I thought I might be able to make it to the 5,500' shoulder of Goat Mountain, and I did.  The weather was sunny.  The temperature was 45 degrees F. on the way up and 50 degrees F. coming down: Perfect.  The sunshine was filtered while I was on the shoulder, but became bright again after I left.  Go figure.  I did not see any other hikers all day.

The trail is nearly unobstructed (a few step-over blowdowns) until the last mile where patchy snow and tree limbs combine to challenge your progress.  There are also some wet, muddy areas in this section.  The final half mile of the journey to the shoulder is all snow, but the snow route is easier than the summer route through all of the rocks on the final part of the trail.

I had waterproof boots, microspikes, gaiters, and trekking poles.  I needed all of them.  The snow is consolidated, so there was no need for snowshoes.

I found a patch of dozens of Calypso Orchids at mile 2.1, and I found a nice patch Avalanche Lilies just before reaching the meadow.  I also found a group of a dozen Trillium and was able to get a "real" picture instead of just one puny plant and bloom.

The views of Sefrit, Shuksan, Baker, Goat, etc. are good.  I inserted a telephoto shot of Price Lake into the picture of Shuksan.  The lake looks amazing right now.

There were two sets of tracks to the shoulder.  I'm pleased that my tracks are the third set.  There were no tracks beyond the shoulder: Too early.

We climbed a bit less than 2000' before running into continuous, deep snow. The trail is in good shape with some minor deadfall/blowdown and the road has a fair number of potholes, some pretty deep, but there was a low-clearance sedan at the trailhead so it's certainly passable with care.

Based on today's trail conditions, snowshoes and route finding skills were needed from about 4300 ft on. Lots of post holing and iffy snow bridges. We saw a beautiful young brown bear as we arrived at the trailhead. He/she skittered off into the forest.

The access road is drivable to the trailhead (with the usual ruts and potholes). Looks like two blow-downs (at 0.9 and 1.4 miles) were recently cleared. It was 34 degrees and snowing in the morning. I was the only car in the lot. No obstacles on the trail until the snow cover at 4000 feet. Lots of run-off along the way. I followed some faint tracks along a bushwhacking route until they stopped at a rocky ridge. Nice snow shower while I was up there. Had snowshoes but didn't wear them; there's a dusting of fresh pellet snow on top and a mostly hard icy crust underneath. Thought I saw a black squirrel; didn't know we had those around here.   

Lots of potholes, and some trees down around the access road but it was doable. On the trail there was patchy snow at 3100 ft. (that's according to my phone, which put the trailhead at 2100 ft.), and I switched to spikes at 3400 ft. A party ahead of me put on snow shoes at 3800 ft., and beyond that the snow was deep out on the open slopes. I followed their trail for a while but post-holed up to the top of my leg and turned around. That was about 2 hours in. Beautiful day, lovely forest.