Distance: 31.3 mi.
Elevation Gain: 6800 ft.
With a valuable three day weekend over Labor Day and no good weather to be found in Washington, we decided to drive down to the Wallowa Range in eastern Oregon. I had been wanting to check out this range since seeing photos from Craig’s trip in 2018. We weren’t in much of a rush with three days to reach our objective, so we started driving on Saturday morning and reached the Wallowa River trailhead at 2:30 PM. From here we began climbing the West Fork Wallowa River Trail south. The trail had lots of ripe berries and was quite scenic with the cascading river nearby.
We kept straight at the Ice Lake trail split and then turned right at the Lakes Basin Trail. We removed our shoes to ford the West Fork Wallowa River, although there were some downed trees across the river that others were crossing.
We reached Horseshoe Lake as the sun was setting and curled around to the north side of the lake for a quieter campsite. As expected, the lake was chock full of weekenders. We hung a substandard bear line near camp from the available trees.
In the morning we decided to base camp rather than moving our campsite uptrail. Our campsite was nice enough, and it would significantly lighten our loads for the ascent. However, this option ruled out the option of the longer loop hike back down the West Fork Trail via Glacier and Frazier Lakes.
We took the right branch at the east end of Douglas lake and enjoyed the hike past Craig, Crescent, and Mirror Lakes. Just past Mirror Lake we turned left at two separate trail crossings to take the East Eagle Trail past upper lake. From here we had a long, dusty ascent toward Eagle Cap. We climbed numerous switchbacks before traversing around to the south side of the ridge and making the final climb to the top. We didn’t encounter any snow on our route. The summit featured 360 degree views of the ethereal Wallowa Range and we enjoyed perfect weather and a bit of solitude on the summit. We seemed to have found a quiet gap among the dozens of hikers climbing up and down the mountain that day.
After making our way back to Mirror Lake we decided to take the small loop along the north side of the lake on Trail 1810A past Moccasin Lake. Craig did some fishing at the east end of Mirror Lake while I did some reading and we waited for the day to cool off. From here we passed Moccasin Lake and the opposite side of Douglas Lake on a slightly more rugged trail. After we rejoined the Lakes Basin Trail we had a brief hike back to our campsite and enjoyed another evening at Horseshoe Lake.
The next day, we got back to the trailhead in time for lunch at Terminal Gravity Brewing in Enterprise, where we saw several hikers we had passed over the weekend. The only difference from our ascent route was that we took the fallen logs back over the West Fork Wallowa River, which were shaky and terrible. I’d love to do more exploring in this mountain range. It reminds me of a supersized Enchantments without restrictive permits (for now).
(Download the free Gaia GPS app on your phone to view tracks and then get a Gaia GPS membership if you want offline access. Discount below!)
Recommended brew: Terminal Gravity Eagle Cap IPA
Gear Used:
- Backpacking tent
- Fishing pole
- GPS
- Sleeping pad
- Summer sleeping bag
- Stove
- Trail runners
- Trekking poles
- Water drops/filter
Post may contain affiliated links