A misty day at Garfield Ledges Trail
Looking up at Garfield Ledges from the Taylor River (2020)
Garfield Ledges Trail is a relatively recent addition to the Middle Fork recreational area. For a last summer hurrah, we headed up for a hike over Labor Day weekend. The day was cool and misty — it seemed that fall had beaten us. Yet higher in the mountains, spring comes later too — we saw a faded trillium, bleeding heart just fading, and still-blooming fireweed.
The smooth trail winds up a steep hillside, at times ascending stairs. A second growth forest shades the trail, spindly trees growing close together over an understory of sword ferns. Everywhere you look, there are rocks — in the carved out edges of the trail, it appears the earth of the hillside is more rock than soil. Slabs of rock emerge from sheets of moss filigreed by red huckleberry.
Sometimes second-growth forests are dull, but this one was rich with history. Massive stumps dot the forest along the entire trail. Logged a hundred years ago, most have lost their bark and serve as a base for new trees and red huckleberry shrubs to grow. In some places, the felled trees appear to have been left beside their stump. Even on a gray day, the effervescent green of the red huckleberry glowed electric. Snags, too, stand amidst the living trees. The past and the present are intertwined; the long now of a forest is much longer than people’s. This is the magic of a mature ecosystem.
At the top of the short trail, a small rocky ledge reveals an expansive vista of the wide Middle Fork river valley, carved long ago by glaciers. An interpretive sign pictures the valley below when it was freshly logged in the 1930s.
The Garfield Ledges Trail starts from a relatively new parking area at the start of the road to the Dutch Miller Gap
