There weren't any recent reports about the trip up to Thorp Lake and the Thorp mountain lookout via Thorp Creek. I can provide incomplete information. We hiked the river trail up stayed overnight at the lake. Very few people out there this weekend.
Road: The road is in fantastic shape. Gravel was smooth with few potholes. Just before the last turn off, there are some not so deep potholes. I would say the biggest hazard is brush creeping in from the sides making much of the road single track, again after the last turn. It could be a pain on a busy weekend. At the trailhead there are a couple of turnouts. I'm not sure there's room for more than six cars total. We were the only one on a Friday afternoon.
Trail: The trail is in fantastic shape, overall. There are definitely blow downs. Most of them are pretty easily navigable. A couple take a little more work. A bigger hazard are the stream crossings. I wouldn't bother to put your shoes on completely at the start of the hike. Not long after you pass around the gate, there is a creek that must be forded as far as I could tell (on the way back my son went over with shoes and got only his forefoot wet). So we took off our shoes, gaiters, socks, liner socks to cross the creek and put them all back on again, pretty much right at the start of the trail. Throughout the hike there are many stream crossings. In a couple of instances it takes a little bit to work around them. The trail and the stream are the same thing for a couple of significant sections. However, workarounds have developed to get around them if you look a little bit. Only at the very end did we have a small snow field cross before getting to Thorp Lake.
The trail up to the lookout had far more snow fields to cross. This includes a fairly steep pitch. In fact, these are what ended up stopping us due to fading daylight. We didn't have spikes, not all of us had poles and we worried about getting across the same snow fields in the on the way back in the dark.
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