Scattered - Heart Lake, Emigrant Lake and Greensprings 6-30-25

Photos by Linda and Randy and Rich

Ashland Hiking Home

The turnout was low on Monday as the group had family and friends visiting and a growing list of the walking wounded. Speaking of wounded, my SUV was still in the body shop, so Lisa kindly agreed to drive me to Rite Aid parking. We arrived before 8 AM and found we had the lot to ourselves.

After a short wait, we decided to stay local and try out her new birding app at Emigrant Lake. Since the lake is full for the first after many years of drought, there was plenty of human activity on the water. We saw a guy standing and rowing on a paddleboard, a couple of motorboats pulling water skiers and students in shells taking instructions from a woman with a megaphone.

On the shore, we saw countless Canada Geese with their goslings, and flying overhead, a pair of Osprey. The microphone on the birding app from Cornell University could detect songs and calls from many nearby birds. It was an exciting experience for this non-birder.

Next, we headed up to Greensprings after Lisa heard my sad tale of misplacing my hiking stick while scouting for a rare flower with Liz a few weeks back. Elisabeth Zinser had fowarded to me a photo of what looked like my stick leaning up against a tree. The picture must have jugged some grey cells, and we headed up Highway 66 to the summit parking and then up Old Hyatt Prarie Road to fork to the right. The fork crossed the PCT and we searched both ways on the trail. First, we found the rare Mountain Lady Slipper plant, now starting to shrivel up, then we found my stick, after much searching leaning up against a tree by the Old road.

In between, we met a through hiker whose trail name was Py. He had started at the border with Mexico and had hiked through the Sierras. His day's goal was to reach the Brown Mountain Shelter by nightfall some 33 miles from his start. He said that hiking the PCT in N Cal was rough with all the deadfall, but that so far the trail in Southern Oregon was much better. Thanks to our local trail-clearing groups.

Then I got a phone call from Randy wondering if we were coming on the hike to Heart Lake. They had driven straight down to the TH. I explained that no one else had met us at Rite Aid parking so we decided to hike locally.

Randa and Linda went ahead with the hike to Heart Lake and got some great photos of the lake and its surroundings. They had nice sunny weather with temps in the 70s and hiked 5+ miles with 600' of gain up from Castle Lake parking. On their way home on I-5 they had heavy downpours of rain from thunderclouds leading up to the Siskiyou Summit.

So it was a scattered day, but we 4 made the best of it and had hiking adventures in both Oregon and California.

Happy Trails,
Rich