Silver Star Mountain

Silver Star Mountain, Clark County, Washington. On the very bottom left corner of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Visible from Portland as a non-descript lumpy mountain that blocks the view of Mt. Adams from most places in the city. You'd never think much of it if you didn't know what it was.

What Silver Star is turns out to be possibly the best hike I've done. I had massive expectations for this considering everything I've read and every expectation was met and occasionally surpassed.

But before we get to the good stuff, lets talk about the bad stuff. The reason it's taken me 4 years of living in Portland to get to Silver Star was entirely based on my fear of driving there. Silver Star, despite being fairly close to Portland, has absolutely no ease of access. Because of Silver Star's shape (it looks like a star) there are about 5-6 ridges that lead to the summit and about 5-6 trailheads. Yet none of these trailheads are easy to reach. All are accessed via gravel forest service roads, and the road quality ranges from rough potholed gravel to...well what I drove yesterday.

There are two trailheads everyone prefers. The North Trailhead, and the South Grouse Vista Trailhead. The North trailhead gives you the backside Ed's trail hike, and is the one with the worst access. The Grouse Vista is the easiest to reach, but the trail is slightly longer and harder with less views. After missing the June wildflower bloom for 4 years, I talked it over with Keeley and we decided "F- it, lets go for the north side, it can't be worse than the 4 mile gravel road to the hippie commune we stayed at in California on our coastal trip"

It was, by far, the worst 9 miles of "road" I have ever driven. You start on the gravel FS road 41 behind Sunset Campground. At first it's a couple of small washouts and some pot hole sections. Take it slow and weave around, it's not too hard to maneuver. We were in Keeley's RAV-4, so it was even easier. But the potholes start to get pretty clustered the further up and in you go, to the point where you have to simply pick the least bad looking potholes and drive through them. Everything I read indicated that 41 was "pothole alley". The potholes were annoying, but not terrible. We drove slow and handled them well enough, even the big ones. The road was narrow but had points where cars could pass.

But then you reach FS road 4109, and things get really bad. FS 41 gets extremely rocky and keeps going southeast to two other trailheads (Starway and Bluff Mountain, both longer hikes) and 4109 dips down to the right. Then it narrows to about 1 car width, and the "road" turns into essentially a washout path. There are no longer potholes, because half the road is just washed out, and the other half is uneven rocky mess. Shortly down 4109 we came to a bridge. On the other side of the bridge the road went up. I've seen ATV trails that were in better shape. We parked and I walked up it a bit to gauge it. We didn't really have enough room to turn around, so we went for it. That uphill is the worst stretch of the entire road, but it doesn't get much better than that the rest of the way. You are mostly driving up hills, so the road constantly suffers washout pothole problems. We drove 9 miles on this, and it took us an hour. I still don't know how I did it. By the time I got to the trailhead, my nerves were fried. At the trailhead were two subarus, two trucks, and a goddamn Toyota Prius. I have legitimately no idea how the Prius made it. At points in the RAV we were doing Jeep Commercial levels of pitching up and down, and we had twice the clearance of the Prius.

Do not drive this road if you don't have an SUV, jeep, or truck. I don't know how the prius made it, and I don't want anyone to get the idea that if a prius can make it, anyone can. I don't want to drive it ever again, and we had a good high SUV.

But once we made the trailhead and looked off to the side, we knew we were in for something special.

St. Helens from the Trailhead

Silver Star from the North has two basic routes. You can follow the old fire lookout roadbed to the top along the west side of the ridge, or take the more classic Ed's trail up the east side of the ridge. Both follow the exact same ridge and are never far apart, but give completely different views. Ed's is harder but prettier, so we took that way up and took the road down for max variety.

The reason this area is designated as a must see becomes clear extremely quickly. It's like an entire 5 mile hike consisting of nothing but Dog Mountain's highlight reel. Dog Mountain has that final wildflower summit meadow, with about a half mile total of trails through exposed flower explosions and great views. Silver Star is essentially 5 miles of that meadow, with better views and more flowers. Well, maybe the same volume of flowers, but much, much more variety. I saw every single wildflower I have ever seen on this hike, plus several new ones. The reason it's so exposed is due to a massive fire called the Yacolt Burn in 1902-3. It was so bad that trees never really regained a foothold on the summits, and the wildflowers took over. The hike was top 5 instantly, and might be my favorite ever.

For the first 2 miles you slowly climb up the exposed flower ridge, views everywhere. You reach a gap with huge cliffs and a view of Mt. Hood. You see Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens is never far away and almost stunningly clear (it's the closet volcano to the mountain). The ridge is a series of false summits and rocky promontories. The trail is very rocky, as there is no moisture or trees keeping things in working order. Bring sunscreen, there is no shade.

View of the Starway Ridge and Mt. Hood peeking over it

New Wildflower

St. Helens & Rainier

Flowers

Ed's Trail sign

Keeley looking over the gap to Hood

Our pathway up

the first rocky knob

Old roadbed facing north

Further up the trail

Looks like the summit to me!

Looking back at our path so far, 3 Cascade Volcanoes say hello

Cool rock lump further up the spine

This is top notch hiking

Back at the ridge, trail faintly visible

A rock & view facing east

The summit!

Beargrass is everywhere. They look like giant q-tips (the flower is the size of my fist)

As if things weren't beautiful enough, Ed's trail even features a beautiful natural rock arch near the "summit". After the arch, the trail gets tough and you have a brief bit of scrambling to do up some rock. Then you round a corner on the summit, and...you realize it was just another false summit, and the REAL summit looms ahead of you. After a brief downhill, you enter a wooded area, connect with other trails, and make the final ascent through the trees, as if Silver Star knows to hide the final wow behind a curtain. Then you reach open air in a sort of saddle between two summits, the south summit and the north summit. The north is the true summit. And there you are, on top of the world, full 360 degree view. It's one of the best views I've seen in my life, right up there with Crater Lake and Yosemite from Glacier Point.

You can see St. Helens, Rainier, Adams, Hood, the top of Mt. Jefferson way to the south. You can see the top of Dog Mountain and Mt. Defiance to the east. You can see the coast range. After some careful looking you can spot downtown Portland. You can see where the gorge is, though not the water. It feels like you can see everything.

Arch

Arch

like bros

Mt. Adams

Little Baldy mtn

The TRUE summit presents itself around the corner

Mt. Hood

Beargrass

Again, keep in mind each bloom is the size of my fist

Finally, the summit. Hikers on the lower south summit.

PORTLAND! Technically my apartment is in this picture.

Sturgeon rock to the west

Adams

Hood

Jefferson, barely

Little Baldy, with the Bluff Mtn trail running across it

Rainier

Can you imagine being in this spot when St. Helens blew up? What a view. 

St. Helens

St. helens

Looking back at the false summit and Ed's trail down

Paintbrush

Buddies

Hood

Conquerors

The true summit of Silver Star from the south summit

Hood

One bad thing about the summit was the astounding number of bugs. Kind of put a damper on things. It was also unbearably hot, close to 90 degrees. The trail isn't much climbing (1500 feet) and is never too steep, but the heat made it hard. If it had been 20 degrees cooler, with less bugs, it would literally have been the perfect hike. One good thing about the awful roads, they keep most tourists out. If it wasn't so hard to reach, this might be the most popular hike in the entire area. We still saw a lot of people for where we parked.

We took the gentle steady roadway down back to the car. The roadway side is less scenic and much easier to walk, and not quite as nice as Ed's but still great. We got back to a trailhead with 10+ cars, all SUVs and jeeps. One jeep had the NWHiker logos on it, which was cool, because I use that site as a resource for these hikes. I wish I'd met the guy driving it, but I didn't.

Driving back on nightmare road was a little easier, but still terrible. No hurry to drive it again. I've decided that if I come back in the fall (to see colors and huckleberries), I'm going to the easier south trailhead and then making an extra loop north if I feel up to it.

Great hike, thoroughly recommended if you have the proper means to reach it. You could seriously screw up your car out here, so be wary. The warnings are absolutely true. But if you can make it, it's absolutely worth it. 

Roadbed heading back

Also!

Here is a poor quality video of the summit