Palisades, Little Ranger Peak via Ranger Creek — Thursday, May. 17, 2018

I'm not going to give a full recap of the Palisades hike, but just contribute some information other recent reports seem to be lacking. I also tagged Little Ranger Peak, both because these two hikes share so much of the Ranger Creek trail and because there is one paragraph below attempting to describe how to find - or not find - Little Ranger Peak.

As other recent trip reports have noted, this trail is not actually closed and WTA should probably update its warning.

The trailhead is easy to find if you follow WTA's directions, but if you are using their map/coordinates, please note that they are wrong. Here are the correct numbers: 47.049, -121.57

We did not see any of the calypso orchids reputed to bloom near Dalles Creek falls this time of year, but also did not look very carefully. Keep your eyes open. 

Recent trip reports noted that they sunk into soft, rootless soil affected by recent wildfire. This was only a mild problem for us, and we never came close to anything like postholing in dirt, as one trip report described. The fire does, however, pose a few obstacles. First, there are - as noted in a sign at the trailhead - a lot of trees down across the path, and others that might fall soon. Second, the trail is somewhat hard to follow between the final Palisades viewpoint and the intersection with the Ranger Creek Trail 1197. If you can't find it, just keep close to the ridgeline and you should be fine.

The mileage supplied by WTA for the last few miles of this hike (beginning with "At the junction with Trail 1199, turn right and hike about 3.3 miles along the valley bottom.") does not match the mileage posted on signs along the actual trail. I would venture that the mileage posted on those signs is more accurate, but I did not measure. The overall length, however, does seem to be mostly correct, so just making a note of this here in case you, too, become mildly confused when reality does not match what you read in the trip reports.

The rest of this trip report is for anyone interested in finding Little Ranger Peak from the intersection of Ranger Creek Trail 1197 and Palisades. Feel free to skip it if you are just interested in the Palisades: We had hoped to climb Little Ranger Peak before completing the loop, and the hike description made it seem like this would be easy to do from the intersection with Ranger Creek Trail 1197 (All it says is "Here you can access Little Ranger Peak and the Ranger Creek Shelter beyond"). We followed the obvious trail from this intersection (straight ahead, instead of turning right to head down the Ranger Creek Trail 1197), but just wound up hiking about 1.3 miles up the Ranger Creek Trail 1197 until we encountered a sign notifying us Little Ranger Peak 'View' was three miles back the way we came. We took this to mean we had gone the wrong way, missed the peak entirely, and turned around. Near as I can tell by from comparing GPS coordinates from pictures on my phone with GPS tracks others have posted online (e.g. https://www.summitpost.org/little-ranger-peak/687732), here's what happened: If you're doing this entire hike as a loop, you'll hit Little Ranger Peak just by walking along the Palisades trail and heading for 1197, so by the time we reached the intersection we had already been there. None of the hike descriptions we'd seen made this clear, so we reached the intersection and only then started looking for a way up to Little Ranger Peak even though I believe we'd already made it. Later, when we saw the sign pointing us back towards Little Ranger Peak 'View' and believed that this location was our intended destination, we were making a mistake I've now identified in numerous trip reports for the WTA 'Little Ranger Peak' hike as well as elsewhere (e.g. http://www.hikingwithmybrother.com/little-ranger-peak.html): conflating Little Ranger Peak with Little Ranger Peak 'View'. The distance and mileage (12 RT) posted on WTA for the Little Ranger Peak hike seems to be correct, though several trip reports describe reaching the summit at around 3 miles into the hike, rather than six. That's because they hit the View and turned around there. Were I WTA, I might consider splitting what is now "Little Ranger Peak" into two hikes - one 6 RT and another 12 RT from that trailhead. I could be entirely wrong here, and we in fact never made it to Little Ranger Peak ourselves - either way, it's worth keeping in mind the distinction between Little Ranger Peak and Little Ranger Peak 'View', because unless you're paying very close attention to trip reports, you might find yourself very confused like we were. Also, the shelter appears to have been unsurprisingly reduced to a heap of metal, though I could have just looked in the wrong place. Anyway, please feel free to correct me if any of this is wrong. I suspect there was once better signage before the fire.