At the start of 2019 we posted about our goal of visiting each or Oregon’s legally accessible designated wilderness areas. Since that post we added two areas to our list of visited wildernesses and had one added to the list to visit.
In May we took a trip to Joseph, OR for some hikes including one that briefly entered the Hells Canyon Wilderness. Our brief time in the wilderness consisted of low visibility and some rain/snow mix, but we could at least check it off the list for now and hopefully the weather will better on our next visit.
The weather and amount of lingering snow at higher elevations on that hike convinced us change our plans for the next day opting to skip a planned hike at Hat Point with it’s 7000′ elevation. Instead we decided to check off another wilderness area by driving to Troy, OR (at an elevation of 1720′) to hike the Lower Wenaha Rive Trail into the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness .
A bit of good news in 2019 was the creation of the Devil’s Staircase Wilderness in the Oregon Coast Range east of Reedsport. There are no official trails in this wilderness so whenever we get to visit it should be quite the adventure.
The new wilderness gives Oregon 48 designated wilderness areas (only 46 can be visited). With Hells Canyon and Wenaha-Tucannon crossed off that list it leaves us with a half dozen that we haven’t made it to yet. We had hoped to have visited them all by the end of this year, but changes to our plans in 2019 have pushed completion back to at least 2021. As our plans currently stand we hope to visit 5 of the 6 this year: Boulder Creek, Black Canyon,North Fork Umatilla, Gearhart Mountain, and Devil’s Staircase.
That will leave just the Monument Rock Wilderness for 2021. Happy Trails!
wanderingyuncks 
4 replies on “Progress Report – Oregon Wilderness Areas – January, 2020 Update”
[…] Thursday marked our sixth straight day of hiking and promised to be one of the longer, if not longest hikes of our trip. The weather had cooperated and after a couple of afternoons with possible thunderstorms the forecast for Gearhart Mountain was for mostly sunny skies. We were hoping to reach the 8370′ summit of the mountain which is located in the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness, one of 6 Oregon wilderness areas we had yet to visit (we are trying to visit all 46 of the wilderness areas in Oregon open to people post). […]
[…] Boulder Creek Wilderness, one of the five remaining Oregon wilderness areas we had yet to visit (post) and one of Sullivan’s featured […]
[…] 2020 we had plans to visit 5 of the 6 remaining wilderness areas in which he haven’t hiked (post), but 2020 had other plans. Plans to visit three of the areas were moved to another year and a […]
[…] in order to complete this goal. Staring in 2019 we began posting annual updates on our progress (2020 & 2021) and we are excited to report that, unless any new wilderness areas are established in […]