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Tuesday I hiked a portion of the Meadow Creek trail. I’ve done this a few times but the last time was almost a year ago, June 25th of last year to be exact. I was curious to see where the snow started because last year I ran into heavy snow and turned around just as I finally got to Meadow Creek. Turns out this time was the same, but almost three full weeks earlier in the year, the obvious conclusion being that the snow pack will be gone quite a bit earlier in the year compared to last. Great for hiking but maybe not so great for the fire season in a month or two.
Although last year I had intended to go back later in the summer and hike the whole trail I wasn’t able to do so because of the Bolt Creek fire. You reach the Meadow Creek trailhead by taking Highway 2 to Beckler River Road and then following that until the pavement ends. Right there are a couple of Forest Service roads. Taking the right most road (almost a 180 from the main road) is NF-6520, which goes to the Johnson Ridge trailhead (I’ll hike this trail in the next couple of weeks). NF-6530 follows the Rapid River and a few miles up this road is the trailhead for Meadow Creek. The point is that although the Bolt Creek fire did not affect any forest on the east side of the Beckler River, it did close Beckler River Road pretty much the second half of last year and all the trails I would normally hike in the area were inaccessible. Despite the fact that Meadow Creek trail was not hiked in almost a year, the trail is in really good condition with just a few trees down across the trail. Nothing that can’t be crossed or hiked around.
The Meadow Creek trail is a bit of a misnomer because for the first few miles you don’t ever see the creek. You then hike along the creek for a mile or two and then leave it again. It’s an interesting hike because you go through a few different microclimates if you hike the whole trail. For the first few miles you are basically just hiking up the mountain through a nice dry forest. At about the 3.5 mile mark the trail starts to flatten and you start running into little stream crossings. You finally cross Meadow Creek at around 4 miles and then for the next mile or two you follow the creek up through a nice area which, as the name says, is surrounded by small meadows going up the valley. After a couple miles of this you’ll cross the creek again and head up into a subalpine-type region. Eventually you come to Fortune ponds. There are two of them but the trail only passes one. The other is over a ridge with no trail to it but, at least on the map, it looks like a fairly easy scramble although I’ve never tried it. If you continue on the trail you’ll go up and over a pass and hike down to Pear Lake. Hiking over this pass is a unique experience in that, at least the first time I did it, it felt very much like I had transitioned from Western Washington to Eastern Washington in the space of about 30 feet. In just the span of a few feet it felt like the humidity changed, the temperature changed, the smells changed. I went from one region to another almost instantly and it was a memorable experience. On the other side of Pear Lake the trail ends when it runs into the PCT. From start to finish it is a little over nine miles each way, an aggressive but doable day hike. Luckily there is a nice campsite or two at the lower Fortune Pond and several at Pear Lake if you’d rather make a fantastic overnight experience out of it.
On this day though I turned around at the creek crossing. 7.5 miles total with just over 2,000 feet of elevation gain. Even on a busy summer weekend this is not a highly trafficked trail and on a Tuesday I didn’t see another person.
