I messed up my shoulder a week ago so I'm just doing low-key adventures for now. This one actually ended up being a lot more impressive than I thought it would be... I guess sometimes things are popular for a reason. Really good scenery for really low effort on this one.
There was snow and ice on the road. I'm attaching a picture of the trailhead and parking area (which is the side of the road, and I bet it's crowded and hard to park here on the weekend!) There isn't much room to turn around. I turned around in the middle of the road and my subaru was okay, but almost immediately after another car came through and tried the same thing and got stuck. They dug themselves out with a shovel and tried again further down the road and got stuck again. So, I'd say make sure you have the clearance and the confidence to deal with the snow!
If you're just doing the Gold Creek Loop and stay strictly on trail you can do this right now with just boots or perhaps microspikes to avoid slipping. The trail is really packed down all around the pond. However, if you step off the trail at all without snowshoes, you'll post hole. Because I didn't want to have to carry anything, I just wore snowshoes the whole time.
We did the pond loop first, and it actually wasn't all that crowded at 10am on a Wednesday. Later in the day there seemed to be a lot more people out there. The forecast was cloudy, but we actually got some lovely sunshine in the morning and it was simply gorgeous... Really stunning views, I was definitely impressed.
After doing the pond loop, we decided to walk up the road to Heli's Pond... we definitely needed snowshoes here, though there was a bit of a track from a cross country skier. There's one tree down across the road but easy to go around. Heli's Pond was really pretty! We weren't able to loop around it since the bridge was out and there was brush, but it was nice. We went maybe half a mile past Heli's pond until we cleared the trees and the views opened up... We turned around there as we were under steep slopes, and starting to navigate waist deep snow with rocks and gaps underneath. Everything up to our turn around point was pretty safe and straight forward, past that expect deep snow and avalanche conditions. We didn't see anyone past Gold Creek, which was sweet!
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