There appears to be four trails to reach Tuchuck Mountain. All the trails come together by the time they reach Tuchuck Pass, which lies below Tuchuck Mountain. Three trails of varying length leave from the Tuchuck campground along Forest Service Road 114 (Trail Creek Road). The fourth trail (#19) left from Forest Service Road 114A and this route appeared to be a little shorter (I'm guessing 4.5 to 5 miles one way). I had been on road 114A when I hiked up to the Mt Thoma lookout and knew this road was much higher in elevation than road 114 so I expected we would have less of an elevation gain than if we took a trail from the campground. I have a feeling that it didn't work out this way.
We decided to take trail 19 from road 114A.
Here is our route shown on a 1971 Forest Service Map. (I can't find my current map of this area). FYI - since this map was created road 114A has now been closed after where I marked "Start" on the map. Trees are now growing in the road.
From Google Maps, here is what I believe our route was.
Looking at the Google maps view of Tuchuck Mountain I found the U.S. Canadian border interesting. It appears to dip across Frozen Lake. I wonder if the border really does dip?
The Western Larch trees (Tamaracks) were turning yellow and were quite pretty.
The following photo was taken from near the middle X on the above map. Looking south you can see the three lakes.
We had been walking three to four miles by now and hadn't seen Tuchuck Mountain yet. The trail kept mainly to the south of the ridge blocking for the most part the view of Tuchuck Mountain. On the return to the car, at one very brief point, I was able to see part of Tuchuck Mountain when hiking along the ridge.
The following photo was taken near the fourth X on the map. This is where trail 18 (one of the trails from Tuchuck campground) meets with trail 19. The two wooden signs in the middle of the photo were laying on the ground when we came and we didn't see them. Not knowing where to go we went to the left and after climbing a third of a mile began to suspect something was wrong. We got out Patti's map and figured out we were on trail 18. I hiked to the top of the ridge and found Tuchuck Mountain. We definitely were on the wrong trail.
We backtracked to where I took the following photo and then found the signs listing the trails. We propped the signs up the best we could then headed to the right, where Patti is standing.
Tuchuck Mountain as seen from the "wrong" trail.
Tuchuck Mountain was seen from the "right" trail, trail number 19.
The photos with clouds were taken after it had just rained. We had a wet day. It had rained before we started our hike. Therefore once the trail got brushy after a mile or so of hiking, our clothes and shoes got wet. Then as we neared the top of the ridge, and the first trail junction, we hiked in a light rain. Fortunately once we got back onto the right trail the rain quit for the day and we even saw the sun briefly when we were on Tuchuck Mountain.
The preceding photos somewhat capture the steepness of the mountain. At Tuchuck Pass, where trails 19 and 23 join, the trail then went down. We followed it a short way then quit and returned back up to the trail junction. Going down felt wrong when we could see how the ridge went up to the mountain.
We saw a cairn of rocks and began to bushwhack up the ridge. After a bit we could see a few signs of a switchback trail further up the mountain side and continued up the ridge to reach the trail. We didn't use the switchback trail. The trail was old and narrow and we could only see some sections of it. The trail would go into the trees on the other side and we couldn't make out where it came back from the trees. On the way back down from the mountain top we tried to use the trail but found the trail kept curving around the mountain's east side well into the trees with no sign of the next switchback. We lost sight of Tuchuck Pass. We felt more comfortable going straight down the mountain side as it was shorter and we could see our destination at all times: Tuchuck Pass.
The downside of not taking the trail up the mountainside was that it was very steep going up and slow going. We slowly climbed up the ridge the best we could until we got to the top of the mountain. Time was passing and we started to get concerned about getting back to the car before dark. We had started hiking at 10 am and we didn't reach the top of the mountain until 2:13 pm. We left the mountain top at 2:45 pm and got back to the car at almost 6 pm. 4 1/4 hours vs 3 1/4 hours. That indicates the climbing we did during the hike.
When we started up Tuchuck Mountain, here is the view back the way we came. We had started the hike at the middle of the left edge of the photo. We hiked up just on the other side of the mountain ridge that goes from left to right. At the right side of the clouds on the right side of that mountain, we descended to Tuchuck Pass. Yes, I said "descended". Quite a distance down multiple switchbacks. Now I am not so sure we saved any elevation gain by starting at road 114A. I suspect if we took trail 23 from the Tuchuck campground we may have had a similar amount of elevation gain as that trail joined our trail (#19) at Tuchuck Pass.
Tuchuck Pass is just right of center.
At the top of Tuchuck Mountain we found this marker. We also found some broken glass and cable from where the old lookout once stood. Apparently the lookout existed from 1931 to 1957.
I've been to the top of a few other peaks in NW Montana and I think many of the other markers also were from the year of 1924.
The three following photos put together a 360 view from the top of Tuchuck Mountain.
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| View SE to almost West |
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| View almost West to NE |
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| View NE to SE |
A short video made by another hiker from the top of Tuchuck Mountain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE0GRl9rndM
Several other things of interest...
I'm not sure what caused this, but a number of small trees near Tuchuck Pass has this brown stuff on them. I wonder if it was because of a late season snow melt?
And we found a quite number of huckleberries on the bushes. Some still tasted good, others had no flavor due to how late in the season it is. Here is a sign the bears were eating plenty of huckleberries. We saw plenty of bear scat and also wolf scat on the trail. So we often made noise to warn the bears we were coming and saw no bears.
These photos are just 1/3 of the photos I took. For more photos (67 photos, including the ones you seen above), go to my Picasa photo site: https://picasaweb.google.com/109566462412251958234/Tuchuck
1 comment:
I was there in 1986 it was great 😃
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