The road to the trailhead is completely free of snow, but is littered with potholes. Make sure your vehicle is up for the long 12.5 drive on dirt/gravel and potholes (Lets hear it for Subaru’s!!!). The trail itself is easy to follow and gains very little elevation. However, as my crew quickly learned, this trail is blow down central!!! If I took all the blow-downs from all the hikes I've ever done, and spread them out on a trail, I still wouldn't have enough to equal the amount on this trail. Though there was a LOT or trees on the trail, they were definitely manageable. Most can be easily hopped over, or you can just walk around. After roughly 3.5mi, the snow was consistently a good 2’ deep. The side trail to Otter Falls is very difficult to find, and is not much of a trail. At a little past 4mi, you'll cross a large creek with a fire-ring just on the other side and a rock cairn next to it. The ""trail"" (or lack of) is about 100-150 ft past this point on the left. Took us about 5hrs to get to Big Creek Falls and back (10mi rt), with a 30min lunch break, LOTS of picture breaks, and a fairly modest pace. It’s also worthy to note that the crowds were far and few (on a Sunday too!), and the bugs hardly existed.

Starting our hiking season with a low elevation hike because of the snow pack from the winter... the drive along the middle fork road is as bad as it usually is, full of potholes until you reach the Nat'l Forest boundary. 12.5 miles never took so long to drive. The forest is great this time of year, the bleeding hearts and trilliums are blooming, everything is fresh. The trail itself is fine for the most part - except for the blown down trees every 100 yards or so, no kidding... mostly just trees you can step over or duck under but in a couple places it gets tricky. There are also two or three sections where you have to cross a creek using slippery rocks - one of them especially stands out as a boot-soaker, but really not a problem. We hit snow about a mile before otter falls, and towards the end there was more snow than trail... the side trail to otter falls wasn't obvious so we just followed the directions from some returning hikers and found it easily enough... Beautiful sight! Pictures don't really do it justice; it's a very tall and wide granite face, not so steep so it's easy enough to scramble on to get near the sheets of water cascading down.

Taylor River - The blowdown was bad, though not impenetrable. The trail was mostly wet, and beyond the first mile, mostly snowy. We camped a few hundred yards past Lipsy - the crossing there was turning around most people - and although we were on 4' of snow, the 70 degree weather was a wonderful contrast. Marten - This was our Plan A. We actually left our packs under the bridge at taylor river and hiked up to the lake, but decided we might find a place with less snow near Lipsy. We were on snow the whole time - most of it was pretty rotten as a large amount of the base was avalanche debris, some hardpack, some not. It led to a lot of breaking through. Despite that, I think the access might be easier now than in another two or three weeks when the snow has melted and the devils club is out.

When we called the ranger station and received a report of “Patches of snow, but completely passable”, we had no idea that this wording translated into 3-4 feet of snow-pack on the trail about a mile in and onward, and blow down like I have never imagined. We had intended to go the full 5 miles to the Concrete Bridge, but only made it to Marten Creek bridge, and that was a major effort without snow shoes… The other factor was that the heat had created so much snow melt, that there were some dangerous water crossings to maneuver in the section of the trail preceding Marten Creek. I would say that the trail is totally passable, but even if you had snow shoes, you would be struggling over all of the blow down. Basically, this trail will need some massive clean up efforts to get it back to where it was back in November when I hiked it last.

The Middle Fork Snoqualmie road is snow free to the end so I expected the same from the Taylor River road/trail, but I was wrong. Patches of snow started right across the bridge and got deeper mile by mile and after 2 miles the blow down became frequent enough to be annoying. A lot of people have been on this trail so the trench is hard enough for boots, but gets soft in the afternoon and most turn around at Martin Creek judging by the boot tracks. I had never been to Lipsy Lake and was hoping for tracks or flagging to indicate where to leave the trail. I didn't see any and we kept following tracks well past the creek that drains the lake. Soon enough it was obvious we were too far so we came back and found the lake and falls after a little exploring in the woods. It's the second significant drainage past the Martin Creek bridge, and the terrain flattens out significantly there. The guide book says there's a small sign, but that's either gone or still buried in snow.