The trail head for Sutton is tucked between some trees along the creek – you can see it clearly using the GPS on the OregonHikers website or by using Bill Sullivan's GPS points from his Eastern OR hikes book. The gate at the trailhead is tricky to open – gotta really throw your weight into it! The trail isn't hard to follow, there's a gate halfway that is again hard to open, but if you hike along the fence uphill for a couple minutes you can step over where the fence has fallen and rejoin the trail easily. There are early spring flowers right now including hedgehog cactus, larkspur, paintbrush, yellow bells, grass widows and more. A pleasant, easy hike. Nice views at the top.
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Responses
Nice photos, Melanie! I’m not sure where the second gate you mentioned is. There was an opening in the fence that the jeep track led directly through, and then the trail turned left and uphill pointing directly towards Sutton, but I haven’t seen a gate. Hmmm… 🤔
Huh – maybe we got off track. The second gate was when we turned left uphill towards Sutton. I was using Bill Sullivan’s directions and tracking our route via OnX. OnX shows a trail to follow and it seemed to be the same way. But who knows. Out there it’s easy to meander and not worry about getting too lost. It was nice to have a new hike to explore with this year’s 6 Pack.
I put together a trail guide for Sutton: https://socalhiker.net/hiking-sutton-mountain/
The opening I’m referring to is at the 2.1 mile mark (there’s a photo of my friend David walking towards it). Did you go up along the left side of that fence?
Yes, I believe so. I can’t imagine there are any other fences anywhere that we may not have seen. Perhaps other hikers can report their experiences with this gate. There was a sign on the tree that said something about not trespassing that I didn’t read carefully since we thought we needed to go along the inside of the fence. We saw that it was knocked down a little way up, and realized it wasn’t likely keeping cows in, but when we came to an obvious dead end we saw we had gone the wrong way and had to step over the fence at another falling down spot to continue up to Sutton. Bill Sullivan’s guide, AllTrails’ dotted line (they don’t have a hike marked for Sutton) and OnX all describe or show the trail the same, so I don’t know why this gate suggests it’s not public access land. I did hear from locals that a lot of people are suddenly showing up to hike Sutton, so maybe it’s a reaction to the increased traffic? We saw 5 other hikers out on the trail, so we were definitely on the correct route.