I met my hiking group around 8:30 on a cloudy Thursday morning at the Heart Lake parking area off of Heart Lake Road. Other than our cars, the parking lot was empty. There are privies available and they were in decent shape.
From the parking area, we crossed Heart Lake Road and hiked towards Sugarloaf, our first destination of the day. We used Trails 313, 21, 320, and 215 to get to the summit of Sugarloaf. All of these trails are in good shape with no obstacles but have a decent amount of incline so we were able to get our heart rates into the cardio zone pretty quickly. We paused for some water at the summit of Sugarloaf and proceeded towards the summit of Mount Erie to get most of the significant climbing out of the way before lunch. From Sugarloaf, we used Trails 226, 230, 207, and 216 to get to the summit of Mount Erie. Again, all of these trails are in good shape with no obstacles of note. There are several areas on Trail 216 where the trail is basically a smooth rock face and these sections were trickier than usual because they were wet. We took it slow and everyone in our group had at least one trekking pole so we all made it through these spots just fine.
After lunch and some poking around at the summit of Mount Erie, we proceeded towards Whistle Lake on Trails 216, 207, 21, and we then followed Trail 204 around the lake clockwise to Trails 20 and 205 along the east and south sides of the lake. There are a couple of bridges on Trail 205 and the bridge decks are a little slick right now, but other than that, there are no obstacles to report on any of these trails.
From this point, we followed Trail 247 along the south side of Mount Erie back to Heart Lake Road. Trail 247 has a lot of up and down and crosses into private property at a couple of points. There are a few nice viewpoints as well. After we crossed Heart Lake Road again at the Two Big Trees trailhead, we followed Trails 220, 212, and 210 to loop around Heart Lake clockwise and back to the parking area. Our mileage for the day was around 13 miles and we were back at the parking area around 4:45 PM.
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