Great to be in the Northwest! Beauty of a blue-sky day with a backcountry snowshoe.  My first time on this trail so I may go into too much detail in case I need to refer back to this again. Not a lot of surprises on this outing that were not already covered in other trip reports.

Got off on exit 54 and crossed the road then turned left into the Hyak overflow parking lot.  Got there about 8am but I was dead tired already.  Had a rough night with the 95 year-old Grandma that now lives with us.  My hat goes off to all the caretakers out there.  It is one of the toughest things to do in life. Closed my eyes for a quick nap, then awoke shivering and it was 930am.   Packed up my stuff and headed up Snoqualmie drive. At the hairpin curve on the road you can see where everyone has gone over the snow-bank to get on the trail.  Stay on the left trail to cross the creek with a snow-log.  Blue diamonds are plentiful on this area of the trail that gets you up to Hyak lake and then the ski roads.  After that they get more scarce and things are a bit confusing in spots.  GPS and a map kept me straight.  Up by Rockdale lake the ski trails are looping everywhere.  Could not have kept on the Nordic trail without the GPS.  The trail became less traveled and more snow covered, then it abruptly stopped.  From then on it was trail-breaking in snow that compressed 6-12 inches with the snowshoes. Quickly became a workout, and an exercise in path finding and GPS skills.  Every now-and-then a blue diamond would be on a tree.  It was tough to get a bearing or head towards a landmark because you were in the trees that all looked the same.

Made it to the pass where the views were not great but there was open areas to get in the sun and have lunch.  I used my phone GPS app a lot.  At lunch time it was down to 7%.  One of my 10-essentials is a battery pack.  In 40 minutes it was back to 85%.  From parking lot and back it logged almost 9miles.  WTA shows it as 7 miles.

There was no broken trail past Hyak Lake so we made our own following the blue diamonds. (Pop quiz: When you hear “blue diamonds” do you think Lou Diamond Phillips or Blue Diamond almonds or this dude is crazy?) There was a lot of wind blown snow on the trees so it wasn’t always easy to stay on route. 

We stopped just short of Nordic Pass itself at a sketchy creek crossing. We saw no people beyond Hyak Lake. 

If you go, start early. The parking was a madhouse when we returned at noon.

(note, this is a 7 mile RT snowshoe to Nordic Pass, with about 1580 of vertical gain... the webpage incorrectly gives the distance to Hyak Lake with a description of the longer hike to Nordic Pass).

We hiked in the morning before a big snowstorm, so assume some of our info is out of date already.  We started at 9am; finished at 3.  Normally we do this in 5 hours but today did some exploring which added time.  The Nordic Pass trail (following blue diamonds) was perfect today. Somebody preceeded us and so we never broke trail.  We only saw 1 person the entire day (mid week).  Our only slight detour was about 2.5 miles in there is a creek crossing that wasn't safe and so the current boot trail takes your 30 yards off trail to a good crossing.   

For new people to this trail...its marked by blue diamonds about 10 feet up on trees, you start down by Hyak (see other reports on how to find the trail at the bottom) and then ascend for 1 mile to Hyak Lake.  If there is sufficient snow at Hyak you cross ....turn left or roughly west to re-find the blue diamond trail.  Take this then up to a ski trail road and cross that.  This section has fewer blue diamonds so you likely want to rely on a map to refind the trail.  It then follows a steep ridge and you'll do a bit of snowshoeing on an angle (ugh) but that lasts only 200 yards and then you end up in a lovely forest.  You end up roughly going south for the last mile.  I have not seen avalanche slopes nor evidence of avalanche, which makes this a good snowshoe.  I would not hike this with only boots or spikes; its often untracked and thus hard to do.  At the top we went 100 yards further to look at the Snotel gauge.

Attempted this snowshoe but had to turn around partway through. Blue diamond markers were visible, but we were unable to cross the stream at the start (as we should have been able to do) due to the snow trail being washed out from several days of rain this week. We hiked alongside the stream for a while until we came to a bridge to cross over. We didn’t trust our dog to safely cross so we turned around. Hypothetically, you should be able to cross over here and find the blue diamonds to continue the trail to the lake. This was confirmed as we took our snowshoes off at the trailhead and talked with a local resident walking by. Wouldn’t recommend unless you’re prepared for a longer (and possibly wetter) trek than planned. Snow was not as well packed as we had hoped. Ee did also see some cross-country skiers start the trail slightly before us and they seemed all right on that trail. 

HYAK LAKE TRAIL. The trail starts behind the left side of Silver Firs Lodge (green dumpster) and twists up immediately into the forest. Shortly join a ski trail. Go left past a snow covered bridge (watch out for the downhill/cross country & boarders traffic) until the junction with the designating yellow symbol [only for snowshoeing]. It starts gradually steep with 680-ft elev. gain on mostly packed trail in-and-out of the treeline. Trail recrosses the ski trail and continues up to the lake loop area. Be careful not to venture into directions where there are no snowshoe tracks. Easy to sink a few feet deep, also quite difficult to pull back out. Lake level is a vast open view area good place to rest.

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