Hello, long time no see! Spring is on the horizon and I’m getting excited about it being hiking season again! As I peruse online and look through my guidebooks I always wish I had a record of where I’ve been and what I’ve done. I always think I’ll never forget but even great hikes eventually blur together. So, I’m going to start using this blog to post “trip reports” of sorts, of the hikes and other outdoor fun things I’m doing. I may also post some memories and photos from years past, as well as travel journalling. We’ll see! For now, here’s some photos and thoughts from a short hike my fam and I did recently. Happy trails!
On February 21st my family and I headed eastbound to check out a hike we’d found in a book I’d given my dad for Christmas, 50 Hikes in the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it to the trailhead of the hike we’d hoped to do because of the snow. Not wanting to go back to Portland without something to show for the afternoon, we backtracked a little and headed toward Timber for the ~2 mile Triple C Loop Hike.
The internet tells me the Triple C stands for the Civilian Conservation Corps, which in this area helped recover the forests after the Tillamook Burn in the 30s and 40s. (Ya know when Sufjan Stevens sings “Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook Burn and the Fourth of July”? Don’t mind me, I just get excited when Sufjan sings about my home state…)
This hike turned out to be a perfect snow day hike. The day was clear and the sunshine on the snow was so beautiful! There were some more open areas of the hike where it would have been difficult to see where the trail was headed with the snow, but luckily other hikers had been there before us and we were able to follow in their (literal) footsteps! I would love to come back in the summer time and see the meadows in all their green glory.
This trail is a loop, with starting points on either side of the road where the bathrooms are. We parked by the bathroom where there were two trailheads, and took the one on the right. Doing it this way we ended across the road from the parking lot and our car, the opposite of the way the book directed us (oops). As it’s a loop, there isn’t a wrong way to do it, of course, but the signage at the end of our hike made it seem like it might be less confusing to start there. Just a note for myself in case I ever come back! 🙂
Cleo Josephine 