Rockpile Lake to Cigar Lake (mile 2041.1).
Miles hiked: 28.8.
Slept through my alarm since it was turned down from being in a house with other people, but still got hiking by 6. The trail quickly crossed a saddle where the wind was blowing thin wisps and filaments of cloud over the ridge from west to east. I walked quickly through the moist, heat-sucking wind, feeling it's cold seep through my clothes to my skin the way wind feels when your out on the ocean early in the morning. After crossing the saddle I turned back and could see the cloud forming on the west slopes of Rockpile Peak as the humid western air was blown up and over and cooled and condensed, then fading into shreds as it crossed over the crest and sunk back down into the dry eastern air. I could almost sense the moisture being sucked right out of the air by the parched trees rising up into the fading cloud. Off to the east, the sun rose orange and red through wispy clouds. The peak of Mt Jefferson came into view as I rounded bends in the ridge. But soon it too was growing its own blanket of cloud. A Golden Eagle soared over headed north, with some other large hawk that I couldn't figure out lazily mobbing it as they went along.
The trail spent much of the morning wrapping around the steep western flank of Jefferson. This was mostly in forest of tall trees shaggy with moss and thick understory of blueberry bushes turning red and rhododendrons with drooping leaves and no flowers left. The morning's fairly efficient travel was interrupted only by Russell Creek, silt-laden and tumbling steeply down from one of Jefferson's glaciers, roiling around slippery looking rounded boulders and pouring quickly through spouts between frothy pools of uncertain depth. I struck out upstream looking for a good place to cross, and not really finding one in 100 or so yards I just sort of hopped across some slightly-submerged rocks where the stream split into a couple narrower channels.
I lunched beside the gently lapping waters of Scout Lake, set in Jefferson Park, a big flat bench on the north side of Jefferson, with canyons dropping off to east and west and ridge rising to the north. I laid my sit pad out on a sandy beach and made my little cheese and salami burritos then put on my pants and down jacket against the chill wind and had a nap.
From Jefferson Park the trail climbed north up a slope to regain the ridge as it dirt rose then dropped down to the north of the big Jefferson with its crevassed glaciers spewing milky streams down the mountain side. I crossed a small east-west running ridge at the top of this climb and suddenly there was Mt Hood way up to the north another 50 trail miles away, standing tall and bare with snow and glaciers and alone with just shorter forested hills all around. Cresting this ridge and looking back, Jefferson looked much closer without the Park visible.
The next several miles I wound down a mostly barren and beautiful sun-alpine ridge with clusters of stunted trees here and there and lots of rock cropping out all over the place and little forbs growing sparsely in the dry shallow soil. All the while Hood was out there near the horizon, and in the low space just beyond flowed the Columbia River.
The trail finally dropped back down into forest, and I continued another couple hours to set up my little cowboy camp near the little Cigar Lake with its water a few feet below normal.
Birds:
Oregon Junco
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Golden Eagle
big hawk
Northern Flicker
Steller's Jay
American Robin
Cooper's Hawk
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