Goat Mountain — Friday, May. 19, 2023

The road has some potholes, mostly in the first 1.5 miles. Save the road and your suspension. It’s only 2.5 miles to the trailhead from the highway, slow down instead of trying to drive faster and avoid them. 
The trail is snow free for a little over 2 miles.  Patchy snow starts around 4200’ and solid snow starts at 4600’ near mile 3. I started down from the viewpoint near 5200’ at 2:30. I didn’t go higher than that. If you want to get all of the way to the top be prepared for travel through avalanche terrain. It was ok on the way up, but I found some holes and broke through a couple of snow bridges on the way down. The slide alder was also starting to pop free in the afternoon, so starting earlier would have been better. 
Below the Wilderness boundary sign there were four trees across the trail and one blown out creek spillway. The trees were under 12” diameter and easy to get around, the creek spillway is not suitable for horses. Sections of the trail above the Wilderness sign got very wet and muddy in the afternoon. There were a lot of calypso orchids and trillium blooming and even a few glacier lilies.