My daughter and I picked this hike for her first backpacking trip, and it was a ton of fun.
Based on the description we figured we'd go two miles, and then push for three if we were up to it. As it turned out, we found exactly one viable campsite at the 2-mile mark, and no others within the next 1/3 mile; I thought there might be more options in the same area.
So we backtracked to that one and made camp. The site was hilly and lumpy, which didn't make for a great night's sleep -- but the owls hooting all around us were totally awesome! We had fun hanging our food for the night (lots of good trees nearby for that), and the quiet, mossy woods made for a lovely atmosphere. (There were also a couple of fighter jets that flew overhead, nice and low, which scared the crap out of us. And I got food poisoning from a dodgy freeze-dried meal pouch, which was also . . . interesting.)
I wouldn't recommend the 1/4 mile forest service road in a car; I was glad we were in a 4WD truck with good clearance. The trail ascends several hundred feet over the course of two miles, well maintained but not a casual walk in the woods. The creek is never far away, which unfortunately means that neither are the mosquitoes.
I'd love to tackle this one again as a daughter-daddy team, but plan time to push out to the 3-mile mark. Some folks we bumped into on the trail said that there were lots of good potential campsites at that point.
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