Heather Lake

There were scalloped clouds across the sky in the west, and in the east the sun was fixing to bang out its first rays dead in the eyeballs of anyone who dared drive that direction. It was going to be a grand day.

Mizz S, herinafter referred to as Scout, had kindly condescended to handhold me through my first snowshoe attempt at Heather Lake, a skosh three years after I had gazed across that frozen expanse and vowed to do so. You can read about that at http://tinyurl.com/c7r956 . A little slow on the uptake, is me.

The road to the trailhead was passable to 4WD vehicles only, and even then we were slewing and fishtailing quite a bit. Scout seems to have a bit of a phobia when the back of a vehicle wants to arrive at the destination before the front, and she was grabbing and goosing the oh-shit handle on the car like it was a lever to Heaven. We did however, arrive at the trailhead without injury, geared up, and headed out.

The lower trail is largely snow-free, so we stowed the snowshoes for the time being. There wasn't significant snow until we came into the old growth tree stands, and even then it was well-consolidated on the trail. We followed the established tracks of others, and discovered that the tracks go pretty far afield of the established trail. Eventually the tracks themselves petered out, indicating that everyone there that day had given up and headed back out. We found that exceedingly strange, given that by that time, the Pilchuck massif was readily visible through the trees, so it'd be kinda hard to get lost at that point, so we headed over the drifts and soon found ourselves at the lake.

Beautiful as always, Heather Lake for me is the poster child of the Mountain Loop Highway trail system: readily accessible, yet relatively unknown outside of Snohomish County, at least compared to the I-90 corridor. We had a snack lakeside, with Scout whipping out her jet-boil for some tea and soup (boy, that thing can fry up water quick).

Heading back out, we discovered we had a few things in common with the half-dozen vehicles at the trailhead: we were all stuck. The sun had warmed the surface of the snow, melting and re-freezing it so that no one could get out from their parking spot without outside help (excepting the dude and his Subaru puddlejumper).

But, we were also all in it together, so the group of us pushed, shoveled, and otherwise muscled all the vehicles there onto the road track, and carefully made our way to the main drag, Scout goosing the Lever to Heaven all the way down.



*on edit: replaced 'Mizz S.' with 'Scout' as requested.