This weekend kicked off my summer hiking adventures. The very first hike of the season was to Snow lakes in the Cascades, east of Seattle. You can get there by taking exit 52 on I-90 (from Seattle) and making a left at the stop sign onto Alpental road. You need to drive up to the parking lot where the trail starts. We had a pretty big group (13 people), mostly newbies to hiking. We were greeted by about 4-5 feet of snow from the very beginning and it showed no signs of letting up. You need to be careful this time of the year since a lot of the snow up top is melting, creating hundreds of streams under the snow which gives up pretty easily.

Most of us were wearing sneakers and didn’t really expect too much snow until we got to the summit. We crossed a couple of waterfalls on the way to the summit and this definitely needs some guts, given the current conditions. We never quite made it to the lake or the summit and turned around some 3 hours after we left, after one person on our team rolled his ankle. Here is what most of our hike looked like -

I would definitely not recommend this hike at this time of the year unless you have the right gear to tackle the snow and start out early. We started hiking at 1:15 in the afternoon and that was atleast a couple of hours later than we should have.

Tags: 2009, hiking, snow lakes