We got to Marten Lake today, but had to work for it. If you head up here anytime soon, you'll want gaiters, gps and poles.
The first portion, heading up from the Snoqualmie Lake Trail, is its usual self: a rooty scramble through some nice old growth and occasional waterfall views. The trail is still pretty clear despite the winter's accumulated deadfall. There was no snow through this section.
The challenge was the second portion, the open meadow, which is usually pretty easy, but today was a route-finding bushwhack.
At some point there was heavy snow that pushed a lot of slide alder and salmonberry down over the trail. There's just enough snow left that you can't really see the trail half of the time, but not enough that you can go straight over the top of it. We had no choice but to bushwhack through with assist from our gps for the route. The second pic is looking over this section from above, and third pic shows one of the worst sections of trail.
The snow is soft and shallow enough that spikes wouldn't really help. There are a few places we found voids under the snow, but it wasn't too bad otherwise. Poles were really helpful for probing. It's like late spring conditions. Snowshoes probably wouldn't help either due to the brush. We were happy for our gaiters.
When we got to the trail fork on the last part, we took the upper trail to avoid the bog on the lower one. This part was as usual steep and scrambly, but snow free and pretty straightforward. After we hit the crest of the trail the snow returned for the last little bit to the lake. There were some faint tracks from before last week's rain that we followed here.
The lake is stunning and iced over, but looks like it's melting, especially around the lake outlet. There are some temporary waterfalls right now coming down the cliffy parts of Rooster Mountain.
Some other details:
The Middle Fork Road in is looking pretty good right now other than the two places where it goes down to one lane. They've cleaned up all the other debris at this point. The portion after the Taylor River Bridge is still heavily cratered.
The Snoqualmie Lake Trail approach had a few reminders of the recent storms. There are a couple of places where there are trees across the trail and a couple of places where water has slightly changed the stream crossings. Nothing was too bad though.
We saw two people on the Snoqualmie Lake Trail, and no one on the Marten Lake Trail.
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