The site should be more reliable and considerably snappier.

• Narrows fire - this is along highway 224 near Three Lynx - it sounds like this is mostly under control at this point
• Mitchell Fire - this is north of Hideaway like - it is currently at 5 acres 
• Austin Fire - this is near Austin Hot Springs and looks very bad - it is currently 30 acres and growing rapidly.  It looks like what I remember the 36 pit fire looked like when it started.

This was what the Austin fire looked like today from the camera on Oak Grove Butte:

There are now cameras on Oak Grove Butte, Whalehead and Memaloose to help detect fires.

Here is the link to the one on Oak Grove Butte - you can see the Austin, Mitchell and Grashopper fires from that camera.

Please, please, please do not start any campfires and be careful out there!

The other area that might be a bit overgrown is the area around Terrace spring - it had a bunch of thimbleberry that has kind of exploded since the fire - but you should be able to get thru it.

FYI, there isn't much to see of the old lookout - burned legs and a bunch of burned metal really.

Here is a link to pictures from that hike last year:

Bull of the Woods Hike - 7/31/2025

If you do end up hiking it, post a trip report here.  There is a link at the bottom of the trail page where you can post a trip report with pictures - Trail page

One thing to be aware of though - the road to the trailhead had a few semi washed out areas that might be difficult for a car to get thru.  I would expect it got worse after last winters storms as well.  If you have something with a bit higher clearance it will probably be OK.

Additionally, all the old forum postings from the very first forum have now been added to the current forum under the Archive topic, so those old postings are now also searchable.

To access the new comprehensive search tool, you can go here: Search Tool

If you are logged in, it will take you to a chatbot interface that will do the searching.  If you are not logged in, it will take you to a generic search tool.  Note that since the chatbot incurs additional cost, it might get taken down or stop working if it runs out of money.

The other cool new functionality is that for some of the scanned documents (the ones that got transcribed via AI), it shows the scanned document on the left side of the screen and the transcribed document on the right side of the screen.  This is particularly helpful for some of the handwritten documents which were hard to read.  The AI transcription, while not perfect is really good.  Here is an example:

https://www.trailadvocate.org/document-transcript/?doc=13

Only select documents that were transcribed with AI will have this side by side functionality.  The rest of the documents will display like they always have.

As always, if you have questions or issues with any of this new functionality, or find mistakes, feel free to send an email to webmaster@trailadvocate.org.  If there are other documents you think would benefit from being transcribed, you can send those along as well.  The real benefit of the transcription is twofold:

1. It can make difficult to read scans a lot easier to read
2. It allows the content to be searched

https://youtu.be/Ku3-TSnt6BE?si=FMRjJTTFz1bIlsRb

• Anvil Lake
• Mon-Olallie Lake (Monolallie Lake)

That still leaves these trails official status as "unknown" at this point:

• Burnt Granite
• Cottonwood Meadows
• Cripple Creek
• Double Peaks
• Gibson Lake
• Hawk Mountain
• Horseshoe Saddle
• Mt Lowe
• Russ Lake

😡

• The map selector (showing what maps cover a given area) and the map scans/PDFs have been combined into one (hopefully) more useful page now.  
• The Historical Items page has been updated to hopefully make it easier to navigate
• Several minor updates to the look and feel to make things more consistent

Hopefully people find them useful.

As always, if you find issues or problems, please send an email to webmaster@trailadvocate.org

All of the old posts were converted to the new forum, so no historical postings were lost.  Some of the features of the new forum:

• Simplified editor
• Ability to upload files to posts and place them inline - uploads are significantly faster as the images are automatically converted to a more efficient format before uploading
• Ability to upload a gpx/kml file into a post - a map will the track will display at the bottom of the post
• Ability to add emojis to posts
• Ability to add reactions (like, sad, mad, etc) to posts
• Simplified private messages
• Ability to taq posts with custom tags to make searching easier
• Ability to mention someone and they will get notified (@Username) - this feature isn't working as well as I'd like - I'm not sure how much it will get used - it may get removed at some point if it continues to be problematic.
• Ability to bookmark posts to come back to them easily in the future
• New Feature - Ability to add interactive polls
• Ability to subscribe to topic and categories so you can be notified when new postings occur
• Ability to report posts (spam, questionable content, etc).
• Ability to preview messages before posting.

Again, the purpose of this was to remove features that didn't seem useful in order to make the forum easier to use and to add a few features that would be useful (polls, track display in a post, private messages).

If you just want to experiment with the new forum to see how it works, there is a Test Forum available (only visible when you are logged in).  Feel free to post whatever in that forum.  At some point I will remove it.

If you have problems, questions or issues with the new forum, please either post a message or send a message to webmaster@trailadvocate.org.

• Rho Creek
• Top Lake

Maybe it is just taking them exceedingly long to add all the lesser used trails, or maybe someone told them they were missing.

If you find anything that is broken or suggestions for improvements, please send them to webmaster@trailadvocate.org.

1. Cache Meadow
2. Corral Springs
3. Huxley Lake

I find is strange they've lumped everything "recreation" into one list.  They show Campground, Trails, Trailheads, Horse Camps, snowparks, etc all int the same list.  It is also very inconsistent.  Some closed sites have a red "Site Closed" banner but places like Indian Henry do not - there is just a comment in the text that says it is closed.

I think it is a terrible design and incredibly unhelpful.

Road 57 is also gated at the junction with 58 so it is a dead end until they reopen the gates.

The roads page on the Forest Service website is pretty unclear about it, so I thought I'd post this here since this appears to be a new seasonal closure that will be permanent.

If you find any broken links, please send an email to webmaster@trailadvocate.org and let me know where the link was.