The Bull of the Woods

Published 2021-08-31

Someone had made a small camp at the broad junction of the Mother Lode and Pansy Lake Trails. We happened upon this spot late around mid-day, after summiting to the Bull of the Woods watch tower. We sat in the place where someone had obviously pitched a tent, and we ate our lunch of tortillas and cheese and sausages and almond butter. We noticed a thin stream of smoke rising from the dust of the trail. Whoever had camped there had buried their fire while the embers were still hot; I was worried it might burn slowly down into the roots of the old- and second-growth trees around us. We dug up the remains of the campfire and spread them around until they were cold.

A month and a half later, on Labor Day weekend, the Beachie Creek fire tore up the southward edge of the Bull of the Woods wilderness, along the beautiful Santiam River. Trapped in our house by the smoke outside, I obsessively refreshed the incident website, mentally marking the course of that trip — would this spot we loved be spared? By a narrow miracle, it was.

Not this year.

That trip last summer, before the fires, to the Bull of the Woods Wilderness, unexpectedly became one of our favorite backpacking trips. It wasn’t the easiest, and it wasn’t the most beautiful, but this is maybe why it was one of our favorites.

Zach Urness of the Salem Statesman Journal has written with obvious love about this piece of the Old Cascades. In 2018 he wrote a review of the fire watch tower, and he has been following the progress of the fire closely.

This is now the second place we love that has burned

Update 2021-09-07

Sometime this past weekend the lookout burned down

Elk Lake Creek Trailhead — we saw a juvenile bear here on our way out

Bull of the Woods Wilderness trailhead sign — a harbinger of the state of maintenance of these trails

Through a very old burn on the Welcome Lakes trail

Welcome Lakes trail, through the 2012 burn. There was a lot of blowdown & scrambling on this entire trip

Previous burns were mostly “good fire” — they left a lot of older trees

Ring of green clinging to the edges of the Welcome Lakes

Scars from the 2012 fire around the Welcome Lakes. The regrowth was abuzz with wildflowers and insects

Wildflowers on the ridge between Welcome Lakes Creek and Mother Lode Creek

The meadows on this ridge were sublime. The south face of the ridge was completely unburned.

Mason bee on a wildflower on Welcome Lakes ridge

We dropped our packs on the main trail before climbing to the Bull of the Woods watchtower

The Bull of the Woods fire watch tower is a Registered National Historic Place

Mt. Jefferson from the Mother Lode trail on the east face of Pansy Mountain. This was the last photo I took before we made camp. The next five miles were a gruelling slog over HEAVY blowdown from the 2012 fire

With light fading and no water on the Motherlode trail, we were *really* starting to worry that we would have a dry camp on the trail that night. Then we hit upon this tiny site on the edge of Mother Lode Creek just before nightfall. Remains one of my favorite campsites ever.

That second day on Mother Lode trail was like this

Mother Lode Creek near the confluence with Battle Creek

Junction for the abandoned Geronimo Trail (557). I shudder to think what an *abandoned* trail looked like here, the *maintained* ones were pretty rough!

There was still amazing old growth along the Elk Lake Creek trail, and some beautiful campsites on Elk Lake Creek (itself a beautiful opal color)