Bluegrass Ridge-Cold Spring Creek Loop Hike

Overview

The Biuegrass Ridge Trail, on the very eastern border of the Mount Hood Wilderness, offers a rarely used alternative to accessing Elk Mountain and Elk Meadows. The trail should be an easy, gradual uphill lope, but it has fallen into considerable disrepair and needs some attention. Much of the blowdown is negotiable without much bother, but the area of the 2006 Bluegrass Ridge Fire is a little more difficult, with overgrowth obscuring the trail in many spots and more tangles of blowdown. (Sections of the trail were brushed back in 2021.) Here you will be in elk territory and visiting a ridge seen by only a handful each year. The return via the Elk Meadows Trail down the Cold Spring Creek valley is without much impediment and mostly downhill. Note that by adding a little over a mile to the hike, you can do a little loop from the Polallie Trailhead that takes in Tamanawas Falls using the East Fork Trail. Cross the highway, and find the trail heading up the slope. Switchback twice to the Elk Meadows-East Fork Trail Junction. Go right here on the Elk Meadows Trail #645. The trail turns up a ridge with Polallie Creek rushing down the deep valley on your right. Pass a use trail leading right to an old forest road. This trail is cleared every year, but the dry, diseased woods of Douglas-fir, western red-cedar, grand fir, western hemlock, western white pine, western larch, and ponderosa pine are carpeted with blowdown. Vanilla leaf, twin flower, pipsissewa, boxwood, and huckleberry form the understory. Walk along the north side of the ridge and switchback up the side of a gully. Hike along the wide crest of the ridge as noble fir and silver fir enter the forest mix. Reach the Elk Meadows-Tamanawas Tie Trail Junction and keep right. A few yards later reach the Wilderness permit station among stands of Douglas-fir and ponderosa pine. Sign in here, and gently rise in an open forest carpeted with bracken and vanilla leaf. At the edge of the ridge, you can hear Tamanawas Falls thundering below. The trail drops and then as

Trail Stats

Photos

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