Horsepasture Mountain Trail

Leave work early and enjoy awesome views of the Three Sisters from a nearby McKenzie River area peak. 

June is the time to knock off work early, head up the McKenzie, and ponder the Three Sisters from an alpine meadow.  If you can escape work around lunchtime, you can be on top of 5,700 foot Horsepasture Mountain by 2:00 p.m. and back in town in time for your evening softball game.  The top of Horsepasture offers superlative views of the snow covered Sisters.

Directions:  Take Highway 126 east from Eugene/Springfield for approximately 42 miles.  After McKenzie Bridge, just past the McKenzie Bridge General Store, take a right onto Horse Creek Road.  Take Horse Creek Road for 1.7 miles.  Then take a right onto Forest Service Road 1993, just past Horse Creek Campground.  Stay on the paved 1993 road for 8.5 miles to the Horsepasture Trailhead, the second trailhead you'll pass on the right. 

About 150 feet from the road, the trail splits off into three directions.  Stay to the far left.  The Horsepasture Trail climbs gently through a classic alpine forest of Pacific silver fir, noble fir and mountain hemlock.  The forest floor is covered in vanilla leaf, bunchberry, huckleberry and devils club.  After about half a mile you'll cross a number of small springs and begin hiking through a more open forest of Engelmann spruce and sub-alpine fir.  Grab a handful of sub-alpine fir needles and rub them between your fingers—it's a scrumptious smell. 

Bear-grass is the dominant ground cover in the more open forests and meadows towards the end of the trail.  Bear-grass, which grows in distinctive large clumps, will sprout a stalk almost as tall as a person topped by a fat yellow blossom later in the summer.  Bears eat the succulent bases of the grass clumps in the spring.  The Kalpuya and Mollala people who once frequented these alpine meadows in the summer months used the tough wiry grass extensively to make clothing.

After a mile and a half the trail brings you to the top of the mountain where you'll find two rocky outcroppings and several beautiful wildflower meadows.   Among the many flowers in the riot of color are penstemon, larkspur, paintbrush and phlox.  Four iron anchors at the top of one rock outcropping are the remnants of an old lookout tower.  From here the Three Sisters will seem near enough to touch.  On most fairly clear days you'll also be able to see rugged Three Fingered Jack, the church-steeple shape of Mt. Washington, as well as Mt. Jefferson and Mt. Hood to the north.  Bachelor and Diamond Peak are the peaks to the south of the Sisters.

The Oregon Cascades are actually two different mountain ranges.  The high jagged peaks you contemplate from Horsepasture are the so-called "new" Cascades, the result of lava flows and volcanic upheaval from 10 million to 2,000 years ago.  The newest of the Sisters, the South Sister, last erupted 1,900 years ago.  Interestingly, scientists have recently detected a twelve-mile long bulge to the west of the Sisters which has pushed the earth several inches skyward, probably as a result of magma accumulation more than 4 miles underground.  The forests surrounding the Sisters are protected as the 290,000 acre Three Sisters Wilderness; the sweeping valley of unbroken forest you see to the east is Separation Creek. 

The "old" Cascades—approximately 25-45 million years old—are the somewhat shorter hills and mountains to the west of the Cascade crest, including Horsepasture Mountain.  The advance and retreat of glaciers during past ice ages created the extremely steep and rugged valley walls of this region.  The pristine high elevation forests protected as wilderness to the east have relatively little commercial value.  But the lower elevation national forest lands to the west of Horsepasture contain some of the most valuable timber in the world, and have been heavily logged over the past fifty years.

Enjoy your half-day off, and come again soon for the bear-grass blooms.