Blood Mountain
Site of AT6 Texan Plane Crash, this hike required driving on a rough dirt road to get to the ‘trail head’, the dirt road is only passable by 4WD vehicles. Follow the dirt road down a hill and take a right at the gate in front of you follow the road to the next logging road on the left, if you get to the snowmobile bridge that crosses the south branch sugar river you have gone too far, turn around and go back to the first logging road now on your right, there are limited places to park, but found a spot off the side where there was crushed rock placed at side to prevent erosion. You can follow the logging road up as far as it takes you then it’s a full bushwhack slightly to the left and up to get to the crash site. It was necessary to use GPS to find the plane, the forest undergrowth is quite thick and had to go around the underbrush is a few spots.
The GPX track shown below only shows the trip up to the site and does not contain the return trip where we went east & down till we hit the river and rock hopped and crisscrossed down the river through thick pine underbrush until we spotted the unused logging road / runoff that we had come up, had we continued down the river we would have reached the snowmobile bridge mentioned earlier & could have walked on the road back to the jeep. The pin labeled ‘start’ on the map is near where the pavement ends on the dirt road, if you don’t have 4WD you could park there and hike the extra mile to the trail head.
