Hidden Lake Lookout — Sunday, Jul. 31, 2016

North Cascades > North Cascades Highway - Hwy 20

After being delayed by a cellphone incident in the morning, we started our hike just before noon. The tiny parking lot was, of course, already full, and we had to park along the road. The road itself was fairly bumpy, but navigable for a sedan. The first quarter or so of the hike or so takes place in the forest. Bugs were fairly annoying in that part, and the trail was wet and muddy. It doesn't take very long until you exit into a clearing, however, after which trees are gone for the rest of the hike. Bugs leave you alone there and the trail becomes nice and dry, but make sure that you have sunscreen. In the clearing itself, the fairly steep trail was bordered with plentiful wildflowers in full bloom. I'm not very good with flowers, but you can refer to the photos to see what I'm talking about. Most of the trail is close enough to a stream of meltwater that you'll hike to its sound for most of the way up. You can see a pretty tall (but slim) waterfall by looking at the cliffs at your right. After the clearing, you have to follow the trail going around the side of the mountain, from which you have very good views of the surrounding peaks. This part is actually longer than it looks. There was still some snow to cross, but nothing that made me feel that you need any kind of special equipment to get across. At some point you start to see the lookout on the peak, and shortly after the trail turns left to scale the ridge. You can see Hidden Lake from that ridge, before getting to the lookout. We stopped for lunch there around 2:20PM. If you've been keeping track, we got there in roughly 2 hours and a half. From there, the "trail" to the lookout involves a fair amount of boulder jumping around an extremely narrow path. There were a lot of people around the ancient little cabin. We stayed around for almost an hour, taking pictures and inspecting the lookout. The lighting stool is pretty interesting; I wonder how much protection it actually affords. Also, as someone else said in another trip review, some people leave some pretty nice drawings in the lookout registry book. We seemed to notice only one path around the mountain on the way up, but we went down a different route that we hadn't noticed. It got us to the same location. I guess that you're probably fine if you make sure that you go in the right general direction!