![]() ![]() The bushwhack was bad enough I decided to call it a day and head back to the truck. I made my mark in the summit log and rummaged around the cache, nothing worth taking except maybe that plastic dinosaur but since I'm not a geocacher I just left it. ![]() There is a ammo box/geocache at the highpoint of the vent. How was soil formed that supports all these trees? I guess I have to assume 7000 years is enough time for this amount of soil formation to happen. Once at the high point the views were a little disappointing. There is an easier route but I did not locate this until after some pain and suffering on the return trip. There's lots of blowdown (I think due to shallow soils) and the brush in the understory is semi-dense mountain laurel which is pretty unpleasant to bushwhack through. Once across the debris flow I headed up to the high point of the vent and this is where the problems started. The high point of the vent is only 1-200 feet above the base of the flow so appears as just a line of trees. In the photo below the vent is in the center, the higher ridges on either side formed the boundary of the lava flow. The way to the vent is strewn with boulders of all sizes but there is always a nice sandy path and travel is easy. There is a nice pullout just before crossing the Elliot Branch on the way to Laurance Lake to use as a trailhead. Target was the high point of the vent at the south end and possibly good views of the lava field to the north then down the edge of the vent out to the lava field proper for some boulder hopping. So not seeing a TR on it I thought I'd go take a look-see. Nice to see the way the flowering plants, brush, Doug fir and pine (lodgepole?) are coming back. No problem as the route I took to the vent crossed the debris flow which is interesting enough on its own - some massive boulders got tossed around in that event. There is a hiking guide called Hiking Mount Hood National Forest by Marcia Sinclair that actually has a hike description for visiting the lava bed but in reading the trail head description and the 2002 copyright I'm pretty sure this came after the November 2006 debris flow that took out the road across the Elliot Branch and re-arranged the creek bed. I'm sure there are numerous other resources and scientific articles out there. revealed/ and there has been some discussion here on OH at. Splintercat has a nice in-depth article on his WY'east blog at. In the course of looking for something else I ran across references to the Parkedale Lava Flow and thought I'd check it out.
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