On a summer day in July, I steered off the pavement onto a dirt road, then parked and walked into the trees — back in time. A camp had been erected in the old growth, a rendezvous reminiscent of the 1840s.

Merchants with inventories under canvas and traders with their wares displayed on Hudson Bay blankets talked or dozed in the sun. Two ladies in homespun met me at a rough-hewn table.

“You’ll want to talk to the booshway.” I knew enough to understand that meant their captain, a fellow seated nearby on a wooden barrel. J.J. Brannom of the Barlow Trail Long Rifles shook my hand.

A trail walk was in session and we followed “Blue Moon” Smith, “Burnt Hand” Erickson, Wynn Thies, Jeff Strickland and Jake Cansler with their smoothbore trade guns and blackpowder rifles.

The first challenge was for the trade gun shooters, a couple of clay pigeons. The second target was for the riflemen, a piece of steel shaped like Mike Fink’s head with a cup atop it. Hit the cup and score a point, hit Mike and endure the jibes of your buddies.

On the next challenge, Strickland handed me his rifle and pointed out the target, shaded, 50 yards through the trees, no bigger than a squirrel.

Before there was a Highway 26 that crossed the Cascades at Mount Hood, there was a trail called the old Barlow Road.

In 1846, Sam Barlow and Philip Foster carved a passage through the forest to allow covered wagons to cross the Cascades, bypassing the hazardous river route. The road was said to contribute more toward the prosperity of the Willamette Valley and Oregon than any other achievement prior to the railroads.

William Barlow, 22 years old in the fall of 1845, recalled his father Sam’s decision to blaze the trail in William’s memoirs, “Reminiscences of 70 Years.”

“He said, ‘God never made a mountain that He had not made a place for a man to go over it or under it, if he could find the place,’ ” and, he said, “I am going to hunt for that place.”

The Barlow Road begins at The Dalles, then turns west at Tygh Valley to cross the south slope of Mount Hood. It trails down Laurel Hill, along Camp Creek and the Sandy River, then turns toward Oregon City.

On Oct. 1, 1845, Sam Barlow took three men to scout the summit at what is now Barlow Pass, where they imagined they could see into the Willamette Valley.

A few weeks later, when the rest of the travelers coaxed their loads over the trail, William stayed east of Mount Hood with Albert P. Gaines, William Berry and others to help protect the goods the pioneers would come back for.

“It was decided to build a house, and send the stock over the Indian trail that went over Mount Hood, high enough to be on perpetual snow,” William Barlow wrote.

As the pioneers fought their way down Laurel Hill and through huckleberry bogs, on the east side of the Cascades, work on the house continued in earnest. They finished in December, when William Barlow and Gaines decided to head for the Valley.

“House as tight as a jug, all the cracks chinked up with moss, a good store of food and mountains of good dry wood,” William wrote. “We had a few books, which would serve to while away the time. In fact, enough of everything to make any lazy man feel happy. Up to this time there had been no snow at all. Berry went up to the top of the summit with us. We had left him provisions enough for one month, and with a good gun there were plenty of fine squirrels that he could kill.”

The mixed pine and oak forest east of Mount Hood is still some of the best western gray squirrel habitat in the state. And these days, a hunter with a long rifle or a trade gun is likely to encounter a turkey as well.

Both the White River Unit and the Hood Unit support good numbers of western gray squirrels. The season runs Sept. 10 to Oct. 18. Hunters are allowed three squirrels per day with six in possession. A controlled fall turkey season runs Oct. 9-24, with a season limit of one turkey.

East of the Cascades, a hunter with a muzzleloader and a possibles bag can hunt the way they hunted in 1845, when a few gray squirrels fed pilgrims on the Barlow Road.

I thought about old Barlow as I took the rifle and set the trigger. The steel “squirrel” clanged with the strike of the bullet. Blackpowder smoke drifted up through the branches. If there were any real squirrels, they made themselves scarce.