For quite a few years now, I make a point of hiking Bead Lake the Saturday after Thanksgiving and then checking out the shops in Newport for "small business Saturday" afterwards. This is a hard-to-predict time of year for trail conditions, so some years I'm enjoying a wintery hike. This year there was a bit of snow but not much to speak of, so it was still very much like a fall hike: I spotted asters still in bloom and tons of trailside mushrooms. Oddly, despite the fantastic weather, I never saw another soul out on trail. Normally this is a busy one when this date coincides with gorgeous weather!
Since the weather was so nice, I decided to go the full distance on the main trail and then tack on most of the spur trail, turning back just past the 5 mile mark for a 10 mile RT hike. The farther uplake I went the more snow was on the ground, but I never felt it was enough to bother putting on the microspikes I carried. That will likely change within the week, though, with more snow in the forecast.
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