Evening hike to explore snow conditions beyond Talapus and Olallie Lakes.
TLDR: Getting to Talapus and Olallie has minimal snow cover, no traction required. Beyond Olallie gets significantly more snow covered, traction is helpful. Path is pretty well established, so minimal post-holing. Trail down to Pratt looks steep with significant snow cover, so we didn't go down. Trail over to Rainbow/Island/Mason lakes starts out easy but gets significantly harder, we turned around about .65 miles before the next trail split. Snow on the trail gets very steep in sections, requiring kicking steps and occasional knee to hip depth postholes.
We left the trailhead around 3:30pm with light rain. We wore rain jacket, pants, and gaiters on trail runners. There were two other cars there, and we ran into the other two parties heading back pretty soon. Under the tree cover, ground was still mostly dry and we mostly stayed dry.
Trail was completely snow free until just before the bridge before Talapus Lake. Then there's a bunch of patches, but they're all solid with lots of debris on top, so no traction concerns.
A lot of the trail after Talapus Lake is also completely snow free, with more patchy snow showing up before Ollalie Lake. Ollalie Lake, the shoreline, and the trail around it though is mostly snow covered.
We headed clockwise around the lake following a faint trail in the snow. There was occasional post holing, but those were pretty shallow. After crossing the first creek, we turned up hill. There's an unmaintained trail that shows up on Gaia here, and we saw some faint tracks, but mostly tried to find the easiest way upwards. There was some snow cover here, but we mostly managed to stay on dirt.
Once we reached the Pratt Lake trail, we found slicker snow patches and put on micro-spikes which helped significantly, and we were able to move pretty fast.
At the trail split between Pratt and Rainbow Lake trails, we looked down the Pratt trail, but it looked steep and mostly snow covered. We headed down the Rainbow Lake trail as our goal was to try to see if there was a clear path there.
The further we went, the harder it got to keep going. Snow got deeper, with some pretty steep sections. Couple of times we post-holed down to our hips. Several annoying sections trying to get around wet soaking trees. We reached our turnaround time (6:15pm) about .65 miles from the lake basin where trail splits between Island and Rainbow Lakes and headed back.
We considered going cross country to drop down onto the trail between Talapus and Olallie lakes, but the snow off trail was softer so post-holing was worse, so we stuck to the trail. On the way back, we followed the normal trail back to Talapus. This had some really snowy sections where there's less trees, especially between the 3 creeks that flow into Olallie, but the trail is compact snow, so again, minimal post-holing.
Got back to the car right as the light was fading so didn't have to use headlamps. Shoes were completely soaked and the rest of me was somewhat damp, so we were glad to be back.
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