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| The Marble Mountains. HDR |
July 1, Day 38. Lets see here. I'm
doing this two days later so it's a little harder to remember. I
started out at the cabin at mile 1630 and made it to the top of the
Seiad Valley Climb at mile 1674. We were at Bee Camp, or a road
crossing. By we I mean myself and Mouse. The days mileage was 44.25
at point 0485112 E 4641799 N. Lets see, the day started off pretty
good and didn't disappoint really. Having been in the cabin made life
a much much better thing for the morning. It was a little hard to get
moving because it was so dark in the cabin. I was the second person
out. I believe I got started around 6:40am. Mouse had actually gotten
up and out at about 5:30am, so he had about an hour lead on me. I get
outside, clear skies, nice and blue, not that cold, the sun is
shining. It's just pretty moist from the rains. I get going and it's
the beautiful part of the Marble Mountains, I mean the night before I
obviously couldn't see much and I was on the ridge, so you get views,
but now, you're stuck inside the actual marble, in the valley. Green
grass everywhere, the trees are pretty and it's just kind of open.
You climb up and out, across a couple streams, a bunch of snow
patches - actually a couple looonngg snowfields and you make your way
over - five miles later to Paradise lake, which was beautiful as ever
- nice and shiny and reflective. Then you do a bit of a climb, hit a
saddle with a great views into valleys, both to the north-northwest
{towards Seiad} and back towards where you came from in the south. You make on little last climb, then you're on this
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| Climbing up to the ridge saddle in the Marble Mountains. |
ridge that you
follow for a good 6 miles or so, just keeping on the western side of
it. You come from patches of green grass and rolling slopes to trees
and then you finally start cutting down. Once you start cutting down
pretty quick, you just don't stop going down until you hit Grinder
creek. So, in all, it doesn't vary too much. Once you get down low
enough, you pop into more of a fern forest - surrounded by trees with
plants just growing everywhere because it's so moist by the creek.
Once you hit the creek itself though, you kind of flat line, and you
flat line more or less all the way to Seiad Valley, for a good 12
miles or so. You finally just burst out onto a road at a campground
and do a, I think 6-7 mile road walk into Seiad Valley. I caught
Mouse about 6 hours after I left, just at the first bridge over
Grinder Creek. So, we had a good time to chat on the way in, which
was awesome. Once we got to the campground and were walking down the
road for about a mile, low and behold here comes my dad driving up. I
had called my parents from Etna Summit the other day, giving them a
brief update, saying ' yeah I'll be at Seiad Valley, roughly sometime
in the afternoon'. So he was like 'ohh it's only 160 miles, I'll come
visit'. So he gave us some trail magic. We stopped for about 20
minutes and dried off our feet, because in the
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| The ridge Saddle, now dropping to Seiad. |
morning all the plants
had soaked our shoes and our socks had yet to dry. We finished off
our road walk while my dad went fishing. We got to the RV park, got
my package, got into the store, signed the log, bought a couple
things. Went back to the RV park, did laundry, took a shower. The
typical things. My dad was there and we got some more food and trail
magic and proceeded to leave come about ohh 7pm. We were just going
to push, because we didn't want to have to do that climb in the
morning. So we did, we pushed and talked. Company up a climb is good,
especially a long, steeper one like Seiad. In the evening we had this
great sunset as we got above the trees and could see all of the
surrounding layers of mountains, trailing off in pretty much all directions. The moon was almost full, so that helped out. Eventually
we made it to the top and cruised and cruised and cruised. I mean I
can't really explain much about it, you're just climbing a ridge and
then you're on the side of the mountain. Than at about 11:15pm or so,
we finally got to a place where it kind of levels out and put up camp
for the night. In the morning, I guess we're going to set off
together. He's trying to make it to Ashland pretty quick so I think
it will be good. We'll make the border tomorrow and everything will
be good!
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| The start of the long descent to the Klamath River and Seiad Valley. |
