Location: On Highway 200, 8 miles west of Plains is the Westville Creek Road 887. Off that road take Forest Service Road 875 approximately 8 miles to the trail head at the gate near the junction of Forest Roads 875 and 7578.
Big Hole Lookout Trail (368) begins at the upper gate on Road 875. The lower gate is closed to motorized vehicles from December 1 to May 15.
Distance: 5.4 miles round trip. To me, the length felt less as it was an easy hike.
Elevation gain: 1422 ft. The trail head is 5500 feet. The elevation at the lookout is 6922 feet.
The trail is easy. Unlike other Cabinet Mountain trails this trail doesn't climb steeply much of the way. The only steep part is the final quarter mile to the lookout.
There appeared to be plenty of horse traffic on the trail until the turnoff to the Sheep Camp trail, which is a little over a half mile from the lookout. Not so much horse manure, but hoof prints and a soft dusty trail from all the horse traffic. This was probably due to this year's work on restoring the lookout, which was done the week before Patti and I hiked to the lookout.
This was the softest - and dustiest! - trail I ever hiked on. Patti and I had to keep some distance from each other due to the dust raised by our walking. The air was still so the dust hung there. By the end of the hike my shoes and socks were filthy. I even had to wash - soak! - my hiking shoes to clean them. Earlier I had tried banging them together to get the dust off but on the next hike my socks were extremely dirty from the shoes, not so much from the hike.
We had hiked through lots of huckleberry bushes. Here and there the bushes were picked clean. We found out why. Due to the distance apart from each other I missed seeing the bear Patti saw. She thought it was a medium black bear or a smaller grizzly. It turned and ran when it saw Patti. From then on we called out "Hey bear! Hey bear!" as we walked.
Patti also saw a bear near the end of the hike. I missed seeing that one to.
The very end of the hike was very strange. Lots and lots of ravens circled overhead. I wondered if we were unknowingly in the sequel to the movie, "The Birds". 29 seconds long. https://youtu.be/MzaGXIR6ClU
The views from the lookout were very nice.
My 21 photos are at this link: https://picasaweb.google.com/109566462412251958234/BigHoleLookout?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCKTBgaHo7r3HLA&feat=directlink
At the bottom of this web page is a little history, photos and videos about the ongoing restoration of the lookout. The three YouTube videos explaining the restoration work in 2013, 2014 and 2015 are interesting. http://www.bchmt.org/plains/photo.htm
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