After a long time away from a trail, it was time for my husband and I to take the challenge. This was our first hike in at least 5 years.

The weather was just about perfect aside from some clouds that hid most of the Cascades. But the painted hills were pretty in the morning as the sun broke through.

The hike has a few muddy spots, it feels like it may never end at first but it does and then you go through it again at the end. The way the red clay just collects on the bottoms and sides of your shoes makes them heavy to lift. Every so often you can do a kick to get it off or grab a stick and poke it off.

The hike was steep which made the way up almost twice as long as the way down. In our current level of fitness…which is on the couch watching Severance level…we were huffing and puffing. But we were not in a hurry and took our time catching our breath.

The only snafu we had was understanding which summit we were headed to. We followed the road until it ended on the right and then scrambled up to the top (no trail to speak of) which was at 4600ft.  We didn’t see any markers and so kept going along the ridge line (still no trail) to the other summit to our left. There we found markers and a cairn at 4690ft.

I think if you’d rather have  a straight up approach,  when you see the road go off to the right you could continue the climb straight forward. This way you’d summit more simply. Maybe the round about way we did it was how it was meant to be, it wasn’t super clear.

Regardless, we made it to the tops! I would suggest using poles with baskets this time of year to help mostly with the steep downhills, save the knees! We were pretty proud of ourselves and went directly to Tiger Town Brewery!! Everything was delicious the lemonade was out of this world!