I had today off from work, the weather was looking to finally clear after days of rain, so that meant a hike with Codi.  The cascades got dumped on the past several days with fresh snow (or POW if you want to use the skier speak) and I didn’t really want to do anything in the Gorge, so that meant something in the coast range.

I opted to take Codi on the Historic Hiking Loop (aka the University Falls Loop).  I was hoping that the wet weather would pass by the time we got to the trail head, it didn’t.  So at the very least, I was hoping it wouldn’t be super wet, it was snowing instead…….

At the Roger’s Camp trailhead it was a mix of rain and snow, mostly a light drizzle with some big fat snowflakes tossed in for good measure.

We were the only car in the parking lot and we didn’t see a single soul out on the trails.  We could hear some logging work going on nearby a couple times, but didn’t actually see any people.

As we got to the University Falls Trail and were heading towards the Gravelle Brothers Trail there was a sign saying a portion of the Gravelle Bros Trail was closed due to active logging operations.  At this point I still had not reached the falls and it would have meant either walking back on a gravel road or back tracking the way we came turning our 8 mile loop into something closer to 12 miles.  I took a gamble and took a chance on sticking to the trail, hoping that there wouldn’t be any logging going on.

From the junction of the falls and Gravelle Brothers Codi and I hiked on for 1.5 miles until we came to the area that was being logged.  We were downhill from the area being cleared and there was no active logging going on at this point, but the loggers had caused quite a bit of detritus to come down the slope and into the trail itself.  Plus one section there were 3-4 very large trees across the trail.  I hope the loggers are responsible for cleaning this up before they move on.  Otherwise it’s going to be some serious trail work in the spring/summer.

At a couple of the creeks, Codi went out into the water a little too deep for my comfort.  I was somewhat nervous that he was going to end up floating downstream.  Luckily he did not.

All said and done we had just over 8.5 miles which included me having to backtrack 0.3 miles to look for my camera near those large downed trees.  Codi was having trouble getting up and over them, so I had to help pull him over and it must have knocked my camera out of its pouch.  Luckily it was easily found since it is a nice orange color.  That was about the biggest drama of the day.

I’ve mountain biked parts of this loop with Juston, but this was my first time hiking the whole loop.  It was fun and Codi is now pretty wiped out, which is always a good thing.

all the pics can be found here

Thanks for reading,

-Pete