Puckery sweet huckleberries lined the upper Badger Creek trail within easy reach. Ancient western red cedars flared branches like bird wings. Noble firs, Douglas-firs, and silver firs rose columnar and elegant among Engelmann spruce, western white pine, and mountain and western hemlocks. A Pacific wren dueted with a silvery stream. Badger Creek Wilderness, at 29, acres, protects many centuries-old trees and ecosystems of breathtaking diversity.
Hood National Forest. In our steady upward trek, beginning among white oak and ponderosas at 2, feet to Badger Lake at 4,, we recorded 23 kinds of trees.
Thanks to Wilderness protection, Badger Creek is safe from the logging that has decimated so many low-elevation watersheds in Oregon and is still proposed such as in the nearby Grasshopper Project.
That story of a fateful aerial flight came from Dave Corkran, who volunteered on the Mt. And yes, he knows the Badger Creek Wilderness.
Hood, St. I admitted I had notβat least yet. The couple coauthored a Guide to Trails of Badger Creek, 92 pages of detailed hikes and a list of birds, butterflies, and lichens. OWC encouraged people passionate about specific wild areas to form a group and grow the coalition. The same tactic works today. The flight was part of a successful effort by the Mt. Hood Forest Study Group to get the attention of politicians reluctant to clash with the timber industry.
