Becky and I had been planning to take a week off around Labor Day weekend for the whole summer. All summer the weather just seemed to be one perfect week of weather after the next...our plans to spend a week hiking the Bailey Range traverse and climb Mt.Olympus seemed like a sure thing. But....as luck would have it, we ended up with one of the worst weeks of weather coming in for our vacation.
We scrapped our Bailey range plans...we thought briefly about just climbing Olympus, but in the end we tossed the backpacks in the car and headed for eastern Oregon, hoping to squeeze an extra day of sunshine out of a forecast that looked rather wet after Labor Day.
The Wallowa River loop is a rather popular 40-ish mile hike up one fork of the Wallowa River and out the other, starting/ending at the Wallowa Lake trailhead just outside of Joseph, OR. We'd pass by a bunch of lakes, cross over a couple 9000ft passes and hopefully hike up Eagle Cap and the Matterhorn along the way.
Day one was a short hike, with the majority of the day traversing Washington State and arriving at the trailhead by early afternoon. We hiked about six miles up the East fork of the Wallowa River to Aneroid Lake and settled in for the night.
Day two, we left the lake, passing by a large compound of cabins...not sure how they're allowed to be maintained in a wilderness area...there were marks on the USGS map for mines at the head of the lake...could be that the structures were grandfathered in as previously private land under an old mining claim?
We climbed out of the trees into arid sub-alpine terrain and were at Polaris Pass (9,000ish ft) by mid-morning. The view across to the heart of the Eagle Cap Wilderness definitely reminded us of the Sierras or the Enchantments...not so sure about the Wilderness' nickname of 'Oregon's Swiss Alps' but it definitely is different than the heaps of volcanic rock in the Oregon Cascades.
The trail down from Polaris tests the patience of anyone who typically refuses to cut switchbacks. Its only about 2000ft down, but your legs barely feel like they're going downhill because the gradient is so gentle. Finally we hit the valley bottom, refilled our water bottles and continued on to Frazier Lakes.
Despite the scorching afternoon heat we hiked another hour to Glacier Lake and it was well worth it.. This place reminded us of Virginia Lake in the Sierras...one of our favorite places on the John Muir Trail. We quickly found a little lakeside campsite and spent the rest of the afternoon reading, lounging, and attempting to swim in the frigid water.
Our plan for the next day was to hike from Glacier Lake directly to the saddle between Glacier Peak and Eagle Cap, which would be miles shorter than hiking over Glacier Pass, down into Lakes Basin and then back up via the trail on the other side of the mountain. The only bit we weren't sure about was a small section of hiking to gain the ridge...from our vantage point we couldn't tell if it was an easy hike or a loose scramble up a bunch of stacked choss.
Day 3- we left camp and instead of the directissima to the saddle between Glacier Peak and Eagle Cap we hiked up to about 8,600ft and traveled west cross-country around to the usual climbers path to the top, still miles shorter than the all-trail option, but a little longer that making a bee-line to the ridge. Once on top it was obvious that the route from the Glacier Peak saddle would've been a cake-walk.....next time!
We had the top of Eagle Cap all to ourselves....nice views in all directions, but we didn't spend too much time on top as a line of cauliflowery clouds were marching our way. By the time we reached Lakes Basin the sky was mostly overcast...changing weather definitely on the way.
By mid-afternoon we'd reached Horseshoe Lake. Took a bit of time to find a campsite as we were now dealing with labor day crowds, but eventually we found solitude on the far side across from the trail.
Day 4- Overnight it had rained pretty consistently and we had some thunderstorms in the distance, and it was still showery in the morning. We got enough sunshine in the late morning to dry everything out and get packed up, heading down the West Fork Wallowa River trail. Waves of drizzle came through but we had enough sucker holes of blue sky that we went ahead and took the fork on up towards Ice Lake instead of staying in the valley bottom and hiking out to the trailhead.
1500ft of climbing later, and only about 500 vertical feet to go, the sky just opened up..rain jackets on and time to decide whether we really want to camp in the pouring rain or not. Surprisingly, none of the day hikers we'd ran into had looked at a recent forecast so our four-day old weather forecast left us wondering if our chance of showers/thunderstorms was now solidly a bad forecast.
So, we wussed out....we knew we were less than three hours of hiking from the car, and a motel, and the Terminal Gravity Brewery so we started down. We'll hike the Matternhorn another time...and given that the Wallowas are a pretty decent backpackers alternative to the Sierras with a much shorter drive, we'll probably be back one of these days.
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