Dual-Summit Weekend: Hogsback and Black Butte

A few of my favorite weekends as a citizen of Klamath Falls thus far have been what I've taken to calling "dual-summit weekends." Basically, it involves climbing one mountain on Saturday and one on Sunday, ideally in different places so that there's lots of driving and enjoying the surrounding countryside (and maybe restaurants) in the process. This is a novelty to me, I think, because when I lived in Pullman there just weren't any high points close enough to make such a thing possible. If you wanted to climb more than one mountain in a weekend, they had to be along the same trail and you had to fucking bust ass to get them done and finish the 4-5 hour (or much more) drive back to town before school started again on Monday morning.

Here, there are so many amazing high points within 45 minutes or so that I don't have that problem. Hence, dual-summit weekends. I did a few last fall before the snow started falling in earnest: the first one was Yamsay Mountain and then Mount McLoughlin, and the second was Mount Bailey and Howlock Mountain (by way of Tipsoo Peak, so I guess that counts as three). A few weekends ago, Lindsey and I decided to get a bit carried away in the name of rare sunny March weather and attack a few "peaks": Hogsback (in Klamath Falls) and Black Butte in northern California.

I put "peaks" in quotation marks there to indicate that Hogsback, at least, wouldn't really be considered a legitimate summit by anyone who climbs mountains seriously...but damn if it isn't a 1,800 foot ascent from town, so I'm counting it.

Where the trail starts, in the parking lot of some random church, for some reason. Up and to the left you can see the summit.

We headed across town on Saturday morning to the parking lot of a random church that I'd noticed was next to a trail that was visible on Google Maps and labelled "Hogsback Trail." Apparently this is just something you know about if you live in Klamath Falls, because there was at least ten other hikers swarming the hill already when we arrived, despite it only being about 10am. The top of Hogsback was visible from the car, and we decided to take the obvious trail straight up to the top of the ridge and then follow what looked like a pretty obvious path left to the summit.

For once, our route was apparently obvious to others besides just us, because this was actually the route that the trail took for the entire hike. Save for a quick water break under a shady grove of pine trees of an indeterminate type just as we topped the ridge, it was an extremely straightforward, though gorgeous hike.

On top of the ridge, looking back the way we came.

The summit itself, like most Oregon summits (it seems like) was a flatter plateau of sorts, choked with lots of old (and current) industrial detritus.

Like this weird old movie-screen-thing Lindsey is trying to pull down.

There were great views, though, of the lake in one direction and the city in the other.

Exhibit 1: Lake.

Exhibit 2: City.

We also spent some time climbing around on a rusty old fire tower and then searching for a geocache before heading down through a cloud of extremely friendly Klamath Falls hikers and a random guy who was in town from Jacksonville, FL. All in all, it was a surprisingly intense hike to have found right in town, but easy enough that we felt comfortable taking the dog for a three mile walk afterward.

That might have been a mistake since Black Butte was next on the agenda.

We headed out for Black Butte (the CA one, not the OR one) Sunday morning, getting ever closer to Mount Shasta as we headed toward the town of Weed.

Ever closer.

From Weed, we had a disastrously dumb encounter with the GPS on Lindsey's phone which led to us driving in circles on really shitty roads for awhile and ending up on private railroad company property (by mistake, for once) before we realized we needed to actually drive to Mount Shasta City and come at the butte from the south instead of the north. Obliging reality over the GPS, we got a good, if intimidating view of the butte on the way down the highway.

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Fortunately, the drive to the trailhead wasn't terribly complicated and the hike itself wasn't, either. The trail is a marvel of trail-engineering, really, as it has to snake up a fairly steep, two-pronged volcanic cone with sides made almost entirely of loose scree.

Shasta in the distance on an early screen slope (Lindsey in the foreground for scale).

As we got higher, the wind got...windier (?)...and the slopes a bit more exposed, lending the hike just enough intensity to make it interesting but never enough that I felt unsafe. There were kids along the trail at a few points and actually a couple hiking with their infant strapped to the man's back. So, clearly it's not viewed as a particularly dangerous hike. But being up there on the rocks in the wind felt awesome, like being on a much scarier and manlier mountain. Good times.

Lindsey heading up into the wind.

The summit itself was actually the foundation of an old watchtower of some sort, which was actually quite fortuitous because it gave us something to hunker down into while taking in the views without getting totally battered by the wind.

Me, on the summit.

There was actually a very exposed, frankly terrifying little move across two not-quite-joined blocks of rock to be made to reach the final summit, and though Lindsey scrambled over it like a crab (while I covered my eyes) I wasn't able to bring myself to test it. However, after a few minutes of poking around Lindsey found a lower, less exposed but more scrambly backdoor of sorts to the watchtower foundation, which I chimneyed down without losing control of my bowels from fear.

Slinky.

Eventually, we stopped screwing around on the summit and found a lower ledge out of the wind to eat a quick lunch. After which, Lindsey took a "nap" in front of Shasta.

Then it was a quick scramble on sore leg joints back to the car to finish off a great weekend of hiking.