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L6 Wild Plum to Milton Creek.
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L5 Milton Creek to East Meadow Camp.
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L4 East Meadow Camp to "another good road" 1178.5-6740.
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L6 Side trip to road on east side of Milton Creek and Wild Plum Loop.
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M10 Bucks Summit to Clear Creek.
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M11 Clear Creek to Belden Trail and back.
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M11 Side trip to Three Lakes.
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M11 Belden 1283.1-2310 to Belden Trail 1277.8-5900 and back.It wouldn't be Belden without bugs. I was pleased that they were not present in the cold shady south side of the canyon, but they were out in diminished but recognizable numbers on the sunny north side. It also wouldn't be Belden without the railroad, and the UP has taken over the PCT trailhead just below their tracks as a parking lot for their work crews.
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N1 side trips to Belden Cemetery and Post Office.The Belden cemetery along the Indian Springs trail may be the only one near the PCT. It was used as recently as 1994, and contains the graves of a couple of Beldens, including the son of the town's founder.
Belden Town Resort actually closes for the winter, but the Belden Post Office does appear to keep its 20-hour week. I discovered that you can get to the Post Office by heading west 0.7 miles along Highway 70's fairly broad shoulder from the rest area/trailhead/Belden Town bridge. OR you can follow the closed PCT west about a mile with a couple hundred feet of gratuitous up to a steep power-line dirt road that goes down to the Hwy 70 turnout just east of the Post Office driveway. If you continue on the PCT west past that dirt road, you first come to the site of the burned out bridge at Little Indian Creek (this is the outflow from Indian Springs that the bypass trail crosses in 6 or 7 miles) and then to a huge down tree across the trail in a very steep section that I didn't want to bypass. I think these items are left for last for repair to discourage equestrians and hikers from continuing westward on the trail.
The way to avoid the missing bridge and huge tree, by the way, is after you pick up your mail at the post office, cross Little Indian Creek on Hwy 70, and pick up a trail starting uphill from a turnout on the west side of the creek which switchbacks up to the closed PCT. The trail to Williams Cabin site is in fine shape from here, better than much of the unburned PCT elsewhere, and views much better than before the fire, I imagine.
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N1 Belden 1283.1-2310 to Williams Cabin site 1289.4-3700.However if you do go over that creek and around that down tree (and maybe some others immediately after it, I didn't check) you find that the Forest Service has been at work, and all the trees have been cleared from the trail to the site of the Williams Cabin and perhaps beyond. That's as far as I got, and only the metal parts of the cabin are left - hammer head, shovel head, pick head, pots and pans - but it's still a nice-looking place to camp with a pretty spring flowing. Most of the big trees on the flat are undamaged. The real trail destruction - not a few trees over the trail, but no there there any more - is further up the canyon, but I guess I won't check that out until next year. Ginny & Jim Owen posted an account of those difficulties as of 2000.