Jim Witty

The Bulletin

If every hiking path has a personality, the new Tumalo Creek Trail is brash, a little rough around the edges and achingly beautiful. Much like the brawling, headlong stream it follows.

Three years in the making, the four-mile section follows the creek from just west of Shevlin Park upstream to the old Columbia Southern Canal.

It’s no walk in the park. If that’s what you’re looking for, I would suggest the peaceful paths of Shevlin Park, just downstream.

No, this fresh-from-the-factory trail is a rugged alternative to much of the Deschutes National Forest inventory.

From the beginning, the Tumalo Creek Trail is in your face. The trail switchbacks up the hill and away from the stream until you’re right beneath looming basalt boulders and steep rock faces up near the top. The trail is part dirt path and part rock scramble along a narrow sidehill corridor.

The path is off-limits to mountain bikes and horses, which is a moot point anyway, given the natural impediments along the way. In addition, the soil is extremely loose and erosion into the gin clear water of Tumalo Creek is a worry.

Hikers are strongly encouraged to stay on the trail for the sake of the trout, the fragile vegetation on the canyon slope and to avoid trespassing on several adjacent parcels of private property.

For the first couple of miles you’ll follow the upper ridge, but still get occasional silvery glimpses of the creek far below. Then the trail takes you creek-side and eventually to the end of the line at a dry canal. Here, you can either loop back on Mrazek Trail or turn around and return the way you came.

The trail snakes through some impressive stands of old-growth ponderosa pines and Douglas fir. There’s also a smattering of larch (those wacky pines that lose their needles each year) that are emphatically firing up for fall.

The Tumalo Creek Trail is on land the Forest Service recently acquired in a trade with Crown Pacific. While it’s been owned by a succession of private timber interests, a lot of big trees remain.

My work designing this trail has been my antidote to Bend politics, and I am tickled with how it has turned out, but the trail isn’t for everyone, said Forest Service Recreation Specialist and City Councilman John Schubert, who got to know every inch of the four-mile path during the last few years. It’s a very gratifying part of my job.

Schubert said the trail is a difficult one and should be attempted only by the sure-footed.

It’s among some 14 miles of new trails that are part of a campaign to connect the city of Bend with the National Forest from Galveston Avenue as well as the Cascade Lakes Highway at Entrada Lodge. Schubert and crew have also extended the Mrazek Trail all the way to Happy Valley near the eastern edge of the Three Sisters Wilderness, where it intersects with the Metolius Windigo Trail.

Jim Witty can be reached at 541-617-7828 or jwitty@bendbulletin.com.