Continued...
Day 3 featured some hiking on actual trail, a welcome change for Jackie, having
grown tired of picking thistles from her socks and shoes, following dad through
brush and similar unpleasantries. Not just any trail, either, but a section of
the PCT that quietly winds its way through this part of the Plumas National
Forest with little
fanfare. The second outing of the day wasn't so much to her liking - very little
trail and more of the aforementioned unpleasantries. She decided to sit that
one out after the first mile.
McRae Ridge
I was after the highpoint of this ridge, a P900, which lies on the boundary of
Plumas and Sierra Counties. The shortest approach is about 1.5mi to the east at
The A Tree, the oddly-named saddle on the crest where several roads come
together. We drove in through Eureka State Park where one has to drive into the
park from the pavement at Johnsville to find the forest road heading south.
It's a pretty rough road in places, high-clearance required. About six miles of
such driving gets you to the saddle where the PCT conveniently crosses the road.
We parked here and headed north on (though it actually goes west
through here). We left the trail when we neared our peak, heading
to the west up several hundred feet to the highpoint,
taking about 45min. We found the highpoint at the flattish summit to be in the
forest with an understory of dwarf manzanita, not all that impressive and weak
on views. Nearby, to the southwest, however, was a slightly lower
with in three directions. We could see
Blue Nose Ridge, our afternoon objective, to . The PCT
actually connects the two
hikes but adds another 3.5mi each way which is more easily done with additional
driving. We briefly considered going to nearby Gibralter, a rocky feature about
half a mile to the southwest along the crest. It would have been an easy call
if there'd been a trail, but Jackie wasn't too keen on the additional
cross-country even though it didn't look too bad at all. We left a register of
our own under a small cairn and headed back the way we'd come, about an hour
and a half all told.
Blue Nose Ridge/Blue Nose Mtn
Blue Nose Mtn can be found in Pete Yamagata's Northern Sierra Peaks Guide, a
collection of 86 summits that is a superset to the OGUL list. It had
been more than a year since I'd done Mt. Como, my second-to-last summit on this
list, and I'd mostly forgotten about it. It wasn't until the night before when
I realized McRae Ridge was nearby that I made plans to visit it. Pete's guide
provides directions for an approach from the north and west, but that would be
terribly inconvenient from McRae Ridge, so I made up a route that was probably
a longer hike but easier on the driving.
More jeep driving took us around the north end of McRae Ridge, down into the
north branch of Nelson Creek and then up to a saddle with the Canyon Creek
drainage at the south end of Blue Nose Ridge. The PCT crosses the road here as
well, so we parked and started off on heading north around
10:50a. We were only on the trail for a few hundred yards before I called to
Jackie just ahead that it was time to leave the trail. "Already?" she asked, not
a little dejected. It was clear she much preferred the easier trail. Though
there a good deal of brush to contend with, the sidehilling on
the east side of the ridge to avoid a local highpoint was a bit tedious. A
tiring, loose led up to a saddle on
northeast of this highpoint that eventually
sapped Jackie's will to continue. She had brought her sketch pad for just this
situation and decided to hang out on the local highpoint while I went off to
finish the business over the next several hours. She went up
while I headed north along Blue Nose Ridge.
It would take me about an hour and a half to reach Blue Nose Mtn after leaving
Jackie, a somewhat tricky route-finding affair to minimize brush encounters. I
mostly stayed on, or close to the ridge, with deviations as necessary. I first
went over of Blue Nose Ridge, a bonus summit with 323ft
of prominence. There was a small duck found atop this point surrounded by much
brush. then drops down to a saddle where a section of
impressive are found (bypassed on the east side) as the
ridge begins a slow climb up to Blue Mtn. Somewhere along the way I noticed
a and evidence of an old
trail cut through the brush. Though heavily overgrown, it was still quite
helpful to make the brush less troublesome, and I did my best to follow it (I
did a much better job on the return). The ridge becomes a boulder/talus slope
shortly before the summit, eventually bringing me to the
. Rock had been piled up to make a
of some sort, though it looked sad and in poor shape
on my visit. quite nice overlooking a broad
swath of the forest. A bit behind schedule, I stayed only
briefly (didn't find nor leave a register) before starting back. It would take
another hour and a quarter to make
south along the ridge and find
jackie sitting patiently at .
She had drawn
of Blue Nose Ridge which I was much impressed by. Rather than return to the
talus slope and side-hilling we'd used earlier, we descended the local highpoint
to the southwest, down a steep,
with modest brush, to reach the PCT
where it goes over a saddle with nearby Stafford Mtn. Once this initial descent
was made, it was a pleasant 3/4mi back down to
which we reached
at 2:45p. It would take us well over an hour to drive back out through Eureka
State Park to reach the main highway, where we called it a day.
After returning to Portola to take a shower, we headed into town for dinner at
the Pizza Factory in the old town center. We were the only customer the entire
time we were there, an interesting experience. Not bad pizza though...
Continued...