Our goal today was to hike into the Castle Crags in the eastern Klamath Mountains before driving home. But before that, we made an impromptu visit to Dunsmuir where, based on nothing more than a provocative sentence in my California guidebook, we went looking for Mossbrae Falls. We found them after a mile-long walk along train tracks, at the bottom of a hill hidden by trees—you could walk right by the falls without knowing they existed. But Mossbrae Falls were spectacular—only 50 feet tall, but 150 feet wide—and I was glad we made the trek.

Back on the road, we drove to the base of the crags. It was noon. That left us plenty of time for the 5.5-mile round trip hike into Castle Crags.

We started in a dense secondary forest of Douglas-fir, ponderosa pine, incense-cedar, and black oak. We couldn’t see the crags at all through the unbroken canopy. Nevertheless, a stiff wind blew through the trees and I was cold enough to put on all of my layers: a fleece jacket, a windbreaker, wool gloves, and a baseball cap. The forest’s understory, now at the beginning of the wet season, was bare, covered only with pine needles, pine cones, and oak leaves.

We climbed steadily up the trail, through forests that gradually became sunny and open. Greenleaf manzanita and Labrador tea showed up. Oaks that I couldn’t identify grew on spindly trunks with fissured bark.  The wind had stopped and the air had gotten warmer. I took off my jackets.

We finally saw the crags. The mountain ahead of us, instead of being covered with green pines like the others, bristled with spectacular silver spires. Lone pine trees, large in their own right but dwarfed by the crags, grew in the cracks between them. Castle Crags seemed two-dimensional from our distance—some waterfalls and mist and they would have looked like an old Chinese landscape painting.

We climbed, passing a Forest Service sign announcing our entrance to the Castle Crags Wilderness. The trail became rockier. The forest diminished into scrubland. Greenleaf manzanita was still with us from lower elevations, but it was joined by pinemat manzanita and ceanothus. A few pines grew out of the scrub.

The trail became faint, splitting and merging—a manzanita maze. Would we have trouble finding the correct trail on our way down?

Higher up, even the scrub faded, leaving us on bare granite. This was familiar terrain from our hikes in the Sierra. We scrambled up to a saddle near Castle Dome, using our hands for balance when the granite got steeper.

The crags, which had looked flat from far away, became three-dimensional once we were inside them. Crags next to the trail were some 50 feet tall; others were the size of skyscrapers.

We scrambled up to the saddle below Castle Dome to look down its other side. It was so narrow we could only stand on it one at a time. A great chasm opened up in front of us, dropping thousands of feet into a dark forest. On the opposite side of the chasm, a set of cliffs just like ours screamed down. In the distance, the fresh snow of Mount Shasta was so bright that it hurt to look at.

We stopped at a flat area to eat and drink. I was still so full from my Black Bear breakfast that I only ate a granola bar and some fruit leather. The mountains in the distance were a contrast to the crags: a gentle green landscape that reached to the horizon.

Elizabeth and I made it back to the car by 4, some 40 minutes before sunset. Pretty good timing, I think. We made the long drive back to the Bay Area, stopping at Los Mariachis in Red Bluff for huge portions of good Mexican food.

This morning we woke up at sunrise. Weaverville’s empty streets were filled with fog. Temperatures were below freezing, and cars, houses, and trees were covered in a layer of frost. How long had it been since I last scraped ice off my car windows?

I knew I wanted to hike in the Trinity Alps, but I didn’t know where to go. There was already snow on the mountain tops, and the roads to the trails were steep, winding, single-lane Forest Service roads, often unpaved: harrowing enough without snow and ice on them. We stopped at the Weaverville Ranger Station for some suggestions.

The ranger recommended the popular Stuart Fork Trail while his yellow Labrador, Scion, broke free of his leash and ran around the station. Elizabeth played with the dog while I talked to the ranger about the area. He gave me a topographic map of the trail and directions to the trailhead. Scion was rolling on the ground, and I gave him a good belly-rub on our way out.

The Stuart Fork trailhead was at the end of a narrow and potholed dirt road, but we got there without a problem. Our car was the only one in the parking lot. I expected not to see anyone on our hike.

Outside it was shady, cold, and damp. Immediately I spotted some very large incense-cedar and Douglas-fir.

The Stuart Fork was a deep blue-green river with a little whitewater. Its sound filled the thickly forested canyon. Streams trickled downhill to meet it. In fact, we heard running water throughout today’s hike. What a contrast to the High Sierra, where we’d sometimes walk for hours without seeing water.

The forest, meanwhile, reminded me of the middle-elevations on the west side of the Sierra Nevada. Incense-cedar and Douglas-fir, the trees I’d seen near the car, were most abundant. There were also sugar pine and ponderosa pine. I even saw an unexpected lodgepole pine. Broadleaf trees included black oak and bigleaf maple. In a way, the forest reminded me of an outsized version of the riverside forests I’d spent so many days hiking through in Pennsylvania and New York. I felt at home.

After an hour and a half on the trail, it was almost time for us to turn around. I heard something, like a tree or rock, fall down by the river. A minute later, a big, furry black animal crossed the trail 15 yards ahead of me. I’d seen dark objects out of the corner of my eye hundreds of times will hiking and wondered what they were, but this time I knew instantly that I was looking at a bear. “Uh-oh,” I said. We stopped. The bear seemed oblivious. Did it not know we were there? Or did it know, but just not care? The bear stopped and turned toward me. Recognizing a human, it ran away, bounding up the hill. I turned around and Elizabeth was wide-eyed and starting to walk backward. Now the bear’s cub crossed the trail. Then the cub, too, saw us and ran up the hill.

Elizabeth had turned around and was walking away at a quick pace. Well, I thought, it’s time to head back, and now would be a perfectly good time to turn around. I followed her.

We were still tingling with excitement from seeing the bears when around a turn in the trail ahead came a wolf. “Not again,” I thought. He was walking right toward us. He looked oddly happy—as if he wanted to be pet. Then I saw his collar: he was just someone’s dog. I rubbed his head and he brushed up against my leg. He turned around and led us down the trail to his owners. They were all backpacking up to Morris Meadow. Their dog was Diesel Henry, a wolf-malamute hybrid. We chatted a while, then we went on our ways.

I kept looking around as we walked back, taking in as much as I could: the huge conifers, the moss-covered maples and oaks, the snow-covered peaks, the dark green canyons that went on without end. Everything held the promise of more adventure. It felt like the beginning of a crush. I’d have to arrange a way to see the Trinity Alps again.

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.