Summary
I did a clockwise loop starting from Mowich Lake, following the unmaintained Knapsack Pass Trail up to Mount Pleasant, then across the ridge towards Hessong Rock, and finally descending to Spray Park and following the Spray Park trail back to Mowich Lake. This added up to 7 miles and 2960 vertical feet of gain.
Road/Trailhead
The last 16 miles of road are gravel. The good news is that the potholes are few and generally not deep. The bad news is there is some degree of washboarding for almost the full 16 miles. The road is in better shape than I remember it from years past, however the distance on washboard it quite demoralizing.
I arrived at the trailhead a bit before 9:30 am on a sunny Tuesday. There were still at least 10 spots left in the pull-in parking at Mowich Lake and plenty more parallel parking between the Spray Park and Tolmie Peak trailheads. The privy is open and in good shape.
Trail
The Knaspack Pass trail can be found by following the rightmost trail out of the campground around the shore to the patrol cabin. At the patrol cabin it turns inland and before the outhouses there is an End of Maintained Trail sign. From this point all the way to the pass the trail is fairly obvious and in pretty good shape. There were a couple short muddy sections and one section that had evergreens encroaching that needed to push through, but I did the whole section in shorts and t-shirt and had no regrets.
On the east side of Knapsack Pass, the trail immediately begins descending a steepish talus slope. There is a faint trail followable here. Currently following that faint trails spits you out on a steepish section of snow - without microspikes/crampons you will either need to kick some laborious steps for a while to get you down to a shallower slope or commit to glissading down a bit. The runout is safe so there's not much issue with this.
Once down to the shallower slopes, there's a few sections of alternating talus and lingering snow, all easy to cross, with a tarn and some obvious trail in the middle of it all. Finally there is a larger section of lingering snow that the trail curves around before getting back onto dirt for the climb up to the Mount Pleasant ridge. There are some cairns sprinkled throughout this basin between Knapsack Pass and Mount Pleasant, however they are not always easy to spot and sometimes they seem to be taking you off in the wrong direction. Having a GPS track to follow helps a lot - the OSM track is quite true to the correct route for this section.
Once off the final snow, you're on standard sub-alpine trail up to the junction with the Mount Pleasant trail. At that point you have a choice of dropping down on a trail that heads SE in the direction of Seattle & Spray Parks or one that heads WSW towards Mount Pleasant.
The Mount Pleasant trail heads straight up to the summit - there are some side trails/deer trail to the side, but the main trail sticks to the ridge here. After the summit, the trail comes to a fork where it looks like there's a descent on the left and the main trail sticking to the ridge, but the ridge trail cliffs-out shortly thereafter. Take the left fork and descend a bit and then the trail is obvious from here all the way to the saddle. From the saddle I took the trail to the west for a ways to get a look around the back of Hessong Rock. I didn't follow it all the way to the summit - there's a section that looks steep and loose and has large cliffs to the right of it.
The descent from the Hessong-Pleasant saddle is steep and unpleasant - it's loose dirt and pebbles all the way down the steepest portion - though that's mercifully short. There is also a deer/goat trail that starts towards the right but quickly grows fainter and fainter. The real trail is a bit to the left and is an obvious trail all the way down.
Once down to Spray park, the main trail is in good shape all the way back to Mowich.
If I were to do this hike again, I would skip the section west of Mount Pleasant, backtrack from the summit to the junction, and take the shallower descent that heads towards Seattle & Spray Parks.
There were no bugs on the trail until the start of the climb out of the basin. From there the bugs got more and more frequent and annoying up through the ridge, with quite a few mosquitoes up there.
There was a short section of nice wildflowers on the climb up from the basin to the Mount Pleasant ridge. There are still some lingering flowers at Spray Park but both the flowers & tarns there are well past peak.
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