Thunder Creek Trail and 4th of July Pass

Both of these trails have always been on my list but since Thunder Creek is basically a very long valley trail there's often not much reason to do them, except early season because it will be snow free.  Or when it's been raining for days and days and days like this last weekend.  However, Thunder Creek Trail is the approach to several interesting climbs.  With that in mind, plus that it had been raining and raining and raining and might rain some more Jim and I decided to check out the approach to Logan, which is on both our lists.  And also ponder the aproach to Tricouni, Austere,and Primus, based on a trip report we had both seen on NW Hikers.

Along the way we talked to several backpackers who said that they camped high and dry on 4th of July Pass and other camps.  Huh.  Well that explains why the telemetry websites weren't showing much precipitation.  Yet at home it rained constantly for more than 24 hours.  Jim said his wheelbarrow was half full of water.  If it rains that much at low elevation it is reasonable to expect that it rained (or snowed) more at higher elevation.  So much for studying all the weather and telemetry websites.

We walked on the trail, which is well groomed and basically follows a contour so there is very little elevation gain for the whole hike, until you get much further south.  I snapped a lot of pictures of water falls, flowers, mushrooms, trees.  Seems like the flat trails are harder on my feet, mostly because of the repetition of taking the same step over and over and over again.

About 6 miles down the trail we decided to turn around and go back to 4th of July Pass, which is 3 miles up a different trail.  We had all day so why not?  And it wasn't raining yet.  It took a couple hours to get back to the junction to 4th of July Pass.  The climb up to the pass is steep (2200' in 3 miles) but there are lots of switchbacks on a nice trail so the climb was reasonably easy.  We got up to the pass in less than 2 hours.  The pass is still relatively low elevation (3600') so the only view is a break in the trees at the backcountry camp.  We wondered why we didn't think of just coming to 4th of July Pass in the first place and slogging our way up to the summit of Ruby (7408').  I guess we were expecting different conditions and didn't get our minds around the dry conditions and easy travel until we were 6 miles in the other direction.  Oh well.

By then it was 4:00 so definitely time to turn around.  Then it started raining lightly.  On the way down from the pass we noticed all kinds of flowering dogwoods that we hadn't seen on the way up.  In part, because it was steep uphill we both had our heads down.  And white dogwood flowers against a monochrome sky are hard to see.  But they were distinctive against the bright green background of the forest.

We got back to the car at 6:30 p.m.  It had been a 9 hour day that was fairly leisurely in spite of the distance.  We were both sore in different places but none worse for the wear.  It was a great day to get out of the rain and see a trail neither of us had hiked before.  Here are the pictures.