Coming up on the South Ridge trail I was fortunate to spot my first bear ever on a hike - very black and about 150 feet up the trail. We regarded each other as to threat status and decided no confrontation required. The bear turned up the hill and ambled off into the brush. You can never get the camera out fast enough to capture these kinds of events.
I like going off trail to follow the ridge to the vision quest pits as the views are always good.
Made the summit after some very wet and melting fast snow on the trail - the summit was standing room only. The air was very clear and views were magnificent on all directions. This pano runs from Goat Rocks on the right to St Helens on the left. I believe the left foreground ridge is the Tatoosh Hills.
This pano is pretty much the rest of the day, Little Baldy, Bluff Mtn and the ridge ride home.
On the Bluff Mtn trail on the approach to Little Baldy, an osprey settled down for a break on a rock outcropping.
On the south face of Little Baldy looking back.
From here I left the trail for a bushwhack across the south face of Bluff Mtn. The original plan was to summit both Little Baldy and Bluff Mtn but I took a pass on these as I could see I was going to be short on time with an unknown bushwhack across the ridge. Bluff Mtn. was not bad and the start of the ridge going south was a nice walk through fields of beargrass and huckleberry bushes punctuated by neat little rock outcroppings that provided more expansive views.
Here's a pano from the south face of Bluff Mtn.
Looking back on Bluff Mtn from the ridge.
A pano from the ridge looking south.
A close up of Hood, I think the ridge on the Oregon side is Yeon Mtn with Tanner Butte on the far left.
The little point on the left is is Three Corner Rock, dead ahead is Table Mtn and just beyond is Defiance on the horizon.
Having committed to the ridge the ever increasing brush started to become a real problem. The misery was down low as the views continued to be good. Here is the ridge and Chimney Rocks.
A couple of the locals stopped by to see what the stupid human was doing what with all the crashing through the brush.
Yeah, well, you have big ears.
By now, the brush was near impenetrable and I was getting a little concerned, about as dense brush as I've ever seen.
The rest of the ridge looked impossible. I'd gone too far to turn back and considered dropping off the ridge into the trees or maybe abandoning the whole thing to downclimb to Skamania Mines Road.
I looked back towards Bluff Mtn. and pondered on the error of my ways.
The brush was bad but the views were great. Getting close to Chimney Rocks.
My fears about the rest of the ridge dissipated when I got lucky by landing on a good ridge line game trail and zipped up the ridge to meet up with the jeep track above Chimney Rocks. Looking back on the day.
From here was an uneventful but very long walk back down to Skamania Mines Road and up the 1200 to return to the trail head.
I wear a Garmin 405 heart rate monitor/GPS when I hike, neat device (I'm a member of the zipper club so I pay attention to this stuff). It has an internal rechargeable battery lasting around 6 hours at most so when the battery goes dead, that's it until a recharge from a USB port. To get a feel for how difficult bushwhacking is I include a graphic from the report generated by the Garmin software. The battery died just after I'd done the worst of the ridge bushwhack. You can see on the graph the most difficult parts of the day were the bushwhacks across Bluff Mtn and in the saddle part of the ridge (see map below).
So I'm going to invent the Bushwhacker 9000 Athletic Trainer - constructed from a treadmill and rotating drums on either side like in a car wash only outfitted with hard plastic tubing that pummels you while you 'hike' on the treadmill. You heard it here first.
Here's the track, around 15-17 miles, approximately 4500' cumulative elevation gain. Great day and while I recommend the Bluff Mtn parts and a ways down the ridge, the section across the saddle of that ridge is not fit for man nor beast.
