Goat Rocks

August 27th Ellie and I packed up the car and drove to Packwood for the night. We often find a cheap motel near the trail head the day before we hit the trail. It simplifies things and sets us up for hitting the trail at a decent time, which isn't always our strong suite. In fact we joke that we hit the trail later so that we have the trail to ourselves as we see hikers returning to the trail head as we are hiking up. This also provides us with information about the trail ahead as we say hello and question the hikers returning to their cars. How much longer to the meadow? Are there fewer of these nasty little bugs at the top? Are there many campsites available at the lake?

This weekend we were returning to a overnight backpacking trip up to Goat Lake in the Gifford Pinchot forest. We backpacked up to Goat Lake last year, but this time we were wanted to make it a loop. After getting a map and asking some questions at the ranger station in Randal, we headed out to the Berry patch trail head where we would take the Snowgrass trail to trail 86 to Goat lake to trail 76 and back to the car. Estimated travel 12 miles.

Lattes, last minute visits to the Packwood grocery store, sporting goods store, and Randal ranger station delayed us a bit and we hit the trail at 12:10pm. This is an exceptionally early time for us to be hitting the trail. I'm not sure the two of us together have begun a single hike in the a.m.

Snowgrass trail slowly ascended through a wooded area that periodically opened up to show us the meadow below and a bit of ridges on the horizon. Snowgrass is similar to the Goat Rocks 76 trail but the nicer of the two in my opinion. Snowgrass ascended more gradual than 76 and never had the tougher rocky climb to the valley below the steep switchbacks just prior to the ridge that leads to the lake. We made our way onto trail 86 and started to enter the valley below Goat lake along the eastern ridge. The trail opened up into meadows of wildflowers. On the approach to a wooded area halfway to the lake along the ridge we came across a ton of bear grass. Very alien and appear as if they would glow but biology wouldn't be changed that day. We saw over a dozen people on this trail and asked some of the hikers about the trail ahead. From the conversations we had, it appeared that most of the campsites were occupied at the lake so we proceeded to find a good campsite nearby as established sites could be seen a couple miles before the lake.

A few sites were already taken at this point. We found a nice site right of the trail near a stream and with the view of Mount Adams. We set up camp, stashed the gear and hiked up past the lake to see if we could get a view of some mountain goats.

We past the 1/4 mile sign that approaches the lake on the west side and not much more than 30 yards away we saw 3 goats looking down off a rock not too far. The battery in my camera had lost it's charge and I wasn't able to get a photo. The image of the goats above are from the same ridge near Goat Lake in the second week of September 2009. We continued along that ridge until we knew we could not see any to the ridges end. As we got halfway through the immediate area around the lake we could see roughly 15 goats move along the ridge above the lake. When the goats got atop the snow fields alternating between rocky ground they galloped across the snow field until they reached the rocky ridge area and then raced again across the next snow field and up into an area hidden my some misty low lying clouds hung up on the top of the ridge. This ended our goat viewing for the evening and we hiked back to camp, ate some diner and dug out the Oskar Blues Old Chub from the bag. It is a scotch ale that was just right in the cold evening air with Mount Adams on the horizon. Pack it in. Pack it out.

The next day was cooler than the day before. I got the bag from the tree where we tied it up in the night before. No signs of bears or other critters except the usual marmot, pica, or chipmunk. Oatmeal and dried bananas with a cup of coffee among the bear grass but that morning Mount Adams was covered in clouds. We ate, filtered water at the stream, packed up and start backpacking towards the lake to continue our loop back to the car. The sky was fairly cloudy and while we slowed to enjoy the wildflowers on the ridge after the lake we elected not to visit the lookout above the switchbacks heading down as the cloud cover offered little compared to what we experienced the day before. We descended quickly on the switchbacks and I was glad we chose to do the loop counter clock wise so we did not have to climb up them. We ate lunch between the rocky slope and stream below and watched nearly a dozen marmots chirp and scamper among the rocks. Once we were fueled up we hiked down the shake like rocks to where the trail contained more soil and easier hiking. We saw fewer people on the way down on Sunday but spotted a couple deer after the 76b loop trail. We made it back to our car packed it up and headed home after another great weekend at Goat Rocks.