Devil’s Punchbowl hike, Siskiyou Wilderness

Last night Elizabeth and I camped under the redwoods in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, falling asleep and waking up below a thick layer of low clouds.

We were on a long-weekend trip with the San Francisco Sierra Club. Our group left for our hike an hour after sunrise, driving east into the mountains through tall, thick forests. The clouds began to break up, revealing blue skies above as the road climbed into the mountains.

We stopped at the Doe Flat trailhead, at just over 4,000 feet, from where we could see endless green mountains to the north and the fog in their valleys beginning to burn off as the day warmed.

• Start/End: Doe Flat trailhead, 41.8142, -123.7079
• Route: Doe Flat Trail, Buck Lake Trail, Devil’s Punchbowl Trail
• Distance: about 13 miles
• Elevation gain: 2,000 feet
• Highlights: alpine lakes, old-growth forests, good views

We left our cars and walked out into the forest. The trees were tall but separated enough enough to let sunlight through to the forest floor. They were all of various sizes and ages, some of them standing dead and others rotting on the ground. This, along with the absence of stumps from logging told me that we were in an old-growth forest.

The forest floor was covered with pine needles, vanilla leaf, and Oregon grape and the ground was already starting to get dusty even this early in the summer. Most of the trees were Douglas-fir but I also spotted some incense cedar and sugar pine. There were many other species, I’m sure, considering that these mountains harbor some of the most diverse coniferous forests in the world, but I couldn’t identify them.

The bark of the Douglas-firs was covered in a rich patina of light green witch’s hair lichen. A few species of wildflower added joy to the forest floor, including little yellow violets, white and pink trilliums, and the lovely and mysterious calypso orchids. Sticky currant and the Oregon grape were also in bloom.

We stopped for a quick break at Buck Lake, a deep blue-green lake surrounded by tall conifers. It was still early in the morning and our large group surprised a group of campers who had spent the night there.

We listened to the ‘wenk wenk wenk’ of red-breasted nuthatches as they searched tree trunks for bugs to eat and the distinctive ‘quick, three beers’ song of olive-sided flycatchers before getting back on the trail. I saw some Nuttall’s toothwort on a sunny patch and we all enjoyed the low, rhythmic whumping of a drumming grouse. We crossed a few streams and some of them were swollen from melting snow and required careful footwork.

I took a closer look that the bushes I’d seen almost constantly from the trail and realized they were in fact trees. They were tanoaks, but they are afflicted by sudden oak death here, and the disease seemed to be keeping them short by killing them before they grew taller, in effect turning them into bushes.

The hike’s character changed completely once we started the Devil’s Punchbowl Trail. We’d been walking for miles on a gentle hillside traverse, slowly rising and falling through nearly continuous forest. But now the trail went aggressively uphill, gaining some 800 feet in less than half a mile. Even peak-bagger Bob Burd had this to say about it on his way to Bear Mountain via Devil’s Punchbowl:

When I reached the next junction I turned right and started up the very steep switchbacks leading to a ridge. They were incredibly steep actually, and I was glad to find some worthy switchbacks that tested ones mettle rather than the lazy packmule ones found elsewhere in the state. These were manly switchbacks, by God!

Elizabeth and I got hot as the forest grew thinner and the trail grew sunnier. But we were well within the Siskiyou Wilderness now, and the elevation gain let us see a pristine landscape dominated by the long, forested canyon of Clear Creek extending for miles to our north and the mountains rising on both sides of it.

Mountain dogwood bloomed along the trail, its big white flowers contrasting nicely with the orange bark of incense cedar. We also saw some Brewer spruce, one of the world’s rarest spruce species, with its needles growing from distinctive weeping branches.

In front of us was Bear Mountain, a black hulk whose gullies were still streaked with winter snow. Once we crossed the stream that drained the Punchbowl we were near timberline and could enjoy the cool breeze blowing off the mountain. The patches of dirt between the rocks were filled with yellow glacier lilies and mats of spreading phlox with little violet five-petaled flowers.

Ahead of us was a deep-green tarn surrounded by cliffs and framed by Bear Mountain. We walked to its shore and sat down, taking off our shoes and even putting our feet in the bracing water. We got out our lunches just as Brad, on of the trip leaders, informed us that we weren’t at the Devil’s Punchbowl yet. In fact, this was a nameless tarn below our real destination and we still had some way to go.

So we continued around the east side of the tarn, carefully walked across some steep mud on the north side where the trail had washed out, and then continued toward the true Punchbowl over a mix of consolidated snow and boulders by following the plentiful cairns.

We knew we were at the right spot when we reached a much larger alpine lake directly below Bear Mountain, surrounded by a dramatic cirque whose couloirs were still filled with snow. A few conifers grew out of the rocks around the lake and the snow in the couloirs was slowly melting into the water, forming little bergschrunds just above where it was falling in. Patches of ice floated over most of the lake, masking its blue-green waters with shades of gray. Devil’s Punchbowl lies around 4,800 feet and Bear Mountain tops out at 6,411 feet, but the scenery we enjoyed made us feel as if we were at 10,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada.

After lunch we returned the way we had come up. The walk back was uneventful, a warm afternoon stroll through the woods.