Silver Moccasin / Shortcut Loop

[sugar]

Silver Moccasin / Shortcut Loop Trip report

https://onthegomap.com/s/d61dpr9n
16 miles, 6 hours

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I parked at Shortcut Saddle Saturday morning with the plan to walk down to West Fork via the Silver Mocassin Trail and back up Shortcut Road. Strava showed no traffic along Mocassin and All Trails cautioning the trail was lost.

I took the road rather than the switch backs down to Silver Moccasin, and missed it at first. There’s a pair of sticks denoting the beginning of Silver Moccasin’s descent from the Shortcut road.

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The trail is thin, but present for the first two miles. There’s a tight switchback here that I could find no evidence of. After thrashing around the brush for a while, I chose to glissade down to where the trail turns back east 15’ below.

As you approach West Fork, the trail fades into thickets of poison oak

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It’s a lush and pretty mile to West Fork Trail Camp, but if you’re finding the route too tenuous, you’re going to want to stick to Rincon Red Box road instead of continuing on the Gabrillieno Trail.

There’s little evidence of trail for the 1.5 miles along the West Fork floor, but you won’t get lost. The steep valley walls keeps you eastward, but will have to select a route through tall brush, stacked timber debris, and leaping across boulders. I frequently backtracked to try pushing forward on the other side of the river. It was the slowest going for the day.

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The Devore Trail camp is easy to find. It indicates where the trail diverges from the river and begins ascending up to Rincon Red Box. The trail, finally, is clear again. The tread is in poor shape. Combined with a number of downed trees, the route gets spicy once or twice. The mile climb ends with bonafide timber stairs, albeit riddled with heavy brush and downed trees.

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It’s a relief pushing out from the brush onto the manicured rincon red box road. Though I had a majority of my journey ahead of me, the riskier portion of unknowns was behind me. An easy three mile jog down to the last and far tamer crossing of West Fork before a six mile climb back to shortcut saddle.

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There’s a terrific slide a half mile up from West Fork. Besides that, the remainder of the route is delightfully boring compared to the demanding descent earlier that morning. As the steady climb wore on, I shuddered to imagine taking this loop the other direction. Upside down hikes are tough, but exacerbating that with quantity of route-finding and loose tread would have been a longer day!

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[Matthew]

I still have to check out the wilderness upstream from cogswell. This post is a reminder for me to do so asap! Was the trail brushy at all?

[sugar]

The road is great, bikable. The trails (Gabrillieno and Silver Moccasin) are very overgrown.

[dima]

Excellent. I heard the trail was gone, but it's good to see exactly what that means.

[JeffH]

Thanks for the report. I was just looking at this route last week, driving past Shortcut Saddle prompted my search for a short getaway. Seems like the camps are not currently a good place for actually camping.