I hiked to Kaleetan Lake from the Talapus Lake trailhead. Once on the Kaleetan Lake trail it gets more challenging and you can tell that trail gets less use than the other trails, but it was always easy to follow.
I'd recommend fording the Pratt river. The rocks just before the river were slippery. It looks like you could theoretically rock hop just upstream from the trail, but those rocks looked slippery too. There is a log you could cross, but it's pretty high up. The river is really shallow at its shallowest but the rocks there are big, flat, and mossy. I felt safer just fording where it was deeper but I had better traction. At its deepest point the water was just below my knee. The river is not very wide. There's a log at the other side that you'll need to climb over (or go under, I suppose). It's easy and the rocks on the other side were not slippery. After the river there are several small streams but they were mostly pretty easy. One has a log you have to get over, making it a little harder.
There are a handful of blowdowns to navigate and a few are fairly large, but I didn't find any of them to be really challenging. The trail has ups and downs, so it's not going to be all downhill on the way back. I had the lake, and in fact the whole Kaleetan Lake trail, to myself. This was a fun trail, but it was also nice to be back on the easy Talapus/Olallie trail for the last few miles of my day.
When I mapped it out on Gaia beforehand it came to a bit over 19 miles, but at the end of the day Gaia said I'd done 21.35, so who knows how much I actually did. Either way it was a long but lovely day, and the only downside was that when my alarm went off at 3 am this morning I decided I was too tired to get up for today's adventure in the mountains.
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