Iron Mountain - Cone Peak

Nearly every Oregon wildflower guide book has a chapter on Iron Mountain. It's listed as one of the premier locations for summer blooms in the central Oregon Cascades. And rightly so, as I discovered on my recent visit to this challenging, popular hike. Iron Mountain and its neighbor, Cone Peak are located about 60 miles southeast of Albany, making a day hike impractical from our area. The peak bloom is in July, so I decided to bundle in a mini-vacation to central Oregon, thereby including a stop at Iron Mountain. A great excuse for a road trip to the mountains!

     

     

I planned for a weekday visit thinking there would be fewer people on the trail. And I wanted a sunny, windless day as well - not too much to ask! Well, I pretty much got what I wanted, although it was a hot day, even at the 5,300 foot level for most of this hike. Coming from Bend, I arrived at the trail head around noon. There were already about a dozen cars at the Tombstone Pass parking area which amazed me, given the day and remoteness of this hike.

So I gathered up all my gear and lots of water, and headed up the Cone Peak loop. The seven mile loop is a classic journey through many different plant communities at different elevations, terrains, and shaded/open areas. It was a wonderful four hours and I chatted with a few folks, mostly active senior types and one younger family from MN who were just loving the views. The hike has quite a bit of up and down, with the Iron Mountain lookout at 5,440 ft. My pain-based guess is the total elevation gain throughout the loop is about 1000 to 1,200 feet over the entire loop and the killer side trip up to the lookout.

I saw many familiar mountain blooms as well as about a half dozen completely new ones, and one "trophy" bloom, the lovely Washington Lily, a Northwest native I had not seen before. Here's a rundown of the discoveries. All are natives unless noted and are in more or less the order found.

...