Came out to hike the Shetipo trail to do some research for the Hiking Guide entry for this trail (coming soon!), but here is a report of the current conditions and my experience on the trail.
This trail is definitely suffering from a lack of maintenance, especially some major drainage issues in the last 2 or so miles of the trail. The trail is steep and in many places has deep rutting and/or signs of water cutting down the trail. The brush is beginning to encroach and while it doesn't make finding the trail difficult, it definitely distracts from the hike.
I counted a total of 18 trees down on the trail: 13 small/medium logs that were easy to step over, 1 at mile 2 that you have to sort of bear hug straddle across, and 3 sets of logs at miles 2.5, 2.8, and 3.7 that I had to either crawl through or go around.
There is plenty of access to water for filtering and in many places the trail crosses over small creeks. The biggest one is about 1 mile onto the trail; there are logs for crossing, but after I watched the group of backpackers in front of me (the only other people I saw all day) balancing on the logs, I chose to just walk straight through the ankle deep water.
The entire hike is fairly steep and the first half is entirely exposed to the sun given the forest of burned trees and while there is more shade in the second half of the hike, it is still very sunny. Luckily the aforementioned creeks meant that I was able to filter and drink roughly 4L of water and dunk my hat to stay cool on a HOT HOT HOT day.
In the last mile or so of the trail there are currently still some patches of lingering snow. I had no problem crossing in just my trail runners, but in some spots the snow has created a bridge over the deep ruts of the trail which made for some surprise and unpleasant (although not dangerous) post holing.
So is it worth it? Definitely not as a day hike, but I like the idea of using this to create a loop from the Cottonwood CG to Larch Lakes and then down and around, but given the complete lack of solid views from the pass ... I don't think I'd do the drive out to the end of Entiat River Rd for just a trip up here.
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