We have been to many of the lakes in the spectacular Alpine Lakes Wilderness and wanted to get a little farther out than Spectacle Lake, having felt it was too crowded for our tastes on previous visits. I love new routes and with my map, scouted out that we could take the Mineral Creek trail, therefore visiting even more new-to-us lakes along the way!
The road was great- only a few potholes and mostly level gravel. We were surprised. Towards the end there are a couple of tight turns you'll want to slow down for. The trailhead held 5 cars when we arrived around 9am on Saturday. There is room to camp at the end of the road and in the first few minutes along the trail (both before and after the stream crossing).
The Mineral Creek trail starts off OK, on what looks like an old road bed. Almost immediately you ford the creek, which at this time is a rock hop but there is a flagged log upstream you could butt scoot across (it's narrow so I personally would not walk across it). The trail alternates between steep sections and more moderate traverses through forest, then becoming mostly rock gravel of various sizes before the second water crossing, which was also doable as a rock hop. Just beyond here you enter the Alpine Lakes wilderness on nice forest tread.
Around mile 2 the trail becomes more difficult. It's rocky, rooty, scrambly, brushy and has some slide alder to slide between. The trail has lots of ups and downs, mostly too small to show up on a topo map. When it looks like the trail disappears into the forest, you want to go over a blowdown to the left and steeply hike down trail to another stream crossing, the outlet of one of the Park Lakes (also a rock hop). We are usually faster hikers than most, should be closer to 3 miles/hour on this type of elevation gain for us but it took us 3 hours to reach the PCT. I'd suggest expecting this trail to take you a little longer than usual. There are a few blowdowns and some sections of loose forest duff tread as well. The last part of the trail is more foresty and pleasant- also full of some of the biggest juiciest huckleberries ever. We ate a lot of them along the way.
We stopped to make lunch at the Upper Park Lake off the PCT before heading left on the PCT until the Glacier Lake junction, which is not marked. The Glacier Lake trail does have an old sign a short distance up it (No Campfires!), but it's not much of a trail anymore. If you're on route you'll find sections of old tread, but do expect to navigate and scramble a bit.
Glacier Lake has a couple of decent campsites near the lake, none of them large. Overall, the camping options here are limited. You can certainly explore farther up the ridgelines and to the tarns higher up or down along the outlet stream to find more options. We reached the lakeshore around 3pm and chatted with two rangers who had some up from Spectacle Lake along the outlet stream. They said it was brush-bashing but not terrible. Pleasant chat with these ladies. We set up at what they called the "premier" site at Glacier, just across the lake from us in a site that appears to have been used for many years. It was sheltered from the wind, had good water access and just enough flat space for our tarptent.
After setting up camp we hiked up to Chikamin Lakes. After the initial rock scramble, we followed the watercourse on intermittent tread until reaching a junction (left towards Chikamin Ridge, right towards the Lakes and the trail down to some smaller lakes that drain into Spectacle) Again, if you are on route you will find sections of boot path (this was a built trail long ago) but you need to be able to navigate. It's steep in places and requires/allows some minor scrambling. One cliffy area we found 3 different "trails" through :)
Chikamin Lakes are lovely, 3 larger lakes and some smaller tarns along the way. This is a very windswept area, it was extremely chilly and the trees are all in layer/mat form. We enjoyed visiting but were glad we would be camping in a more sheltered location. With the cold biting wind and my husband's sore leg griping a little, we decided not to go further towards Lemah 1.
It was chilly at Glacier Lake overnight and we heard the wind really roaring just above our sheltered campsite. We ended up the only ones camped at the lake as the other party we saw headed up towards Chikamin Ridge for what was probably a very windy night.
The next morning we scrambled around the lake a little, destroying some cairn litter (please don't leave non-navigational cairns!). We saw what I think were coyotes across the lake, a pika that stayed remarkably close to us. No fish. The lake is beautiful brilliant blue.
On our hike out there were two parties headed into Glacier Lake and it was only 1pm. We expected more company by night 2 of a 3 day weekend and were glad to be leaving since we enjoy solitude. We stopped for lunch at the main Park Lake, taking the time to pick 1.5 liters of blueberries and watch the bears (mom and cub) across the lake. There were two parties of day hikers here. Hike out was uneventful, although the Mineral Creek trail is not easy. Met two parties of backpackers headed in- one stated they were going to Glacier Lake so we chatted with them about the route, water and the campsite challenges. Second party was a father with two daughters (he had all three packs!).
Took us about 5.5 hours to reach Glacier Lake on the way in and about the same back to the car (includes a long lunch break of nearly an hour each way). It was about 21 miles round trip. Just under 5000 gain to Chikamin Lakes and a couple thousand gain on the way out with all the ups and downs.
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