Finding myself with four days without work or social obligations (the latter rather unusual for early winter in Wallowa County!), I made plans for a backpack in an area I hadn't been before - Cook Creek and Cherry Creek drainages on either side of Dead Horse Ridge.
I brought my dog Jasper and a friend's dog Noodle along on this adventure. On our drive out, we saw lots of second-season elk hunters sitting in their rigs or at their big wall tent encampments. Once on the trail, we didn't see a single person. And there was good reason for that.
The switchbacks down to Cook Creek from Dead Horse Ridge were a fairly well maintained, obvious trail, but along the creek it was a different story. Shrubs grew in thickly along much of the rocky floodplain, and the trail appeared and faded and interwove with various game trails. The dogs did okay in their space a couple feet from the ground, but I spent a lot of time with my arms in front of my face pushing my way through branches, sometimes feeling like I was being birthed out of a copse of shrubs when I was finally able to push through. Very occasionally I'd see evidence of other human visitors - a few cut stobs, a strand of blue baling twine, a screwdriver lost along the way. But overall it felt very wild and remote.
It was cool and shady in mid-November, with the sun barely reaching over the ridgelines when the trail hopped up on the hillsides through a few sections. We passed swampy pools of cattails, an abundance of thimbleberry stems, and a beautiful stretch of mature, even old-growth alder gallery. There were also prickly roses and as I got further downstream, occasional blackberries vines and thorny young hackberry trees. Two fires had burned through parts of this drainages in the past 25 years, and burned hot enough to kill large trees through some sections.
Eventually the sunlight faded from the ridgelines above us, and we found a reasonably flat spot to camp up above the creek near the outlet of Wild Canyon. With rain on the way, I set up the tent quickly and unloaded my gear. But where was my sleeping pad? With a shock, I realized it had been ripped off the side of my pack somewhere along our ~5 miles bushwhack! I took my headlamp and water bottles to fill and we backtracked for a little bit, hoping I had lost it recently, but not finding it. I crouched by the creek in the dark filtering and collecting water for cooking my dinner, accepting that I would have a hard bed for the night. Luckily I had two dogs to keep me warm.
Camp at the mouth of Wild Canyon.
I resolved to push on to try to get to the hot spring the next morning, which according to the map was only a couple miles further down the creek. But I also felt that I should abandon my plans to continue on the loop up towards Cherry Creek, and instead pack up camp and head back the way I had came after that to try to find my sleeping pad. The morning was cool and foggy after the rain, and the sun failed to lift the clouds. We made slow and soaking progress through the wet brush downstream and I decided to turn back a little while after crossing the creek past the mouth of Dry Creek, where pieces of the old trail junction sign still hung on. I gazed longingly up at the faint traces of the high trail heading up over the ridge to Cherry Creek.
