Dates: August 18 – 21, 2013
This August a few of our guides and friends are headed to the Kalmiopsis Wilderness to help clear some heavily overgrown hiking trails with the help of the Siskiyou Mountain Club. The Kalmiopsis has always been a special place to me, and after paddling the Chetco River across the Kalmiopsis last June I’ve felt a special connection with this wilderness area. On our Chetco trip last summer, we had to bushwhack 8 hours from Chetco Pass to Slide Creek. With the help of many volunteers (and hopefully you!), we’ll get the trail that existed before the 2002 Biscuit Fire reopened.
Hiking up to Chetco Pass
Opening this route will help us access the Chetco for our proposed 5 day wilderness kayaking trips across the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. We’ve asked the Forest Service for permission to offer an inflatable kayaking trip on the most beautiful (in my humble opinion) river in Oregon. This route will also help the Siskiyou Mountain Club by providing a supply artery for their continued work on the trans-Kalmiopsis hiking route from Babyfoot Lake to Vulcan Lake.
The View From Chetco Pass into the Kalmiopsis Wilderness
We’ll meet in Selma, Oregon on the morning of August 18th and drive to McCaleb Ranch on the Illinois River. Here we’ll start the 5 mile drive up to Chetco Pass on an old Forest Service road. We’ll leave our vehicles at Chetco Pass and hike down to an old gold mine along a creek to set up a base camp.
We’ll get up early every morning to hike down and clear trail in the cooler part of the day. Our goal will be to clear the trail all the way to the Chetco River. Since this is a nationally designated wilderness area we’ll only be able to use hand tools to remove logs and brush. We’ll work the morning of August 21st and then head back to civilization.
