Jacoby

Snowbrush is the curse of the Cunningham Cove trail, and Victoria Mitts is its blessing.

If not for Victoria’s dexterity with a pair of metal pruners, I’d likely still be floundering about among the shrubby thickets, half-crazed in my fruitless search for the path, and bleeding from dozens of shallow scratches besides.

My hiking companions, being considerably less stubborn — and more wise — would have long since abandoned me to my ineffectual meandering.

Fortunately no such conflict marred my June 27 hike with my wife, Lisa, and our kids, Olivia, 14, and Max, 10.

Such would not have been the case without Victoria’s efforts.

The Cunningham Cove trail is her first task as the initial employee with the Trailhead Stewardship Project.

That partnership between the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest and The Trailhead, the Baker City bike, ski and outdoors shop that Anthony Lakes Mountain Resort opened several years ago, aims to reverse years of trail-maintenance neglect that have left paths such as Cunningham Cove in deplorable shape.

Assuming you can actually find the trails to brand them as such. And in the case of Cunningham Cove, this is far from a certainty.

Victoria did find the trail.

But she had to look pretty hard.

Cunningham Cove, a roughly five-mile trail that climbs from the North Fork John Day River at Peavy Cabin to a junction with the Elkhorn Crest National Recreation Trail, has deteriorated to a disturbing degree since I first hiked it in 1990.

The Sloans Ridge fire in 1996 was a primary culprit.

The blaze burned the mature forest of tamarack, lodgepole pine and, along the streams, Engelmann spruce.

Relatively few big trees survived the flames — enough, though, to provide the seeds for the young forest that’s thriving now.

As is typical in the few decades following a severe fire, lodgepoles, which sometimes have serotinous cones (sealed by resin) that release their seeds only when exposed to flames, dominate.

Well, at least lodgepoles dominate among conifers.

But even their ubiquity is challenged by snowbrush, one of the ceonathus shrubs, that also has seeds with a protective layer that generally germinate only after some sort of disturbance.

And fire is nothing if not a disturbance.

In the aftermath of the Sloans Ridge fire, snowbrush has formed dense, almost unbroken, mats on the slopes where the Cunningham Cove trail runs.

Snowbrush is not an altogether malevolent plant — nothing like poison oak or devil’s club.

Indeed, on the day of our hike the snowbrush was in full bloom, its clusters of white blossoms attractive and its fresh scent pleasant.

But as with many things — beer, processed cheese and ABBA, to name but three — beyond a certain amount, snowbrush’s attractive attributes are overwhelmed by the deleterious effects of its sheer volume.

Snowbrush is basically the chaparral of the Blue Mountains.

A few clumps dangling over the edge of the trail are easily dodged.

But when the stuff grows thick on both sides, overhanging and meeting in the middle, the only way to get through is to wallow.

This is unpleasant, because snowbrush, although it lacks the spines of, say, hawthorn, is a stout shrub, and if you have to plunge through any significant stretch, the limbs will inflict copious scratches.

Enter Victoria and her pruners.

I had talked with Peter Johnson, Anthony Lakes general manager, a couple days before our hike. He told me Victoria had started working on the Cunningham Cove trail and was making good progress.

As we started the climb — around 8 a.m., in deference to the heat forecast later in the day — we hadn’t gone a quarter mile before we saw, and much appreciated, her handiwork.

The trail in places more resembled a gap between hedgerows — the sort of place where G.I.’s would creep through in June 1944, M1s at ready, listening for the clattering of German tanks.

Then we saw Victoria herself, chopping away at what seemed a Sisyphean task.

We stopped for a few minutes to chat, and to thank her for making the hike possible. I didn’t understand the actual scale of the endeavor until a few days later, when I saw a photo of the trail before Victoria started beating back the snowbrush. But even without photographic proof it was obvious, from a brief glance at the dozens of freshly cut limbs scattered beside the trail as we hiked, that prior to the pruning, walking this way would have been an exercise in frustration.

But now it was just exercise.

And strenuous exercise, given the grade of the Cunningham Cove trail, which varies from moderately steep to an incline that might give you reason to wonder whether a person designed the route or whether it just follows the paths made by elk and other animals that are much more agile than we are.

Besides battling snowbrush, Victoria had sawed through more than 40 trees that had tumbled across the trail.

This, too, is an inevitable effect following a major fire. The dead trees, deprived of their former roothold, are easy prey for winter winds.

Victoria told us she had cleared about a mile and a half of the trail.

And indeed the boundary was blatant — we went rather suddenly from an obvious path to a route much less distinct due to the fallen trees and encroaching vegetation (lodgepoles, mainly; fortunately the snowbrush is mainly confined to the lower sections of the trail).

We had to pause a few times to find the way. Some previous hiker or trail worker built several rock cairns, but there aren’t enough to serve as guides in places where the tread becomes all but indistinguishable.

Another useful tactic is to stop and look for logs that have been sawed through. These are usually reliable evidence that the trail is near.

We kept at it, though, and eventually made it to the Elkhorn Crest Trail. It was worth the toil to hike a hundred feet or so north on the Crest Trail for the view down to Crawfish Meadow with its inimitable shade of sylvan green. The breeze was fresh and the air pleasantly cool in the shade of the whitebark pines.

We had another brief conversation with Victoria on the way down, where she was having a go at the juvenile lodgepoles that crowd the trail in places.

It was an illuminating experience.

We hadn’t hiked Cunningham Cove since the early autumn of 2012, when Max, just a toddler, made the trip riding on my shoulders in a backpack carrier.

I was not a little dismayed by how terribly the trail had deteriorated in a little less than nine years. Had the route been then as it is now we certainly wouldn’t have made it to the end.

But I was simultaneously gratified that something’s being done to improve the situation, that Victoria is on the job, resurrecting, as it were, a public path that might well have been lost to the ravages of wildfire and the unrelenting alpine climate.

She has quite a lot yet to do.

Based on what we saw on June 26, I wouldn’t recommend the Cunningham Cove trail for hikers who aren’t accustomed to difficult terrain and confident in their route-finding abilities.

But the improvements Victoria has made are noteworthy.

Updates about her progress, and the Trailhead Stewardship Project, are available online at www.thetrailheadbakercity.com.