East Fork Foss - Necklace Valley — Saturday, Sep. 2, 2017

Our original plan was to hike Jade lake (the one near tuck and Robin) from the Tucqwuala meadows trailhead, but the access road got closed due to forest fires. So we had to pick an alternative at the last minute...and this worked out wonderfully.This trail is one of the prettiest I've hiked. It goes through old growth forest, crosses creeks, and has plenty of very pretty established campsites.The first 4.5 miles are really flat and easy, with barely any elevation gain, but don't let that fool you, the last three miles up to Jade Lake will make up over 2800 ft of elevation gain. The trail was in perfect conditions, even on the most rocky area. It is a very efficient trail, with little time for nicely graded switchbacks. It's a pretty good workout, especially with three days worth of food and a tent on your back. It seems that most hikers like to make it to Jade like on the first day. We opted to camp by a creek at an established campsite about 5 miles in on the first day to get some solitude, and then camped by Al lake the next day, which is a bit off the beaten path of the loop. It ended up being just us camping by Al Lake on Saturday night, which was great because we could swim in our birthday suites undisturbed, a real relief after two days of dusty trails. The end of the trails has a lot of wild blueberries, that slowed us down quite a bit...they were delicious.The temperature was much warmer than we expected for the altitude, we were very comfortable in shorts and t shirts the whole time. Bugs are annoying by the lake, but some bug spray helped us mitigate how much of us was eaten up. There is a very big lake (Locket Lake) just a few minutes past Al Lake one can hike to, but I didn't see easy access to the shore, rather to a scenic elevated point, and I didn't see any established campsites there. I can't speak for the loop as we avoided camping by the very popular Jade and Emerald Lakes. The forest fire smoke coming from south took away some of the crispness of color by the lakes, but overall it was a very beautiful hike, and the solitude we found was refreshing given how popular backpacking has gotten in the area.