I was appalled today at how much junk and crap is being left along the Iron Horse trail and at least one of the NF roads in the area by illegal shootists. They set up targets, drink copious amounts of canned booze (judging from the garbage) and blast away.
I forgot to take a picture of the ‘No Shooting’ sign.
Anyway, I was solo today and woke up too late to do Rattlesnake/East Peak. It would have been too crowded. So I drove a few exits east along I-90 and parked in the Ollalie State Park/South Fork picnic lot and started off going up the Hall Creek tail again, exiting at Iron Horse.
Not far from Hall Creek is a cool waterfall across the freeway. I think it is inaccessible for all practical purposes:
The topography going east on this trail, by the way, is interesting. To your immediate left is a sharp dropoff down to the area by the river. Farther left, that is north, across the freeway, are mountains we love to explore and are champing at the bit to explore more when the snow is mostly gone:
Er, actually that picture above is looking south from the Mine Creek bridge but you get the idea. This place might be accessible and I am going to look at Google Earth and maps to see how to get there.
It was 4.25 miles from the car to the McClellan Butte trail. I went about .7 mile up to the old forest service road, NF9020. The first section of NF9020 was tough to navigate because there were so many blow downs. It was the only place all day that had much snow.
Here is a snap of the very last NF9020 snowy section:
9.2 miles, about 3,600 feet of elevation gain (only very short section we would call steep) not a bad day.
Visualization of the hike:
http://adventures.garmin.com/en-US/by/djhiker/hall-creek-iron-horse-mcclellan-nf9020/#.VsonU5Xltow