Saddle Mountain inland from Seaside, OR

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Today we decided to take an inland route to Saddle Mountain, take a hike, then head to Seaside for a car show and on to Cannon Beach for a sand castle competition.  Lots of things to do in one day.

We made a picnic lunch to take with us.  Off we go.

We turned off Hwy 101 and followed the Miami River on a very windy road.  The drive took longer that we thought it would to get to Saddle Mountain.

These purplish pink bell shaped flowers are everywhere here in Oregon.  I've had them in a prior post with a closeup showing the bell shape.  It appears they are considered a wild flower.  Foxglove perhaps?

There are large areas where the trees have been harvested.  This area looks devastated! 

Here is another tree cleared area.  You can see the purplish pink flowers are growing everywhere.  Also some scrubby brush.  However we could not see that any new trees had been started.  Sad!

This is our first view of Saddle Mountain.  This is the horn of the saddle. 
In the parking lot we read that there was a trail that was 2 miles long, but had viewpoints about every half mile.  We decided to take the trail and hopefully get a picture of the whole saddle.

The start of the hike was amazing.  It was humid due to the creek flowing through it.  The amount of green moss on the trees was intriguing to us.

In this area, the ground cover is actually large 3-leaf clover.

There were areas where the plant growth was taller than us.  That is me ahead on the path.

That is Dusty ahead on the trail.  The elevation change from the parking lot to the top is 1630 ft.  It is a steep climb with lots of switchbacks.

As we got higher there were lots of berry bushes with these orange colored berries.  We asked several people on the trail and we were told they are salmon berries.  They are tart even when ripe.  We each tried one.  We agreed they are tart but not bitter.

Here is another berry bush with the berries not close to ripe yet.

To my surprise I saw several wild iris.  These wild iris are smaller in size but still very pretty.

Along the way up we had to cross the creek a couple of times.  This was the most unique bridge we used to cross the creek.
This bridge was very stable.  Not the least bit of give to the logs.

At the one mile marker this was the view.  The light colored patches are areas where the trees have been cleared.

Shortly after this spot, Dusty stopped and Tic went further.

This was the view when Tic reached the top.  What we discovered was we were climbing up Saddle Mountain itself.

This is more rock formations at the top.

These formations have interesting shapes.  Tic decided he had gone far enough.

On the way back to where I was waiting, Tic took this picture of some of the wild flowers growing along the path.  He said there were lots of flowers at the top.

On his way down back to me, this is the best picture he could get of Saddle Mountain.  It was 3:30 pm by the time we got back to the parking lot.

We next headed to Seaside to see the car show.  On the way we passed several antique cars going the other direction, so we decided we must have missed the car show in downtown Seaside.  

We decided to head straight to Cannon Beach just south of Seaside and hopefully see the sand castles.  We did not arrive at Cannon Beach until about 5pm.  We found that the sand castles were judged about 1pm and the high tide was already coming in and had washed away many of the sand castles.

We headed home.  However we did stop at Tolovana State Park Beach and took a few pictures.

This is looking northward up the coast.  Remember the tide is high now.  I bet the closest big rocks could be walked to at low tide.

This is looking southward down the beach.  Amazing views.

It was amazing to us how much elevation change we experienced on our drive home.

From this high viewpoint we could see approximately where our RV park is.  See what looks like a lake in the center of the picture?  It is actually a bay.  Our park is on the east side of the bay.

Long day.  It was good to get home.