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A peek at the Peak Mail Tribune / Jim Craven Huge madrone trees are the subject of conversation on a break from an annual Sierra Club hike to Roxy Ann Peak. The hikers here are stopped at a fork in the trail. A Prescott Park hike uncovers a crown jewel hidden by distance and perception By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune The cloud cover on Roxy Ann Peak lifts for a moment, and the Siskiyous and Mount Ashland rise out of the soup of the valley like the Lost Continent of Atlantis. "Look at that," Helen Ost says. As if in reply, a raven croaks twice. "We're above the cloud layer," Richard Kinney says. But only for a moment, as the misty cover moves back in. Such are the vagaries of hiking in Medford's 1,740-acre Prescott Park on a day when low clouds hang like ghostly ships. But the real challenge is mud. Rains during the night have turned the trails girding the butte into a network of muddy, slippery slides. Hikers' boots grow into heavy gobs of muck and turf on the way up, and into gummy skis on the way down. Our Saturday party of half a dozen hikers, on the Sierra Club-sponsored annual trip to the peak, is led by club member Wayne Vos of Medford. He figures he's been up here literally hundreds of times in the years he's volunteered for trail maintenance in this, the city's largest and most neglected jewel in the rough. The land is more mini-nature preserve than city park. Home to deer herds, bobcat, wild turkeys and bald eagles, it comes alive each spring with the colors of camas bogs and bitterbrush. Trails date from the 1930s, when workers in the New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps were put to work building them. By the 1950s most had fallen into disrepair. They've been substantially restored, and new ones built, by volunteers such as Vos beginning in the 1980s. "We battled a lot of poison oak," Vos says. Vos is bullish on Roxy Ann. He says many people aren't aware of its wild beauty and biodiversity right next to town. The park even has its own famous murder story. "It has the potential to be the crown jewel of the park system," Vos says. But the park's relative remoteness has also been its curse. It's been abused for years by people treating it as a dumping ground, off-road vehicle course and party place. You enter the trail near where the road is blocked by a gate. Derelict car bodies dot the hillside above the subdivisions climbing ever higher. The slope above has been torn up by off-road vehicles. Big madrones, some 200 years old, grow here. "In the summer this can be really hot," Vos says. The trail forks after half-a-mile, one called Oak to the left, Madrone to the right. Madrone runs through black oak, white oak, manzanita, silver tassle, Oregon grape and wild celery, or angelica. "It was probably nice up here yesterday," Kinney says, scraping mud from his boots. There are switchbacks near the top where the trail runs into Douglas fir, ponderosa pine and incense cedar. At the north overlook, the view of Mount McLoughlin would be spectacular if it weren't for the clouds. A picnic table makes it a good lunch spot. At the nearby south overlook it's the same story: Pilot Rock and Mount Shasta are lost in the clouds. What appears for miles around from below - from a nearby Wal-Mart for example - to be a single needle atop the butte is actually not one but two ponderosas growing together. The north side of the butte is green, and the trail passes near the upper picnic grounds where vandals burned a shelter, then loops back into the steep trail that goes down to the road. Most hikers figure the trail of about four miles is a two-hour hike, but it's half again that with the mud. A walking stick helps. Prescott Park takes its name from a famous murder. Medford police officer George J. Prescott was killed in 1933 trying to arrest Llewellyn A. Banks, the leader of a crooked political gang called the Good Government Congress. The park was named for Prescott in recognition of his early support for the park. Anyone interested in trail or other volunteer work in Prescott Park can contact Vos at 779-2930 for more information. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.