Our main purpose today was a day hike to Lena Lake, but we were also wanting to check conditions of The Brothers Trail and whether crossing the creek was possible.
The Lena Lake hike was a nice, early season hike. No snow. I'd forgotten how rocky the lower part was. We arrived at 9am and there were 8 or so cars parked at the trailhead. We passed 2 groups going up, and saw a group of 4-5 had camped overnight at the lake.
We continued past the campsites to the far end of the lake where Lena Creek empties into the lake. Continuing to the Brothers trail was obviously not happening for us. The area where the trail is marked with flags is treacherous. If you want to head upstream and scoot across logs 10-20 feet above the creek, it's probably doable with a bit of bushwhacking on the other side to rejoin the trail. We ate lunch and decided that we'd head out to the Upper Lena Lake Trail instead, just to see how far we could get.
Snow was expected. There were some minor snow patches on the trail to Upper Lena in the section we hiked. I did posthole once on a patch. The trail itself was littered with branches and blowdowns. We navigated a few. Stopped our hike about 200 feet short of the Olympic National Park boundary, as the cluster of (4-5) blowdowns screamed Type III Fun.
The Upper Lena Lake Trail is kind of a mess right now. Lots of downed branches. The show patches should melt out soon, but the cluster of blow downs just outside the park boundary would be extremely difficult to navigate. We knew it would be impassible, but just wanted to see how far we could get.
Hiking down, we passed many hikers heading up. We were done and heading home before 1:30.
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