Rattlesnake Lake to Twin Falls, May 7th, 2007                                Picture gallery.

I wanted to hike Twin Falls State Park on Monday, but I missed the turn and ended up at Rattlesnake Lake instead. This park is adjacent to the Iron Horse State Park, so I decided to just start from there and walk down to Twin Falls, instead of up. The sign said Twin Falls was about 4.5 miles away, and my GPS said we walked about ten miles round trip. The Iron Horse Trail is wide and level and smooth. It’s like a gravel country road but without the potholes. This makes it a pleasant stroll, perhaps a tad monotonous. Several features added interest and made it well worth the while.

     ( click on the thumbnails to view larger pictures. )

At one point, where the railroad bed had been blasted through solid rock, we were in a little canyon with sheer rock cliffs on either side. The moist walls of this mini-canyon had moss and maidenhair fern clinging to the rock face. I tried to get a picture, but it was so dark in this little canyon at midday that the automatic flash came on, ruining the image. It was the first of many things that looked much better in person than the photos I was able to get. The next amazing image that my photographic skills didn’t adequately capture was a dogwood tree in full bloom. It stood at the edge of a Douglasfir forest, and because it was downhill from the trail, I had a full view of its many white blossoms.
 

    
Just before the dogs and I got to the electrical substation, which still has the old Puget Power name on it, we found a little creek splashing through mossy rocks. It was a nice place for the dogs to cool off a bit. This little creek dives into a pipe and shoots under the old railroad bed, probably contributing to the power generation system above Twin Falls. Near this creek was a field of waterleaf, making a complete carpet. I had often seen it here and there, but this was the first time I saw it as a complete groundcover. I took a checklist with me, and spotted over 60 species of native plants, including a couple I didn’t recognize.
 

              
Once you leave the Iron Horse trail and start down into Twin Falls State Park, everything changes. The trail is narrower, and the plant species change. Iron Horse Trail is lined with native edge plants such as elderberry, salmonberry, dogwood, vine maple, and goat’s beard, but it is also lined with mile after mile of invasive weeds like Herb Robert, dandelions, foxglove, buttercup and Himalayan blackberry. As a frequent volunteer in the effort to rid my neighborhood park of invasive species, I was thinking what a chore it would be to clean up the invasives along these miles of trail as I walked. Twin Falls Sate Park seems to be completely free of invasives. I didn’t actually make it down to the parking area, but the mile of trail that I walked was pleasantly lined with a variety of native plants. It also contained many large, old growth trees, even though a large portion of the park had been logged at some point--probably about sixty years ago, judging by the age of the second-growth trees. Along the trail, next to foamflower, candyflower, and twisted stalk, I found a strange plant that looked to be related to either the buttercups or the geraniums. It had a purple stain on its green leaves. It was very distinctive, and I figure it has to be a native since I saw virtually no invasives in the entire park, but I couldn’t find it in Pojar. Also along the trail I found a great rotting stump with huckleberry, fool’s huckleberry, and a hemlock tree growing in it.

                        

The park is next to I-90, so you hear the rush of the cars and trucks most of the time you are walking along the trail through primitive forest. When the trail starts to drop steeply, the sound of the freeway is gradually replaced by the sound of the falls. The tired dogs collapsed on the cool, damp earth while I took pictures of the falls. Here again, the scene was spectacular in person, and the photos I took home are washed out and lacking the lush detail that I saw. A vantage point gives you a good shot at the upper portion of the falls, and then you cross over a high bridge before proceeding down to a platform to see the lower portion of the falls. The lower falls are taller, but I thought the upper falls were prettier, although I’m not sure why, exactly. Between the upper and lower falls is a fine patch of Scouler’s corydalis. It was just a week or two past its peak, but I got a few pictures of the remaining flowers. This patch also contained some skunk cabbage, which wasn’t in bloom.

    

This was our first longish hike of the year, and the climb back up to Iron Horse Trail was tiring for me. The dogs took turns carrying the little doggie backpack. I was annoyed by their constant tugging on the leashes all the way to the falls, but on the way back up the hill, I didn’t scold them at all for pulling. Once at the top, I noticed a nice mossy area and stopped to take pictures. A boulder the size of a Volkswagen had moss growing all over it, and licorice fern had attached itself to the bottom edge of the rock, hanging straight down. While I was admiring the epiphytes and bryophytes, some creature began to scold me. I couldn’t see it, so I don’t know if it was a tiny bird or some sort of marmotish creature, but it kept saying MEEP like a minor character on the Muppet Show. It was less than eight feet in front of my face, but I couldn’t see it in the brush. Other than a few robins, it was the only bird or animal I detected in the whole five hours we were in the three parks.

Shortly after encountering the muppet creature, we stopped at the mossy creek for another drink. (I know I’m not supposed to let my dogs drink from creeks because of giardia and other bugs, but it looked like a cool, crisp, clear, clean creek. At home, I will prepare a nice clean dish of fresh water for them, which they will ignore, and then they go outside and find a tiny puddle of murky water collecting in the corner of a tarp and drink it up like Kool-Aid. So far, they are excessively healthy. If they ever come down with an intestinal ailment, I‘ll be kicking myself.) While they splashed in the creek, I found an interesting steel object. It was a wedge, designed for a specific purpose, although I don’t know what. It had about a year’s worth of rust, so it wasn’t from the era of the railroads. It weighed about ten pounds. I decided to take it home, and on the four miles of walking back to the truck, it gradually became heavier and heavier, until it weighed about fifty pounds. Halfway back to the truck, I found salmonberry with pale pink flowers. I had never seen that before. I wonder if it is a subspecies, just a natural variation, or the result of an unusual soil pH.

         

By the time we got back to the truck, all three dogs seemed very tired from the hike. (We had passed mile markers that said it was 2133 miles to Chicago.)  Then I got out the tennis ball chucker and walked them down to the lake, and they were instantly rejuvenated. They all swam in the lake, which had to be very cold, being fed by snowmelt. Kelsy fetched the ball many times. They wanted to stay and play more when I was ready to head home.

There are dozens of trails along I-90. I’m glad I walked that section of Iron Horse Trail once, but I’m not sure if I would be interested in doing it again. Although, I did see tons of fireweed beginning to pop up, so I’ll bet it would be spectacular in August. While walking the trail, I saw quite a few people on mountain bikes, and it seems like a great trail for that. I never saw any horses, but I saw plenty of signs that they had been there. (Kelsy even tried to role in it a couple of times, but I stopped her.) It would be a great trail for riding horses.