seems like lately, the North Umpqua River area is ground central for summer lightning strikes and accordingly, fire has become a yearly thing on the NUT. This year, the massive and catastrophic Archie Creek Fire immolated over 100,000 acres of beautiful riverside forest and as a result, about half of the NUT was rendered unusable and officially declared off-limits. I'm not sure which of the many fires in the area was responsible for ravaging the Marsters but at least the segment was open for business when I went there for a scouting trip in preparation for the upcoming Friends of the Umpqua Hiking Club venture.

If you like fire damage, then you will absolutely love the Marsters

It was obvious that the green forest residing in my memory pixels had succumbed to the fire. Gone were the salal and ferns, now supplanted by a post-fire population of fireweed and dewberry vines. The lush forest had been converted into several miles of blackened and dead trees, all victims of the fire's rampage. However, life was returning anew and young hardwood trees like bigleaf maple and dogwood were already establishing themselves on the blackened slopes above the North Umpqua River. Since this was late autumn, the young trees were adding yellow, pink, and orange colors to the otherwise stark terrain.  

This landslide was treacherous, yet I
stopped halfway across to take this photo

The bucolic woodland path of yesteryear was likewise gone, now transformed into an uneven and sketchy track undulating up and down across steep slopes. Even though it was ostensibly the same pleasant path I had hiked on in 2016, somehow the fire had imparted a rough and rocky quality to the trail. After a wildfire, trails become damaged by landslides and fallen trees and both of those obstacles were present to be contended with. There was one small slide that was not too bad but a more daunting second landslide was perched high above the river, and was fairly slick too, thanks to a small water runoff trickling down the face of the muddy scar. One really had to be very carefully picking one's way across the shifting soils of the slide and this One made sure to do that very thing.

Got some practice hiking through trees today

The trail crossed Deception Creek and several other small gullies by means of wooden footbridges that did not look new, and I was grateful they had either survived the fire or had been replaced shortly afterward. Either way, it would have been a tedious scramble in and out of the gullies without the bridges, considering each gully was choked and cluttered with litter and debris from the fire. As mentioned, there were plenty of fallen trees that were a pain in the you-know-what to scramble over, under, or around with one notable pile of many trees blocking the way as I neared the trailhead at Calf Creek. My people are going to hate me when we do the actual hike which, in my twisted way of thinking, makes the hike an absolute success!

Bridge across Deception Creek, which was
not named after me (but could have been)

This side of the river was not bathed in warm sunlight and it was a pretty chill day, but several layers of clothing combined with some exertion kept me plenty warm. Because of the cold air and lack of sunlight, the river was running dark, there'd be none of that distinctive North Umpqua River turquoise color today. Across the river, rugged forested slopes were bathed in warm sunlight as if to taunt one certain lone hiker suffering from light and warmth deprivation on the shady side of the river canyon. Local landmark Rattlesnake Rock was eminently visible on the other side of the river, along with an unnamed massive cliff painted greenish-yellow by lichen splotching the cliff's craggy face. All this scenery was made visible courtesy of the fire clearing out the forest and vegetation which is just about the only good thing wildfire accomplishes, although a happy post-conflagration population of woodpeckers, fireweed, and tree-eating fungi might disagree with me.

My lunch time view of Calf Creek

After a rough clamber over the aforementioned pile of fallen trees, the trail then dropped steadily down to Calf Creek, which denotes the western terminus of the Marsters Segment. Calf Creek was a logical stopping point for rest and repast and I partook of both. The Calf Segment begins where the Marsters ends but was now officially closed because of the Archie Creek Fire. The Calf already had fire scars from 2002's Apple Fire so it would be interesting to see what the damage the Archie Creek Fire did. With fire being such a frequent visitor, you could say the Calf is well-done. From ground level however, the Calf did not look either closed or any more fire-damaged than usual. The road to the trailhead was closed though, and people stationed on the highway to prevent would-be hikers from getting to the trailhead would be the problem getting onto the Calf, unless one surreptitiously backpacked in from the Marsters. (Note: the Calf Segment has since been opened for hiking).

Watercolor painting upon the North Umpqua

After lunch, it was back the way I came and I enjoyed the same rough fire-scarred terrain all over again, including hair-raising traverses across landslides and tedious scrabbles over piles of fallen trees.  It would have been nice on the return leg if some more sunlight actually would have made it across to my side of the river, thereby illuminating the autumn leaves and warming the body and soul of this erstwhile cold-hearted hiker. But then again, it just wouldn't be the North Umpqua Trail in late autumn/early winter.

Fireweed, gone to seed

For more photos of this hike, please visit the Flickr album.

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