Packwood Lake, Heart Lake via Lily Basin Trail — Thursday, Jul. 12, 2018

In short, this trail has little water.

We started what was supposed to be a four day hike at the Lilly Basin Trailhead.  We had dropped our car at the Packwood Lake Trailhead and took a shuttle to the Lilly Basin Trailhead. 

The shuttle ride did not go well.  We used The Hiker's Shuttle.  The shuttle lady, Randy, was nice, but only had a small car and was the only shuttle we could find in the town.  We had understood that she knew the back roads, but she didn't.  We went from 12 to road 48 to get to the trailhead.  She felt like the road was too long and we were in the wrong place, so we had to drive back down, 20 minutes, and follow every landmark on our topo map to know exactly where we were.  As we got closer to the top, we came upon a small dip and washout in the road.  Our driver would not cross it, even though a car could easily cross it very slowly.  We were maybe 4 miles from our trailhead at that point so we got out and started walking, and it had gotten to be late in the day.  Temps were unseasonably warm and relative humidity was very low (no clouds in the sky).

Our map showed a small creek crossing the road close to the trailhead, where we planned to replenish water.  It was bone dry, as all the snow is gone from this immediate area this year.  We started up the trail and stopped somewhere in the middle of the ridge as we were out of daylight and spent the night.  We crossed maybe 10 fallen trees in that length.

We woke up with basically no water, hiked another mile up, and then decided that we had no choice but to hike back down, since the only known water was at Heart Lake, too far to safely hike with no water.  We hiked back.  We then went and did shorter hikes the next several days.

If doing this hike again, including the road portion, I would take a minimum of 3 liters of water per person.

The mosquitoes are terrible this year in Goat Rocks.  I would recommend a mosquito net and either lots of clothes or plenty of DEET.

By the way, if you take 48 up to this trailhead, just follow the main road all the way up until you pass the mine, and the trailhead is another, say, 4 miles past that and has a nice trailhead sign.  You can ignore all the other logging roads as they are obviously less maintained.  Just keep going up. It's maybe a 14 mile gravel road.  A high clearance vehicle would be a little nicer, but I think you can make it with a small car if you have a patient and willing driver.