Hiking Mule Creek Canyon

    After being lost among the large trees and ferns of Vashon Island at the end of May (see blog post on June 3) and among the thickly-leaved deciduous trees of the Virginia mountains three weeks later, it was distinctly uncanny to find myself lost last week in the dense vegetation—ashes, firs, maples—in a canyon of the Siskiyou Mountains. If in the first case I was alone and in the second case a follower, this time it was I who was taking a friend on a trail I thought I knew, where another friend had taken me years before, following Mule Creek to Baldy Peak. 

    The weather was perfect and the trail, though long unused, was clear enough. The Mule Creek canyon was lovely—thick with greenery along the creek, dense with undergrowth, and shaded by tall trees from which birds threw out their songs. 

We had to draw ourselves thin in places to get through overbearing poison oak, and, once, a large rattlesnake shook an angry warning as it scooted off the trail into the greens. In one clearing by the creek, where an enormous white Douglas fir log was criss-crossed by dark red trunks of more recently fallen madrone trees, butterflies flittered like prismacolor snowflakes—sisters, blues, tiger swallowtails. Salmon-colored colomia and purple mint bloomed at our feet, and osage orange and ocean spray bloomed white along the creek, which trickled and tinkled and twinkled among moss-covered rocks.

    It was all very good until the trail forked, and I couldn't remember which fork was the right one. A cut log on the uphill side indicated a deliberate trail, so we took that fork.

    Shortly we came upon a broken toilet seat under a makeshift latrine and, just beyond, a fire ring, a left-behind camp chair, and a strange structure with a pole roof and a bundle of stovepipe pieces tied together and attached to a supporting tree. All very strange. And how did the campers get there? The trail we were on continued through the camp, but another possible trail, on what looked like an old road, would take us uphill, though in what seemed like the wrong direction. We decided to stay on the trail we were on

    Soon that trail forked. Then that fork forked. By this time we were marking each turn with limbs on the ground, in case we had to find our way back When the trail we were on finally petered out, we gave up on getting to Baldy and turned to retrace our steps to the trailhead. 

    Immediately we were finding forks we hadn't noticed before. Trails were appearing by magic, animal trails, no doubt, but more distinctly trail-like than most deer trails I have been fooled into taking. Did we come from this trail or that one? Did we really come down this steep hill? We chose slightly wrongly in one place, but, thanks to the limbs we had placed trail junctions, we made our way back to the camp.

    If the campers (hunters, I assume) had not come into their camp this way, they must have come down the road-like trail we didn't follow the first time, so now we took that trail. (Curiosity? Or dogged determination?) We walked on it uphill into drier land and sunshine, a startlingly different ecosystem from the shaded, moist creekside canyon. Oregon sunshine flowered brightly in large clumps along the road, which, we saw now, could not have been the way the hunters came in because two good-sized manzanita trees were blocking access.                 

    But here, at last, we had a vista, and what we were looking at was Baldy Peak. 

Looking through binoculars at Baldy Peak

    Over there?! Couldn't be! Could it? But of course it was Baldy. I recognized the lone pine tree halfway to the top of the butte and the wide, steep slope across which was the Mule Mountain trail. So if that was Baldy, way over there, and we were way over here, we were definitely lost because I had no idea how to get there from where we were.

    From that point on, there was no more indecision, no more trying one trail and then another. We were just going back the way we had come, back through the poison oak, back through the butterfly clearing, back up the hill out of the canyon, back to the trailhead, five and a half hours after we started.

    We had not achieved our goal of hiking to Baldy Peak, but we had had a good time and a great adventure. Margaret held no grudge against me for getting us lost. She hugged me warmly as we parted and said, "We'll inquire about the right path and come back another day."