Fish Hook Interpretive Trail #1180

Dogs Off-leash

Features Views · Wildflowers

The trail is short but mostly across open ground with little shade. Expect it to be hot in the summer months. There is no reliable potable water on this trail, so carry plenty of your own.

In the early 20th Century, a pack trail went south from the Bear Camp Trail (see the Bearcamp Ridge Trail #1147), past Sugarloaf Mountain, and out to a forest camp just south of Fish Hook Peak. A fire lookout was in operation on Fish Hook from 1934 to sometime in the late 1940s. It was supposedly burned-down in the 1960s (as were many old lookouts at this time) but pieces of its timbers still rest on the summit. The chief attraction on this trail are the views from Fish Hook Peak.

As of 2021, the trailhead on Forest Road 2308-076 sported a blank sign board and a warning sign about this being a burn area (huge swaths around here were burned by the 2018 Klondike Fire). The trail itself hasn't seen any maintenance in ages but isn't too hard to follow most of the time. It takes you on a climb over the ridgeline north of Fish Hook, then down into a bowl on the east side (it gets a little sketchy through here), and then back up to the ridgeline south of Fish Hook. From here, 0.8 mi from the trailhead, it's a short cross-country run up the ridge to the old lookout site.

The trail now descends through open terrain and patches of forest for about 0.6 mi to a spring (not a reliable water source) and the site of a forest camp in the 1930s and early 1940s. Nothing of the camp remains.The Forest Service says the trail ends here. Some maps show it making a one mile loop around Point 4596 and returning to the site of the forest camp but years of no maintenance and three major wildfires (1987, 2002, 2018) have made this loop questionable. Most runners go as far as the forest camp and/or the old lookout site.