Found Something Broken? No Problem, Hike It

Getting up at 5:00am on your day off is not something I love doing. However, when a good hiking opportunity appears, why not no it? So, before the sun choose to rise, I was in the shower, making coffee and getting ready to head up for a hike around Broken Top.

This was a photo field trip with the Cascade Camera Club. So, on this hike The Teacher and Magnus did not attend. It wasn't all bad since it gave me and three other CCC members a chance to go nuts with photos.

Another reason I jumped at this hike, was the trail head required a more serious off-road vehicle than what we own. So, we all met up at the Todd Lake parking lot at 6:30am. When I got out of my car, I realized I forgot my outer shell jacket. I did have my long-sleeved shirt, so I hoped it wouldn't be too cool, but there was nothing I could do about it at this point. From the parking lot we took forest service road #370 up to the trail head, which takes about 30 minutes as bump and slowly crawl through the nasty sections of this road.

We began the hike around 7:15am. We made decent time through the first mile or so. Then we started to wander off the trail looking for good photo opportunities.

There was a nice view of Mt Bachelor behind us all of the way up.

While searching around for wild flowers we found some interesting streams around snow fields.

I found one I could look under and get a decent shot.

The interesting thing about this hike is your starting elevation is higher than most mountains. There was still plenty of dirty snow around because of this. We still had more elevation to gain, so we worked our way up the trail stopping many times for photos.

By this point we had already added almost two miles to our hike just by going off the trail. Now it was time to get a little serious and make the push up to the Broken Top tarn. This required some careful footwork, watching every step. The great park is that once you reach the tarn you are instantly rewarded.

Even though we arrived here around the noon hour, the light was great and the reflection in the tarn was perfect. We stayed around here for a bit. Why not, it was awesome. Next up was the final assent to the ridge.

This was about the highest point you could hike, without getting to serious climbing ground. The views were amazing and it was great to look across to the Three Sisters. Back in 2008, I hiked to the top of South Sister . Two years ago I was here looking back at Broken Top:

It felt like a victory being on the other side looking back.

While I wasn't at the highest point of the summit, it was still impressive. We explored just a little more around the top getting a few more photos.

Summarizing it up, we hiked about 7.8 miles with 1200 feet or so of elevation gain. Not to bad for a bunch of photo junkies, hauling tripods up a mountain.