Conditions change - but this is what I experienced today.
Avalanche forecast for this region was very low today (per NWAC).
Started the hike a little after 9:30am from the snow lake trailhead. Snow started from the start of the trail. However, we never took our snowshoes out of our backpack. The trail was super packed down, we did not post hole, not even 1x. The trail was full of snowshoe and skiers. We put our microspikes on 5 minutes from source lake. Wore them the way back as well. We used poles the whole time. GPS said 4.75 miles round trip.
The path -- it was covered in snow, 100% of the time. We followed the ski / snowshoe path the entire way. There were multiple paths - 2x I took out the GPS to make sure we were still on route. We saw probably 30 back country skiers, and 20 snowshoe'rs total.
Originally we were thinking we would snowshoe up pineapple pass, but we decided its been 3 weeks since we last hiked, so we just stayed at the lake and enjoyed the dancing clouds. We brought ice axes to slide down from the pass (since we don't have skis), but we obviously didn't use go/use them.
This hike is on avalanche terrain, so be mindful of the forecast and recreate safely out here.
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