After mostly taking a few years off from the Mount Jefferson area after the publication of 101 Hikes in the Majestic Mount Jefferson Region in 2016, I decided to go back and begin exploring the area again in 2019. I will be writing about some of these experiences here.
An ocean of beargrass on the slopes of Coffin Mountain, June 2019.
Sometimes you just get lucky. I’ve been to Coffin Mountain twice, and both times were during the peak of its magnificent beargrass show. I’m not sure how regular the beargrass show is, but both times I went, the flower show was absolutely jaw-dropping.
The first time was during the summer of 2014. While I was working on 101 Hikes in the Majestic Mount Jefferson Region, I was also very busy with other commitments at home and at work. My trips to the area were limited to mostly dayhikes, with a few multi-day trips included. One of these multi-day trips was to Riverside Campground near Marion Forks, which I used as a base camp to explore several hikes in this part of the Cascades. The weather was incredibly hot on this weekend, and I had to start my hike up Coffin Mountain very early in the day.
Coffin Mountain, July 2014.
It was a Saturday morning and I started early in the morning, but I still saw only one other person during my hike. The wildflowers overwhelmed my senses, and left me wondering how it was that I could be almost alone here (keep this in mind for later in this post). When I reached the summit I saw that the lookout was staffed, so I snapped a few photos and set off downhill again in order to leave the staffer in peace. On my way downhill I turned around and photographed the summit plateau one last time:
Coffin Mountain’s summit plateau.
Now, perhaps you were wondering why it is called Coffin Mountain? Viewed from the north, the mountain appears to be a flat, coffin-shaped table:
Looking south to the Cascades from the summit of Dome Rock. Coffin Mountain is the flat-topped peak just to the right of Three-Fingered Jack.
As you would imagine, this is an excellent place for a fire lookout. The eastern and northern flanks of the peak are mostly sheer cliffs. Even from nearby Bachelor Mountain, the lookout on top of Coffin Mountain looks high and almost out of reach:
Coffin Mountain as seen from the Bachelor Mountain trailhead.
I also hiked Bachelor Mountain, just a mile to the east on that day in 2014, and found it to be as good as Coffin Mountain, if not better. By this point in the day, it was extremely hot. I just looked it up: the high in Salem that day was 95, and on the exposed slopes of Bachelor Mountain, it felt that hot. The flowers and views were amazing:
Mount Jefferson looms over the slopes of Bachelor Mountain, July 2014.
While the beargrass display on Bachelor was less impressive than on Coffin Mountain, the overall flower diversity on the hike up Bachelor was amazing. I counted something like 30 species of wildflowers before I got tired of counting. This was my favorite of all the wildflower photos I took that day:
Two butterflies sit on a Cascade lily on the slopes of Bachelor Mountain, July 2014.
Sometime not long after noon I stumbled onto the summit of Bachelor Mountain in a state of near heat stroke. The exposed slopes were radiating heat and the air was more humid than I’d experienced in a long time. I was completely exhausted after what is normally a fairly easy hike. I sat under a tree on the summit and drank as much water as I could; I also poured some over my head, and tried to cool off as best I could. Eventually I cooled off, and by the time I started back down the mountain, I was feeling fine. I snapped this excellent photo of Mount Jefferson, just seven miles to the east, on the way down:
Believe it or not, I ended up doing another hike after this (well, actually three short hikes, but who’s counting?), meaning that I covered three of the 101 hikes in my book in one day. The heat finally broke that night, and thunderstorms swept over the Cascades early the next morning. I went out exploring anyway, but that’s a different story for a different day. Here’s a photo of Mount Jefferson from that morning if you want an idea of what it was like:
Anyway, I never made it back to Coffin Mountain before I finished 101 Hikes, or after. I love this area, but I had many other areas to explore.
So fast-forward to June of last year. Somebody went to Coffin Mountain, found it at the height of its beargrass bloom, and posted the photos to social media. And chaos ensued. Within a week of the first post, I saw more Coffin Mountain reports on Instagram and Facebook than I’d seen in the 5 years previous. Of course, we had to go back and see too. Wendy had never been, and neither had many of my other hiker friends. So a trip was organized for late June.
After the long drive from Portland to the trailhead, we pulled into our parking spot at about 9:30 in the morning to find several cars already there. We had a taste of the flower show on the drive in, but our first view of the flowers up close was utterly breathtaking:
The slopes of Coffin Mountain, June 2019.
We were all overcome with joy. How could you not be? The beargrass display was better than anything we had ever seen, and it was even better than I saw in 2014. While the beargrass drew everyone’s attention, there were many other flowers all around that begged to be seen if you could take your eyes off the beargrass:
We wandered uphill, at times quickly and at times slowly, as we took in everything around us. On the way up we encountered several other hikers, who were just as awestruck. When we made the summit, we felt a need to celebrate. The lookout was not staffed yet, and we had the summit to ourselves for a bit.
When we started down, we began to encounter a great many hikers heading uphill. Word spreads quickly on social media, and this was the new hiking experience everyone had to see for themselves. I later wrote an article about the explosion in popularity on Coffin Mountain for the Statesman Journal. You can read the article here.
On the way back to the car, it was impossible to avoid looking backwards to take it in one more time…and one more time…and one more time.
Once we had returned to the trailhead, we noticed that it was totally full. Not only were there cars everywhere, there were also cars waiting for someone to leave so that they could park. It was bananas.
It was here that we split up. Some of our group went to go exploring closer to Mount Jefferson, while the rest of us went to go hike up Bachelor Mountain. In 2014, I found Bachelor to be as beautiful as Coffin…maybe more. This year it was hard to top Coffin, but Bachelor was plenty beautiful!
The trail to the summit of Bachelor Mountain passes through shady forest on the way up, a nice contrast t the open slopes of Coffin Mountain.
As you can see in the photo above, the trail up Bachelor Mountain is more forested, a nice change after the open slopes found on Coffin Mountain. The most interesting contrast came in the flowers! While the flowers at Coffin were clearly at peak, the flower show on Bachelor was still a couple of weeks away. There were tons of flowers, but overall it was far more sparse than it had been in 2014. There were lots of scarlet gilia (aka skyrocket), one of my favorite flowers:
Scarlet gilia, or skyrocket, on the slopes of Bachelor Mountain, June 2019.
And of course, the view was just as amazing as always:
The view east to Mount Jefferson from Bachelor Mountain. You can see the fresh snow on the mountain here; a cold front passed through the day before, dropping snow in the mountains. The green meadows in the foreground are Minto Mountain, one of the more mysterious places in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness.
Everyone who visited Coffin Mountain that summer had similarly wonderful experiences to us. As we drove home that day, I wondered if this will become a more popular hike every year, or if this was just a phenomenon of June and July 2019. After all, beargrass doesn’t bloom like that every year, and with the pandemic ruling our daily lives, I can’t see Coffin Mountain being as popular this year as last.
But when people see pictures like these, it makes you wonder. Only time will tell.