Length: ~8.7 mile loop trail
Height: 2100 feet of elevation gain
Time of Hike: One hour, forty-five minutes to summit. Two hours and change back down to the car.
Hiking Partner(s): Joe Orndorff
We left my house a few minutes after 7:30 am, wanting to reach Silver Star Mountain before the day got too hot. Starting from SE Portland we took I-205 to I-5, crossed the bridge into Washington, and exited on to Hwy 14 heading east. Turning left to exit towards Washougal at around mile marker 16, the road eventually becomes Washougal River Road. Staying on that for around 6.9 miles we reached a sign for Bear prairie, turned left there, traveled up that road for 3.2 miles, turned left on to Skamania Mines Road, stayed on that road for 2.7 miles, turned left onto the gravel 1200 Rd, then stayed left for 5.7 miles to reach the Grouse Creek Vista trail site.
To park and hike here you’ll need a Discover Pass which costs $10 for a one-day pass, or $30 for an annual pass. The trail we took begins opposite of where the parking area was, by the Tarbell Trail marker. Our plan for the hike was to go up the Silver Star Trail to the summit, then return via the Salmon Road to the Tarbell Trail.
The trail at the beginning starts across from the parking lot, marked with a Tarbell Trail sign. A little ways up the trail it splits in two, the Tarbell to the left and the steeper uphill of the Silver Star trail to the right.
The Silver Star trail starts off pretty steep. A lot of the elevation gain for the hike is front-loaded into the start of the hike. The trail isn’t too rocky, and not terribly steep, but enough that I had to stop a few times on the way up to catch my breath.
It is thankfully almost entirely forested for the first part of the hike, so even though it is tiring and steep you are at least out of the sun and it is nice and cool beneath the trees. After a while the trail starts to level out and you get to some cleared areas where you can see the peak ahead of you and get a view of the countryside.
Doing this hike in early July meant I missed most of the wildflowers. The really impressive displays are usually at the end of May with the larger displays or if I had hiked the trial a couple of weeks later the gentium would have been in bloom. There were still some flowers, I saw a couple beautiful displays of flowers as we got near the peak.
There are a couple turn-offs on the way to the peak. The Pyramid Rock, and Indian Pits turn-offs, before you finally get to the path up to the peak of Silver Star Mountain and where the old fire lookout tower was. The tower is long gone, though the foundation platform is still there. From the peak, the view is amazing. There was a slight haze on the horizon, but the sky was still clear enough to be able to see all five mountains.
The weather was really calm, which was actually a bit of a problem as we stood atop the peak. Not enough wind to blow all the mosquitoes and horseflies away. Thankfully we weren’t along with the insects for long as more people, and people with pets, showed up and distracted the flies away from us.
The trip downhill back downhill was a slightly longer path. The split off to the Salmon Road trail (labelled Sturgeon Rock on the map) was just off from where the trail had split off to the peak. It looked like what was originally a forest service road, two parallel ruts in the earth, and was heavily overgrown and infiltrated with surrounding plant life. Where it wasn’t overgrown it was rather steep and rocky, easily the worse part of the entire hike. We started to get worried after about an hour, as there are no markers on the road, about whether we had missed where the Tarbell Trail crossed it. Thankfully someone had marked the trail crossing with a blue tarp half-buried into the ground, but the Salmon Road is such a bad bit of trail that it took us longer than we thought to walk upon it.
Once we got onto the Tarbell Trail though the path became much more enjoyable to walk upon. Well packed dirt, used often enough that the trail wasn’t over grown, and the views along it were pretty beautiful. With most of the downhill taken care of by the Salmon Road trail, most of Tarbell Trail was either relatively flat or just slight up or down hill slopes. Curving along the sides of the mountain, and further down than the slope than the Silver Star Trail, there were several creeks that cross the trail with some small hidden little waterfalls.
We passed only a couple of people going the other direction upon the trail, and they were riding mountain bikes. Which, to me, just seems crazy given how steep the hillside is. But that might also be because I am incredibly out of practice riding a bike.
By the time we finished the hike my legs were starting to get a bit sore, while I do walk a lot around town I don’t normally do so on slopes like these, and have drunk almost all the water I brought with me. Which was good, since when I hiked Dog Mountain last August I didn’t bring enough water and was pretty dehydrated by the end of the hike. This was just about the right amount of water for me, given the shape I am in, and how hot it was that day.
What I learned from the hike was a few things: remember a handkerchief as I needed something to just wipe my face with to keep the sweat from running into my eyes, pack a first-aid kit of my own since I know Joe had one but I forgot to pack mine, new hiking boots as mine are pretty well worn out, and read the manual on my camera since a lot of my photos didn’t turn out well enough to share and I want to take it with me to Europe in September.
The hike itself was a lot of fun, had some great views, and I’d definitely do it again. The path we took was probably the best choice, I wouldn’t have wanted to hike up Salmon Road as it was bad enough to be hiking down. The Tarbell Trail segment was pretty beautiful, I’d like to hike along more of that trail and see what the rest of it looked like.