Hiking to Cedar Creek Falls
Sep. 6th, 2023 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerNorth Cascades Travelog #8
Mazama, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 1pm.
What do you do when the trails you wanted to hike are on fire? You find somewhere safer to hike! Fortunately we'd already made a list of several trails we wanted to hike in the area, so after crossing off the top few there were still 3-4 left. Tops on this list is the Cedar Creek Trail to Cedar Falls.
We started the hike under graying skies. Partly it's because there's cloud cover building over the North Cascades (it would rain lightly late in the afternoon) and partly it's because there's wildfire smoke lingering high in the sky. Still, rays of sunlight would occasionally break through.
While fires are still burning (or at least smoldering) higher up in the mountains west of here, this area shows fire damage— from a fire that burned 2 or 3 years ago. Some of the bigger trees survived the fire. The smaller ones were reduced to charred husks, if they weren't burned entirely as the undergrowth was. But one aspect of fire is that it's part of a natural regrowth cycle. With the old forest canopy mostly gone, wildflowers and bushes have regrown rapidly.
There's one particular wildflower we're seeing a lot on the trail today that I haven't been able to identify. It's got small, purple flowers late in the season and plentiful wisps that have turned into cottony, dandelion-like puffs. Hawk said it's Russian thistle weed, but none of the pictures I've found online match what this plant looks like. (Among other things, Russian thistle seems to grow in ground-hugging clumps, while this wildflower grows in stems 3-4 feet high.)
As pleasurable as it was to walk among the wildflowers, our main reason for the hike was to see Cedar Creek Falls. Oddly it's not marked on the trail! But after about 2 miles of hiking we could hear the din of water falling not far off the trail, so we followed a use trail to explore it.
This is what I'll call Middle Falls on Cedar Creek. As I've explored around the rocky perches above the creek I've spotted a cascade and a smaller falls upstream, and another, larger-seeming falls downstream. It's time to do some more exploring to see if we can get to them— stay tuned!
Update: pictures of falls galore in my next blog!
Mazama, WA - Sun, 3 Sep 2023, 1pm.
What do you do when the trails you wanted to hike are on fire? You find somewhere safer to hike! Fortunately we'd already made a list of several trails we wanted to hike in the area, so after crossing off the top few there were still 3-4 left. Tops on this list is the Cedar Creek Trail to Cedar Falls.
We started the hike under graying skies. Partly it's because there's cloud cover building over the North Cascades (it would rain lightly late in the afternoon) and partly it's because there's wildfire smoke lingering high in the sky. Still, rays of sunlight would occasionally break through.
While fires are still burning (or at least smoldering) higher up in the mountains west of here, this area shows fire damage— from a fire that burned 2 or 3 years ago. Some of the bigger trees survived the fire. The smaller ones were reduced to charred husks, if they weren't burned entirely as the undergrowth was. But one aspect of fire is that it's part of a natural regrowth cycle. With the old forest canopy mostly gone, wildflowers and bushes have regrown rapidly.
There's one particular wildflower we're seeing a lot on the trail today that I haven't been able to identify. It's got small, purple flowers late in the season and plentiful wisps that have turned into cottony, dandelion-like puffs. Hawk said it's Russian thistle weed, but none of the pictures I've found online match what this plant looks like. (Among other things, Russian thistle seems to grow in ground-hugging clumps, while this wildflower grows in stems 3-4 feet high.)
As pleasurable as it was to walk among the wildflowers, our main reason for the hike was to see Cedar Creek Falls. Oddly it's not marked on the trail! But after about 2 miles of hiking we could hear the din of water falling not far off the trail, so we followed a use trail to explore it.
This is what I'll call Middle Falls on Cedar Creek. As I've explored around the rocky perches above the creek I've spotted a cascade and a smaller falls upstream, and another, larger-seeming falls downstream. It's time to do some more exploring to see if we can get to them— stay tuned!
Update: pictures of falls galore in my next blog!
