On July 4th Barb and I hiked to Lake Twenty Two in the North Cascades.
We arrived at the trailhead by 8:20 and found the parking lot full. A couple hundreds yards down the road the day use picnic area had one spot we could squeeze the car into.
The trail is claimed to be 5.4 miles roundtrip and has a difficulty of “moderate”. They lie.
My GPS tracking app says it is 3.3 miles one way. Had the trail been on even ground instead of random sized, irregular shaped, rocks half of the distance we would have granted it a moderate classification. The constant attention required to our footing and the work to keep our balance make it above what we considered “moderate” difficulty.
That said, it was a very nice mountain lake with waterfalls and snow:
We had a cute rodent visit while we were eating lunch. We guarded our food carefully while they were around.
There were some large trees along the trail:
Here is a sample of the trail rocks:
We probably would not do that hike again unless someone else specifically wanted to go there. There are other, easier, trails with even better views.
WOW!
That first picture says climb me.
Beautiful.
I’ve always liked Lake 22, and have hiked there many times with me wife (nearby Heather Lake is also pretty nice.) The hordes off hikers that descend upon it each weekend pretty much leaves it out of the running for me anymore, same with Big 4 Ice Caves, further up the Mountain Loop.
We’ve been concentrating on relatively short hikes in the Skykomish River corridor lately. Found one very short hike with only one car in the parking lot on July 3 – very pretty lake with only three people there (briefly). This weekend hiked up to Trout Lake, off the Foss River road. More people, but the area can absorb a lot of folks, since there’s a chain of lakes strung out over several miles. Copper Lake is a nice workout – and brings you into a high alpine basin that’s absolutely beautiful.