SOUTH SISTER CLIMB: anyone who summits has earned their bragging rights! The trail is quite steep and over sand/pebble scree where your footing is uncertain. Although I like the area the problem here is OVER-USE. We went up on Tuesday thinking that a weekday trip would be less crowded...we were stunned to pull into a parking lot filled to capacity, around 40+ cars and car along the roadside. Most were either kayaking Devils lake, day hiking Sister or shuttling from Green lake area. Camping sites at Moraine are limited and we were ahead of the pack by less than an hour; we chose our site and the rest were quickly filled. When you consider how close this is to Portland, Eugene and Bend you understand. Although the majority of people seemed to be young urbanites, what I found most surprising was, for a climb that most definitely was not for the faint-hearted, the sheer variety of people making the climb, from an 84 year old woman to youngsters that looked to be pre-teen and the majority of people not particularly your hard-core hiker/backpacker types. The sense of comradery was high, shared a lot of trail tales with quite a few people, summiting was like some rite of passage or maybe just that bond that comes from the understanding of a shared experience like this. Although the smoke was not nearly as bad as the Valley it was here, compensation of course were the particularly colorful sunrise and sunset I was treated to. And as usual our good weather karma held with just a few small and disperse drops falling for a very brief period of time. Doing Sisters makes us four for four in accomplishing the backpacks we wanted to accomplish-hey!
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 23:31:20 +0000
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