I led my second Winter Walk of the season for the Cascadians today to Bear Canyon. The skies were cloudy bright as we set off, but after a half hour or so it started to snow lightly & snowed throughout the rest of the day. We walked to the junction with the 4 wheel drive road about 3 miles or so up the canyon. There was maybe 1/2" of snow at the trailhead & an inch or so up here. We had lunch at the junction, followed by a pleasant walk back down to the cars. The canyon was quite beautiful with its basalt cliffs as a backdrop to the conifers, cottonwoods, & oaks all covered with a dusting of new snow.

If you happen to be near Yakima, a walk up Bear Canyon makes for a fine afternoon. This is a canyon hike, and the trail meanders between steep, reddish canyon walls punctuated with pine, fir, and flowers. The best scenery is within a couple of miles from the trail head, so no need to proceed further unless you feel ambitious. The flowers were a bit past their peak, although there were still plenty of lupine, paintbrush, and flowering shrubs. We crossed the creek several times, yet the water was low enough not to bother us. We got a close up view of an irritated rattler, enough to get anyone moving along. We saw plenty of birds, including a beautiful Western Tanager (male). We also noticed a number of bleached bones and kept wondering how they got there. Where would we be without eastern Washington in the spring? Long live the desert, especially this year.

Bear Canyon Trail (about 12 miles west of Naches on Highway 12). This is right off Highway 12, about a mile west of Windy Point Campground, look around milepoint 178 or so. Easy to miss the turnoff on the north side of the road, it's not marked. This starts off on an old road, which is almost immediately gated off; there is parking right at the beginning. The old road rapidly turns to real trail, and immediately crosses Bear Creek. Don't worry about getting your tootsies wet, it was bone dry when we hiked it. At the point where road turns into trail, you also turn westward into Bear Canyon and into the shade. The trail climbs slowly but steadily from 2500 to 3300 feet. The Tieton Canyon area is a transitional area between desert and Cascades and this hike is a microcosm of that transition. You go thru several mini-ecosystems: sagebrush, scrub oak, riparian cottonwoods, and higher up on the basalt cliffs, Ponderosa pines. Pretty brushy, but reasonable tread. Lots of flowers, but they will be gone in a couple weeks. May is definitely the window to hike this trail. Any earlier and you may have creek crossing problems: the trail crosses the creek several times. Any later and the flowers will be gone, and the heat murderous.

No need to worry about mud or snow in May on *this* trail, being as it's the easternmost NF trail in the entire highway 12 corridor and at 2500-3000 feet. The trail is featured in ""55 Hikes in Central Washington"", albeit with a few modifications, the most notable of which is that both the book and the map I have were out of date with respect to the trailhead location. Instead of a 0.4 mile drive from the highway to the trailhead, the road is now gated right at the highway and you have to walk the 0.4 miles. Although the book said that Bear Creek should be running until early summer, the drought must have had an effect here for the creek ran only in intermittent spots. Repeatedly encountering a dry creek in one place only to find it running again upstream produced a mystery: where did the water go' (Was it being dammed each time or did it just evaporate away') The book also mentioned a campsite at 1 3/4 miles from the old trailhead, but after over an hour and a half of hiking we didn't find any place that showed evidence of having been used as a campsite, although this could be due to paucity of use of this trail. (Total number of other hikers we saw in three hours on this trail on Memorial Day: zero.) Needless to say, the vegetation was rather different from all those western Washington hikes. For starters, it was my first hike in the state to feature oaks. Apparently we humans weren't the only ones to make use of the trail; several pine saplings had been stripped by deer or elk. This was part of a loop drive from Puget Sound through Yakima starting on I-90. In a single day we ran through a year's worth of weather: cold and rainy at the rest stop at Cle Elum to sunny and 75-80 degrees in Yakima Canyon to springlike conditions on the hike to a winter wonderland at White and Cayuse passes where fresh snow covered all of the trees. Outbound on I-90 at midday we gaped at the stream of bumper-to-bumper holiday traffic going the other way. What would happen when it was our turn to head west' No fear, coming home via highways 12-123-410 at evening hours (7:30-10 PM) was quite a different story. In the 15-mile stretch of highway 123 we didn't encounter a single other car.

This trail is accessed from Highway 12, at milepost 170, just down the road from the Oak Creek Wildlife headquarters. The description in ""55 Hikes in Central Washington"" says you can drive in .4 miles, but this is no longer true: there is a no-fooling locked gate across the road. There is a pullout before the gate with parking space for 4-5 cars. A USFS Trail Pass is required. I was afraid the whole hike was going to be on the road, but it turns to a trail after the washout (at .4 miles) mentioned in ""55 Hikes"". The trail cross the creek many times, but this is no problem; The creek was intermittent when I hiked it. The wildflowers were great, and when I looked up at the canyon walls, I saw not only great examples of columnar basalt, but also lots of yellow arrowleaf balsam root daisies clinging to the cliffs. I hiked this trail in perhaps about 3 miles and the trail never emerged out of the canyon. There is a break in the canyon walls, which in ""55 Hikes"" is described as an old gravel pit at 1 3/4 miles. (Any signs of a gravel pit are long gone.) There is a good flat grassy campsite there and a faint trail up a side canyon (which I did not pursue).