Hike to Madstone Site
05 OCTOBER 2021 | KERBY, OR. — Siskiyou Mountain Club’s Wilderness Corps recently completed the 14-mile route into Madstone Site, restoring one of the most remote dead-end trail routes in the Pacific Northwest. If anything, Madstone is a good place to hide out. That’s why brothers Charlie and Alfred Fattig spent more than two years there. They were WWI draft dodgers and didn’t want anyone, including the hands of the law, to find them.
You can read a narrative of the brothers’ long adventure in their nephew Paul Fattig’s book Madstone (link below), published in 2019. Their old cabin site, which has burned multiple times since their wilderness foray, is at the western terminus of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest’s Little Chetco Trail 1121, deep in the 180,000-acre Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area.
To hike there, pick up the Chetco Peak and Josephine Mountain 7.5-minute USGS quadrangle maps (links to PDFs below). Follow the route along Babyfoot Lake Rim Trail 1126 to Kalmiopsis Rim 1124. From there head south, traversing the slopes of Canyon Peak, catch the Little Chetco Trail 1121, and follow it west to its terminus at Madstone Site. Hikers who pursue the route should have strong navigation skills and experience in the backwoods.
The hike in is approximately 14 miles and comes with a punishing elevation profile. It comes with some reward, a rough and tumble campsite as high as you can get on the main stem Chetco via system trail.
“There isn’t a lonelier or more remote swimming hole in the Pacific Northwest,” says executive director Gabriel Howe. “For some, it’s worth the long hike.”
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