To beat the heat today, my friend & I started hiking at 6am, and we didn't see anyone else until we were half way down from the top. About 1.3 miles in, we emerged from the woods and into a very overgrown bushy section for a little under a mile. It's so overgrown that at times it was hard to see the ground and I accidentally slipped down once since I couldn't tell it was more slopey at that spot. But views started to open and we could see Glacier Peak better and better. Then it was a bit more of woods until we got to a small lake just a bit under the 3 mile mark. We can see the lookout from there, and it looked so discouragingly far away. But I was surprised to find that it's not bad at all the last mile up. Marmots were whistling at us as we got up (likely because they saw my dog). There was a really large one on a rock just below the lookout, and there were also two juvenile ones hanging out around the lookout. They were boxing each other and generally not afraid of us or my dog, who was staring at them.
We did not see a chewed up hiking pole as mentioned in the previous post. It's probably a trophy hanging on the wall of a marmot den by now.
The lookout itself was closed. Even though google map said it's open 9-5 M-F (we didn't believe that, just thought it's funny Google gave it hours of operation). The railing on one side had collapsed but the other 3 sides were solid.
Mosquitoes started to get bad around the small lake area, and it's probably the worst at the lookout. The views on top more than make up for the blood donation to the mozzies.
No snow on the trail at all, and the couple down trees were pretty easy to step over.
Our GPS said 8 miles round trip and 2800ft elevation gain.
The road in was pretty long, it took about 1.3 hours from the turn off of 503 to the trailhead. It was paved for about half the way. Potholes were annoying but not horrible. Parking lot itself was relatively small, probably will fit only about 10 cars. But the road goes a little bit beyond the parking lot so parking along that section is likely ok.
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