Ask anyone in Ashgrove where to walk and they will send you to the river path, which is flat, pretty, and full of people you will have to make conversation with. Harrow Ridge is nine miles east on the county road, up a gravel spur that looks like somebody's driveway, and on a Saturday in October I passed two cars and one dog.
The climb
It is two and a half miles to the top and it gains about eleven hundred feet, most of that in the middle mile. The first half hour is easy and misleading: a wide old logging grade under second growth fir, soft underfoot, smelling like wet bark. Then the trail turns hard left at a cairn somebody rebuilt this summer and starts going up in earnest, switchbacking through vine maple that was every shade of orange the day I was there.
I am not a fast walker and I was not in a hurry. It took an hour and twenty minutes up with two stops. There is one genuinely steep pitch around the two mile mark where the trail crosses bare rock, and you want dry weather and decent shoes for it. I would not take a nervous dog.
The top
Worth it, which is not always true. The ridge opens into a long bald spine of rock and dry grass with the whole valley laid out to the west, fold after fold of dark timber going blue with distance, and on a clear day a white line of peaks along the far edge. There is no bench, no sign, no register. Just a flat rock about the size of a kitchen table that everyone clearly sits on. I sat on it for forty minutes with a sandwich and thought about nothing in particular.
Practical notes
Park on the wide gravel shoulder just past the culvert, not in the turnaround, which a logging outfit still uses. There is no water on the trail and no cell service after the first mile. Go in the morning if you want the valley clear, because the haze builds by two. Coming down took fifty minutes and my knees had opinions about the last half of it.
Best three hours I spent in October, and the only three where nobody needed anything from me.
