On Tuesday morning, we (Daisy and I) awoke (at the Elk Lake trailhead) to fair skies and warm temperatures. A leisurely breakfast, a short drive back to the Lena Lake TH, and we were hiking again. This trail also (like the Duckabush) starts off easy but plain, and then gets better and better. The trees get huge, the moss carpets everything, giant boulders tumbled in heaps, you cross an underground river on a bridge (really!), and eventually reach Lena lake. The lake is nice but not great. The wind had apparently just changed direction, as the driftwood was drifting like crazy. It was very pleasant to look down on the lake from the view cliff about 1/2 way along, letting the sun warm my back. After about an hour, Daisy was restless to hike some more, so I humored her, and we headed towards the Brothers wilderness boundary and the Valley of the Silent Men (cue spooky music).
By this time the few other people in the area had long since departed, and we had the whole place to ourselves. The emerald green water at the far end of the lake was as emerald green as I remembered it, and the campsites as plentiful. A short way after the wilderness boundary, maybe 1/2 mile at the most, we came to the section of the trail that has been hammered by numerous blowdowns of gigantic trees, as reported by Sydney Kaplan on 4-7-06. It was an awesome sight. The section is passable, with care and patience, but beyond that are the first snowy sections of any size that I encountered, and the trail does get hard to follow, meaning both kinds of difficulty, route-finding and post-holing. Still a nice taste of the VotSM is available to be seen. If you love moss gardens, where moss covers everything, and I do mean everything, then this is the place for you.
We headed back at 6 pm, and made the four miles to the car in three easy hours, no flashlight used, though for the last half-hour it might have made more sense to have used one. I easily made the last ferry out of Kingston at 11:10 pm, and was home by midnight.
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