Safety alert! This trail is closed in part due to glacier debris flow hazard. Use morageology.com to assess risk for the day of your hike. Extended hot sunny weather and/or extended heavy rain greatly increases risk. Debris flows are fairly common. There was a debris flow that reached well below the suspension bridge August 16 during the heat wave.just a few days prior to our hike.
Not recommended for the casual hiker.
We used Tahoma Creek as our exit from Klapatche Park back to the West Side Road trailhead. With map, Garmin inReach GPS, and common sense it is relatively easy to patch together this trail descending from Wonderland to the road. If worse comes to worst, you can follow the river bed to the road. We rationalized our decision to hike this trail in spite of debris flow hazard in that we were exiting early in the day and that cooler temps due to smoke haze gave us a slight measure of safety. (But I'll be the first to admit that we gambled because we really wanted to hike Emerald Ridge and see the suspension bridge)
There is a short hazardous traverse (narrow loose ledge) with root handholds plus several hundred yards that are completely washed out in the last 3/4 mile near the road. (See pictures)
If you're using green trails maps, note that the trail is on the river side of the swampy tarn (contrary to what was shown on our map)
This trail would be much more difficult in the opposite direction (ascending road to wonderland) in terms of both route finding and footing.
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