#mount eddy

[vintagecamping]

Hiking through the season's first dusting in the Trinity Alps

Northern California

1994

[thorsenmark]

Capturing a Picturesque Setting of Mount Eddy from the Black Butte Trail by Mark Stevens Via Flickr: While hiking along the Black Butte Trail, I took in this view looking southwest down a mountainside to a valley below with Interstate 5 going through. Beyond, more distant hills and mountains of the Trinity Mountains with Mount Eddy were visible. This area is in the Shasta–Trinity National Forest.

[dailycryptodrawings]

753: Ghost Deer

I know the form doesn't make entirely a lot of sense, but I hope you can appreciate the ghostly floof!

Requested by: anonyhun

An Albino Doe, Unsettling To Look At For Too Long, Could Be A Good Comparison

[firebluegraphics]

Cryptid Road Trip 03 Ghost Deer Mount Eddy, California

[billiethehoe]

Green Day Instagram humans 🐥

Okay so I told @fuuuturism that I could make a list of gd humans to follow on Instagram if they wanted, and they said yes so here ya go 😂

greenday billiejoearmstrong mikedirnt trecool jw_gd (Jason White) therealjasonfreese jeffmatika

Billie’s wife is mnnesotagirl Mike’s wife is batmansmom Tré’s wife is bubukittyfk and her photography account is rosewrightphotos

Billie’s sons are itsjarms (joey) and jakob_danger

Joey is in a band called swmrs (swimmers) and they are fantastic 😝

Jakob is in a band called mount eddy (they were called danger) mt_eddy I haven’t heard a looot of them but what I have heard has been great :)

If anyone notices that I’m missing anyone please repost and add :)

[vintagecamping]

A group poses for one last photo before heading into the Trinity Alps for some much needed time away.

Trinity Alps, California, 1981

[theghostpinesmusic]

(Some photos and text from mid-October, that I forgot to repost until now.)

I'd been hoping to get Milo up Mount Eddy before the snow fell, and after a few weeks of playing tag with the weather, we finally caught a break on Sunday.

It didn't start that way: we left K-Falls in the morning in a downpour that kept on until just north of Weed, but we kept driving toward the trailhead based on the forecast insisting it was going to magically clear out by noon.

And then it did!

One of my favorite things is starting a hike in bad weather only to have the sun and blue sky push their way out partway through, and this time around we hit slushy snow under grey clouds at 7500 feet and by 8000 feet the trail was dry and the sun was shining.

Milo did the entire hike without ever showing any sign of tiredness, of course. He is a monster.

This was his first 9000 foot peak!

[theghostpinesmusic]

Mount Eddy Bushwhacking Loop

For the second backpacking trip of this past season, I convinced Lindsey to join me for a two-night trip up and around Mount Eddy. Camping at the highest of the Deadfall Lakes and then climbing Eddy is something we'd done together before, and we both loved it, but I wanted to add an extra wrinkle to the itinerary this time based on a late-season solo trip I'd done last year, where I'd camped at the usual lake but then taken a sixteen-mile, part-bushwhacking hike around Eddy to the south and then the west before making my way back to the car.

The plan this time was to leave camp set up at Upper Deadfall after the first night and dayhike the sixteen-mile route with one shared pack before returning to camp for a second night, which I imagined would be much more satisfying than trudging up Steward Springs road with a full pack at sunset and then driving two hours in the dark to get home at 11pm.

I wrote a bunch about this route and my experience of it last year, so I won't be describing in as much detail this time. If you want to learn more specifics, you can find the first part of that trip report here, and the second part here.

We were doing the hike much earlier in the year this year, and it was immediately obvious as we headed east from the Parks Creek Trailhead. From there, the first few miles of the route traverse along below the top of a ridge that descends north and then west from the Eddy summit, and there were wildflowers everywhere almost immediately. When we reached Lower Deadfall Lake, there was way more snow than I'd expected still clinging to the hills.

We took a rest break at the lake, as per tradition, and then continued climbing up the Deadfall Lakes Trail, which climbs six hundred feet to the next lake in very short order. It's always the toughest part of the climb for us when done as a dayhike (and that's including the Eddy climb itself), but done with full packs it was a serious slog.

We made it, eventually, up into the Upper Deadfall Lake basin, which is one of my favorite places in the world to be. I've hiked and climbed to tons of other places that are "technically" more beautiful, but this area, a series of interconnected lakes with the face of Mount Eddy looming above them, is a great place to spend an afternoon...or, in our case, two nights.

There really is only one decent campsite on the shore of Upper Deadfall Lakes, and you have to hike through the basin from southwest for awhile before it comes into view, so that portion of the trail is always a little stressful, as you wait to find out if the spot's been taken already or not.

This time it was empty, so we set up our camp, took a short break, and then grabbed a few necessities and continued climbing toward the mountain's summit.

The weather was supposed to be a bit sketchy through the evening, but then clear up overnight. We got plenty of clouds, but no rain, and the gloomy sky actually made for incredible sunset light. I took one of my favorite pictures I've taken in a long while on the way up.

Without full packs to worry about, the climb to the top of Eddy was straightforward and quick, and we made it up in time to see alpenglow on Shasta and then watch the sunset from the summit.

The Eddy summit is long and flat, but extremely exposed...so of course I've always daydreamed about camping up there overnight. We were not doing that this time, though, and in fact we took turns huddling behind some of the old fire tower remains to stay warm as we waited for the sun to reach the horizon.

It was worth it.

Climbing back down to camp in the near-dark might have been a little sketchy if we hadn't already done that exact thing...twice? Three times? I was serious when I said we like this hike.

It was a warm(ish) summer night, but it was still nice to see the reflective tape on the tent seams light up in my headlamp beam and know we were back home. We went to bed early so we could get up early.

I said earlier that I'd done this sixteen-mile bushwhack before, but it felt different having someone else along, knowing that if I took a wrong turn or messed something up, we'd both be in trouble. Combine that worry with a weird malady that didn't seem to be sickness, per se, but had left me fuzzy-headed and overtired for the last week since I'd returned from East Boulder Lake, and I was actually a little nervous when we started off the next morning.

I'd suggested that instead of taking two barely-filled fifty-five liter packs for the day, we load one up with all of our shared gear and take turns carrying it. Smart, right? Well, it would have been had we taken Lindsey's pack and not mine, which is sized in the frame for someone no shorter than six feet...

Oh well, live and learn.

From the Deadfall saddle, you're actually on a real trail on this route until you descend far enough down into the valley south of Eddy that you reach the NORTH FORK OF THE SACRAMENTO RIVER.

(This is one of my favorite geographical things about this hike: yes, the North Fork of the Sacramento literally starts about half a mile west of this trail, at the head of the valley. It's so cool.)

I was disappointed last year that this "river" had more or less dried up by the time I was passing through, but this year, in late June, it was running fast and high(ish). We crossed it easily, still, and proceeded to climb to the south. Some maps show a trail here, but there isn't one. You just aim for the saddle between the two obvious rock towers and prepare yourself for some intense uphill. This is probably the hardest part of the whole loop, and with a heavy pack and whatever was ailing me weighing me down, I actually wasn't entirely sure I was going to make it. But we did, eventually.

The descent back down the other side of the saddle was a second straightforward bushwhack, and before long we'd hit the actual Toad Lake Trail/road. Last time, I'd taken this road west briefly and then angled to the south onto a "trail" that disappeared before long and left me sloshing through a bunch of marshland. This time, we stayed on the road and took it all the way to Toad Lake. Not as adventurous, maybe, but way more fun.

Toad Lake is nice, though given the choice I would always camp at Deadfall or Porcupine Lake instead...

We took a short break at the lake before another pretty gnarly climb up (on a real trail, though!) to the PCT. Once you get to the PCT here, your bushwhacking is done and you're on the trail for the rest of the day.

It was going to be a long hike still to the north and east to get back to the tent, but we took a half-mile detour anyway to visit Porcupine Lake to the south. I'm not entirely sure why I advocated for this, because at that point I felt like absolute garbage. But, Porcupine Lake is beautiful, and a great place to have lunch, even when you sort of feel like you're just going to throw that lunch back up (I did not, for the record).

I'd been a little worried all day that, despite the relatively easy going thus far, we'd run into trouble once the PCT led us onto the north-facing slopes across the valley from Eddy. It was still June in the Trinities, after all, and it was totally possible that those slopes would hold an amount of snow that made traversing them dangerous. If we got stuck, our only real option would be to turn around and hike/bushwhack something like twelve miles back the way we'd come.

For all my worry, I hadn't bothered to pack any real traction devices or ice axes for some reason, but we lucked out and found a way across the one pass that still held a lot of snow without having to do anything particularly dangerous. But it was really close. If we'd have been there a week earlier, there likely wouldn't have been a way to safely cross without specialized gear or a death wish.

But we made it over okay, and then stood and stared at the run-out for a few minutes, waiting for the chance to send someone sliding hundreds of feet down into the valley below.

From that pass, you get a great view of Eddy, the valley below, and up and to your right, the two rock towers from the bushwhacking section of the route. It's fun to be able to see almost everything you've hiked already that day just as you're closing in on the end of the route.

There's a really cool rocky section north of this pass, where first you pass through a bunch of "Red Trinities" peridotite, then some admittedly boring forest, and then a bunch of basalt, finally, as the Lower Deadfall Lake basin comes back into view.

From there, you get the dubious honor of climbing those six hundred feet up again to get back to Upper Deadfall Lake, and let me tell you, if it'd felt like a slog the previous day, it was much worse the second time around.

But then we were back at Upper Deadfall, and we could see our tent waiting for us.

We had a few hours to burn, then, just relaxing and enjoying the gorgeous June weather. Lindsey collected enough fallen wood for a campfire (yes, we had a permit and it was legal in June), and we stayed up late watching shooting stars, knowing we had a short hike out the next morning.

This was the second time I've parked at Parks Creek Trailhead, then hiked out and down to the Deadfall Marsh Trailhead and hiked the mile-and-a-half up Stewart Springs Road to get back to the car.

Don't do it! It's dumb and not worth the extra effort!

But, it certainly made the black bean nacho fries at Drizzle taste even better.