Horseshoe Lake — Tuesday, Jun. 21, 2016

Central Cascades > Leavenworth Area

My dad and I left the parking lot at 7am on Tuesday (plenty of parking) and made it to Lake Stuart a little before 10am. The mosquitos were annoying, we still had energy and we were wanting better views of Mt Stuart so we continued on to Horseshoe Lake. There were many fallen logs to climb under, over and across. The trail seemed to disappear into the marsh occasionally but it was fairly easy to follow. It started getting steep but was ok until the very top where we chose to pull ourselves up with tree trunks and bushes rather than try to get up the steep snow field over a stream. We arrived at Horseshoe Lake at about 1pm, initially thinking it was Jack Lake. We had the entire area to ourselves and found a sandy, snow-free tent site with an incredible view of Mt Stuart and Stuart Lake below. Most of Horseshoe Lake was frozen over and we are not sure if we saw Jack Lake or not. It was gorgeous and we had the lake to ourselves other than for maybe half hour in the evening when some day hikers were there. On the way down, ice axes would have been helpful. We had full packs and sat in the snow and kick-stepped our way down, one step at a time. It could have been tricky without packs, but with our big packs we were pretty nervous. We made it down to the parking lot in about 5 hours (we were very slow coming down that snow field).