At one time, Government Camp, was just a regular campsite on that part of the Oregon Trail called Barlow Pass (or the Barlow Road). When a huge wagon train (several hundred wagons) of the Federal Army was forced to leave a cache of supplies at the location, the locals took to calling the location “Government Camp” and the name stuck. Now-a-days it is an unincorporated area with a post office, a few eating establishments, and a bunch of condos and ski shops. We are staying at Collin’s lake resort Grand Lodge. This is right off of highway 26 and a really (really) nice set of condos built around a little lake and a beautiful stand of fir.
We are using the Grand Lodge (which is really just a big hotel building with nice condos instead of hotel rooms) as our base of operations and are planning little snow outings every day. When we originally planned to come up here was a couple of days after the big ice storm that Oregon had in February. The power was off all over the place including Government Camp. Collins lake told us 1) The power is off, 2) it won’t be back on soon 3) You can’t come up here (travel restrictions) 4) We won’t give you a refund.
But they did let us reschedule. We weren’t really sure if there would still be decent snow this late in he season, but Surprise Surprise, we had snow falling on us as we drove into the mountains !
Now, if you are a big time adventurer or sports enthusiast, you can come up to Government camp and then access the downhill ski areas (Timberline, Skibowl, summit, or Meadows) or any of the many cross country trails (like those to Trillium Lake or Barlow Road). If you have kids, there are many hills to do sledding and such (I like White River snow park, but there is a rope tow over at Skibowl and a dedicated tubing area). There are also lots of little sled hills around including one on the edge of Collins Lake Resort. My party (me, my partner, and a couple of our sisters) have older knees and stick mainly to snow shoeing as our winter sport. There are many nice, scenic, and easy to access snow shoe trails around government camp.
Crosstown Trail
This is just a little trail that is up behind town in the woods and goes from the East side of Government Camp (at the little Summit chair lift) to the Glacier View snow park outside of the west end of town. There are a few connector trails that come up out of town and cross the Crosstown. As it turns out, one of those connectors hits the road through town right across the street from The Grand Lodge, and so my partner and I could just walk over there carrying our snowshoes and access the trail. We went up the Skiway trail (which is also the power line running up to Timberline). This is a wide expanse of cleared trees and not all that scenic. It is also pretty steep. It goes all the way up to Timberline which means that it may also have skiers coming home from their last run on the mountain. And they have right of way. That must be pretty cool, to be able to take the shuttle up the mountain, ski all day, and then just ski down to your condo in Government Camp when you are done. But today we are just walking.
When we hit Wally’s Tie (a trail off to the left) we got away from the power lines and entered the woods. Now things are just beautiful. The snow off the of the trail is generally pristine (non trampled) and still more than 6 foot deep. So you are up closer to the tree tops in the white and green. All 3 days we were here were sunny and this first hike gave us a bright blue sky. It also heated us up quite a bit so we were moving along in shirts and a light vest. After a bit we hit the CrossTown, where we hung a right and worked our way back over to the power lines again. At this point we could have continued on Crosstown back to the top of the town but we had been going for over an hour already and still were a ways from the road, so we headed down hill back to where we had started. This was about an hour and a half total walking time.
Enid Lake Loop
From looking at a not quite so good map we had concluded that the Enid Lake loop trail was a trail that looped around Enid Lake. Surprise! One of our team had even done this hike a couple of years ago and said it was a very short walk just around the edges of this very small lake (OK, more of a medium sized pond). It turns out we were mistaken.
The trail starts out at the West end of government camp. Basically the western terminus of the Crosstown trail. We drove there (you have to get onto 26 for a bit to get the entrance). It is part of a snow park (have a snow park pass) and (during the summer) a continuation of the old Barlow pass part of the Oregon Trail (A great place to practice not dying from dysentery) (See, that was an Oregon Trail Game joke…).
We parked at the end of the road (where the snow plow had stopped plowing) put on our snow shoes and followed the trail toward the Enid Lake Loop. Almost immediately we were back into the pristine white beauty of snow covered pine forest. It is very surreal to drive 10 minutes from a resort and find yourself in a place where (at least since the last snowfall) very few people have walked. The slightly trampled path leads through pristine snow, 6 to 10 feet deep, with just a scattering of pine cones and pine needles to show the impacts of recent wind and weather. We came to the little lake after just a few minutes with the marked trail going right and an unmarked trail going left. I was a little confused by this because we had thought the loop would just be around the perimeter of the lake, in which case the trail would be marked in both directions. But….
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| That is the lake out there. Trust me |
To the right we went. And up and around. Glad I had snow shoes on, probably wouldn’t have broken through in most places, but it was icy and slippery in a couple of spots. We were not very close to the lake either. Most of the time we were 50 to 100 feet away with just glimpses of the lake through the pines. Perhaps when we got around to the other side. We had been walking for around half an hour when we came to the intersection of the Cross Town trail. My partner and I had originally talked about taking this trail and walking back to our condo (with our 3rd member driving back in the car) but things were taking a bit longer than we thought and we had decided to see our other member safely back to the car first. Good decision. We continued counter clockwise around the loop and found ourselves deep in the woods and no where near to the lake any longer.
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| A little bridge crossing |
There were several places where there were small foot bridges with 4 feet of snow narrowly on top that had to be traversed. More walking, now coming up on an hour and I was beginning to feel like we were on the wrong trail. Except that the signage was great…… Perhaps we had just fooled ourselves about the nature of this trail. Still, we go around a bend and come to a place where the trail crossed a little creek and there was no bridge. A creek fording isn’t a big deal, but it was complicated by the wearing of snow shoes. Certainly don’t want to get our socks wet. We decided to cross the creek and continue on for another 10 minutes and see if we got to the trail intersection we were expecting to find.
Turns out it was just 50 feet beyond the crossing. Boy did I feel dumb. Now we were back on the main track coming into where our car was parked. It turned out to be a much longer hike than we had thought but that turned out to be from not having a good enough map.
PCT at Barlow Pass
This was going to be our big snow shoe of the week. Drive East from Government camp following state route 35 to the Barlow Pass trail head area. Not many cars there are all. The trailhead is up at the top of a 10 foot snow bank. Would be hard to get to so we walked down to the Barlow Road entrance (snowed in but more accessible) and then just walked the 50 feet over to the signage for the Barlow Pass trailhead of the Pacific Coast Trail. Another very nice hike through deep snow and pine forest. After about a mile it starts climbing up a ridge line which makes it a bit hard going. My knee was starting to bug me and walking on the side of the hill like that was bugging me so we didn’t get very far. Still, it was extremely beautiful and we only ran into 2 other sets of people while we were out there.
I like these forest snow shoes. Make sure to dress in layers, carry extra layers, carry some sort of emergency shelter if you are going to far away from a road and tell someone where you are going. We had phone service pretty much everywhere we went on this trip, which is a good additional safety feature.
I want to do this again next season. I really liked having a nice warm base camp to work out of, and by next year I should have a brand new Knee to try out.
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