Lake Angeles #80
Nov 17, 2007
- Type of Outing
- Day hike
- Read More in our Hiking Guide
- Hike: Lake Angeles
- Region: Olympics -- North
- Agency: Olympic National Park, Wilderness Information Center
- Trails: Lake Angeles (#80)
- Avg Rating: 2.71
- Be Aware Of
- Blowdowns
We went up the Lake Angeles trail because the gate was closed to Hurricane Ridge.
About a mile up the trail at the 2nd footbridge crossing (At Ennis Creek) there is the mother of all gigantic windfalls blocking the trail! The windstorm of November 10th wiped out a very large section of forest here. The trail is completely obliterated by hundreds of fallen trees strewn about like matchsticks. The mass of tangled trees is virtually impenetrable to anyone who doesn't possess very, very good off-trail scrambling skills! We had to climb up on top of huge logs before walking along their slippery surfaces more than 10 feet above menacing pointy branches below us, jump over to parallel and perpendicular logs, swing from branch to branch before jumping off and crawling on hands & knees in the thick debris under logs and try to figure out where the trail was located on the other side of this unholy conglomeration. The whole mass is about 50 yards in width. We found the ""best"" route around it seemed to be uphill and above the deepest, thickest part of the tangle and it still took us 20 minutes of extremely difficult travel to negotiate the 50 yards.
Seriously, don't try to get through this thing unless you are an accomplished off-trail traveler!
Once through this mess, there is another much smaller tangle about 100 yards farther up the trail that is best bypassed by going downhill, around the fallen trees for 50 feet before re-joining the trail.
There are only a very few, easily negotiated trees laying across the trail after this point on the way to the lake.
Patchy, 2"" deep snow at the lake and no ice formed yet.
*Note: We reported the windfall the NPS and they already were aware of the problem.
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