Blue Mountain Hike

Last weekend, my roommate and I went down to the Blue Mountains in Southeastern Washington to look for some deer and elk sheds and go for a nice bushwhacking hike.  Our entire hike was in the Umatilla National Forest and straddled the border for the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Area.  We heard some rumors of a lot of snow up in the mountains, and calling the National Forest confirmed that rumor.  So, I rented some snowshoes for the weekend.  Of course, once we got to the trailhead, we didn't see snow anywhere except very high up, so I was a little upset that I rented snowshoes for nothing.

On the drive to the trailhead, we saw a ton of mule deer, so I think we found some good areas for hunting this fall.  We also saw a lot of turkeys, but none of them were bearded, so this probably won't be a place for us to go for turkey hunting.  Once out on the mountain, though, after a lot of bushwhacking and climbing steep terrain, the only evidence of any cervids was a lot of trails and even more droppings.  But not the droppings we were hoping for- just poop.  At least it was in a very beautiful area and the hike gave us some great views.

We kept looking across the canyon and thinking that would have been better hiking and maybe better shed hunting.  The grass actually was greener on the other side.

I liked this view up the canyon of the Tucannon River.

It looks like there were very recent forest fires in the entire area, which made hiking up the side of the mountain not on trails fairly difficult, since we had to climb over a ton of downed trees and debris.  Here is a nice shot looking back down one of the climbs on the way up through a bunch of dead trees. 

If you were thinking that my earlier decision to leave the snowshoes in the car was a mistake, you would be right.  The higher up we got, the more snow we encountered.  We actually spent half of the day trudging through snow.  Some of it was hard-packed enough that we could walk on top of it, but a great majority of the snow was soft enough that we were post-holing at least to our knees and sometimes to our hips.  So now I was even more disappointed that I rented the snowshoes.  The ridge we hiked along was incredibly untouched, even by animals, and provided us a really nice hike in an untouched winter wonderland.

With the exception of a crazy rabbit, the only tracks we saw up here were our own.

It was a long walk for a picnic in the snow.

When we finally made it out of the snow, we started looking again for sheds, but still only found scat and trails.  The way down did provide some excitement, though, as we did come about 25 feet from some wildlife.  We were heading down and all of the sudden a grizzly bear came running out of some tree cover right in front of us!  He was staring at us as we ran down the hill to a tree that had fallen over the creek and ran up it incredibly fast (the downed tree was covered in moss and at about a 40 degree angle).  He kept running up the other side for a while before he finally stopped and looked at us for a second then kept going. His speed and agility was incredibly impressive and it reminded me how severely outmatched we are against wild creatures such as grizzlies.  With that in mind, this encounter is exactly how most encounters with dangerous wildlife will occur.  Most of the time, we won't even notice that we just had an encounter and if we do, the bear will most likely just run away.  He was already long gone before I was able to draw my bear spray and my roommate was able to draw his gun.  I think I have probably bored almost everybody reading this with conversations about what to do during a bear encounter (whether black or grizzly), so I'll stop now. Sorry I don't have any pictures, but he was a little too fast.  Although, soon I will post some pictures of grizzly bears that I get to work with.

After a grizzly bear being the only non-avian wildlife we saw while hiking in the mountains, on our drive out, we again saw a bunch of muleys and turkeys.  Overall, a pretty good day, despite once again not finding any sheds.