Washington Knob

Another road walk that I like to do.  The view is nice and the solitude is great.  I don't do Mount Rose or Ellinor at all anymore, they are both too crowded now.

I did not get any good pictures, it was foggy and my image sensor is covered with dust.

Ricoh GR II dirty image sensor and no easy way to clean it

Dosewallips Road Walk

Sadly it is now a 13 mile round trip hike to get to Dosewallips Ranger station.  I did not want to subject Sage to such a long hike so I wandered around on old road grades instead.

Beautiful old road left to nature, not savagely decommissioned

So many oyster mushrooms everywhere this year!

Spied and old road grade going down from the main road.  Followed the old grade for a bit and realized it was taking right back to camp Elkhorn!  So there were two ways to drive into Elkhorn once upon a time.

Gates are open, back to Fir Lake

Fir Lake is quite small.  Where are all the new campers pooping?

Back to Fir lake to hopefully find my camera strap. The wild life gate is open now, but it’s not a very well known lake so I thought I had a good chance of finding it. Nope, no luck. I guess someone picked it up.

Fir Lake was my backpacking destination two weeks ago when I had to turn around due to snow and fatigue.  I wore boots for this hike expecting snow.  I did not need to wear boots, all of the snow is gone.  All of it!

 Sadly I had to share the lake with other hikers too! LOL The lake is now in a hiking guide and there are campfire rings everywhere. I won’t try going there again in the summer. The trail is so very ugly that most people would not bother with this hike. I hate how they destroyed the road by converting it to trail.

 They did such an ugly job on this road to trail conversion. The hike was much nicer before. The road was filling in with blueberries and it was a nice shady hike. Now the road is just horrible dry root ball lined artificial trail. So very ugly. Why did they do such an ugly job here?

Snake let me get really close.. rocks confused the HDR
setting on my camera but the snake came out just right.

Road Walk before the Gate Opens

Trillium

My last chance this year to get in a hike behind a  gate.  I used to look forward to the gates opening, now I think I look forward to the gates closing.  When the gates are open it just means I have to drive further to get to the start of my hike.

Bleeding hearts

I've hiked this road and drove this road plenty of times and I had never noticed this before.  It really does pay to go about half a mile into the woods, you never know what you might find.

I could not believe my eyes.  It was clearly a car from the 1950's.  Wow!  How come I never saw this before?   I half expected to find a skeleton in this car.  How did this car crash land here?  What happened to the occupants?

1956 Oldsmobile Super 88

I stopped to take pictures, but of course is started raining.  This climate is driving my crazy, literally, no not figuratively literally.  I'm sick of  illiterate people overusing the word literally.

I was hoping to find some Verpas on my hike but no luck.

Violets are yellow too

9.5 miles with 5,000 feet elevation gain

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Copyright protected images